June 22, 2001
Section: NATIONAL
Page: A1 (Front Page)
By STEVE PAULThe Kansas City Star
The sky to the west is darkening a ghoulish, greenish gray. Thunder erupts and lightning sparks, and Megg Hardin is about to wail. Onstage, as she'll be this weekend in Euripides' 2,400-year-old drama "The Trojan Women," she'd be wailing as the grieving mother Andromache amid a scene of dead Trojan soldiers and women about to be enslaved.
Here, in rehearsal, she's surrounded by a herd of wounded Mercedes-Benzes in a scruffy parking lot outside the Ape House, the converted brick storefront on east 18th Street in Kansas City that serves as headquarters of Gorilla Theatre Productions.
The trailblazing company is preparing for its 11th annual outdoor production of an ancient Greek play - rise and shine, people, the Greeks got going early - and the weather is about to force everyone at this rehearsal indoors.
Summer storms may be upon us, but is it springtime for the Apes and Euripides?
After a dozen years of fighting the good theater fight, of going to goofy and serious worlds where few theater companies dare to go, Gorilla Theatre is on the verge of something new as it turns its traditional, early-morning Greek show into a handmade local institution: Respect. Popularity. Even outside funding.
In an age of $100 Broadway tickets and an entertainment culture that gets louder and faster by the nanosecond, volunteer community theater, often put on for free, clings to other kinds of values.
Scrounging, recycling and resourcefulness, for instance.
But more than that, Gorilla Theatre is fueled by theatrical passion. By the age-old drive to put on a show, whether it's the camp of "Plan 9 From Outer Space" to the serious mission of presenting all 36 surviving Greek plays. And by a creative spirit that swirls into that special kind of theatrical collaboration that reveals itself in the controlled chaos of a storm-threatened rehearsal.
"This is a band of people who care a lot about what they're doing," says Caroline Oates, a recent arrival who left the daunting theater scene of New York for what she has concluded to be an emerging hip, happening theater scene of Kansas City.
"They pull things together on a shoestring, bubblegum and duct tape," she said. "And rejoice."
On this night, Oates is the company voice coach and she has Hardin leaning against a chair, hands against the actress' belly and back to help her breathe correctly.
"Start low," director David Brisco Luby advises. "And let it go up. Make a deep breath before you do it. Hold it as long as you can. Ten counts would be beautiful."
Hardin inhales. She curses the gods. She inhales. She drops slowly and begins Andromache's mournful wail.
It pierces the night.
Eight counts.
That's pretty nice, too.
The cast and crew of "The Trojan Women" number 54 and counting. Nobody gets paid.
At least not until all other expenses are covered and the end-of-show hat-passing exceeds expectations.
Participants include students and retirees, teachers and artists and all manner of peripatetic, day-jobbing, restaurant-working theater people. Some have put in 10 or 15 hours a week for months; others have come in this last week to work on costumes or help paint sets.
Many of them, including Luby, the company founder, artistic director and board chairman, are graduates of the UMKC Theater Department, making Gorilla a kind of transitional training ground or bridge from academia to the paid theater world.
Tyler Miller, who wasn't a theater student but now serves as Gorilla's president, thinks of it as his own private graduate school.
Bryan Colley, Luby's assistant director, has been involved with Gorilla for five years and a board member for three, but this is the first of Gorilla's Greek productions he has worked on.
"I've avoided them," he says. "They were so big and I just wanted to do the little things.
"But I realize now how much the Greek show is the heart of Gorilla Theatre. This is the thing we're known for. It's the only thing that makes us unique. This is the thing that'll take us somewhere - if we go anywhere."
As the goateed, Falstaff-shaped Luby puts it, "Even though it's free, it's one of our largest fund-raisers. It's Gorilla Theatre's 'Christmas Carol.' It's our big production."
Gorilla Theatre, one of a couple dozen area community companies, usually presents four shows a year, balancing classics with new, avant-garde and often topical plays not likely to be done by others - community, professional or in between. The Greek production has become a draw among culturally curious and adventuresome souls: Blanket-and-chair-toting audiences have grown into the hundreds, outnumbering all the other Gorilla shows combined.
Gorilla selected "The Trojan Women" for this season not only for its archetypal literary value but also because its story of genocide parallels similar recent carnage in Bosnia, Rwanda and elsewhere.
"It has been 3,000 years since the Trojan War, and we still haven't learned anything yet," Luby says.
Gorilla's string of outdoor presentations of ancient Greek plays began in 1991 with Euripides' "Medea" on the south steps of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Construction at the Nelson forced a change of location this year to the nearby Wheeler Amphitheater at Volker Fountain. But that gave the troupe the opportunity to perform in a bona fide Greek-style setting for the first time (doughnuts and coffee on the side).
Another first: Gorilla landed a grant from the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation. The $3,000 will cover barely half the company's expenses. Ad sales in the show's programs, donations from board member's pockets and maybe a yard sale at Luby's house after the show Saturday will cover the rest.
Miller, Colley, Luby and board member Robin Zeplin share leadership duties, all the while trying to figure out how to do things well and on the cheap.
Such as deciding whether or not to have the conqueror Menelaus arrive on horseback. A potential provider of trained horses was willing to cut the fee from $500 a day to $100, but still ... .
"For one scene?" Luby says "For one effect? OK, do I really need it that bad? Where else can I use that $100?"
Before rain interrupted Tuesday's rehearsals and forced a speedy reading inside the cluttered Ape House, Emily Lambdin, a recent UMKC theater graduate, had delivered her monologue as Euripides' golden-haired prophet Cassandra.
Lambdin is on edge, hoping to land a role at the Missouri Repertory Theatre this fall. But in these last days before showtime, she's trying to live inside Cassandra's skin.
"Everyone thinks this woman is insane," Lambin says, "but she's not."
While Lambdin desires a theater career, others get involved in the Greek production for the socialization or the sheer pleasure.
Hardin, a makeup artist with a background in business administration, is reveling in her first speaking role in a Gorilla show. She's not on a career track. She's wailing Andromache's grief just for the fun of it.
"I love being onstage," she says. "I will never be famous. I have no desire to be famous. If I'm not having fun, then I don't want to do it.
"Then again, if someone came up and wanted to make me a star ...
."
Theater in the morning
Gorilla Theatre will present its free production of "The Trojan Women" at 7:30 a.m. Saturday and Sunday at Wheeler Amphitheater at Volker Fountain, near Volker Boulevard and Oak Street.
To reach Steve Paul, call (816) 234-4762.