ATLANTA — When Maia Knispel and Ariel de Man were theatre students at Emory University, they plopped down in an adviser's office and said, "We're not leaving until you tell us how to start a theatre company." The adviser chuckled in a gentle but knowing way.
But create their own company they did — with a clear vision, a later assist from Adam Fristoe (who became the company's third producing artistic director), and a core group of like-minded founding members.
All three artistic directors are also actors; de Man and Fristoe direct, too. Their smart, offbeat, in-your-face Out of Hand Theater is one of the only truly actor-driven companies in greater Atlanta, stressing physicality, ensemble work, and audience involvement.
It isn't that other local companies don't pursue actor-driven projects. Synchronicity Performance Group, for example, created its own script for the ambitious, multiyear The Women + War Project last season. According to its mission statement, Jack in the Black Box Theatre Company "is dedicated to theatrical performance that thrives on cross-fertilization from all art forms — music, dance, painting, opera, video, puppetry, storytelling, sculpture" and strives "to make theatre defy its definition." But Jack works somewhat under the radar, producing about one show a year.
There's also PushPush Theater, a developmental home and performance space for theatre, film, and music artists. Currently celebrating the Samuel Beckett centenary, PushPush generally aims to expand the boundaries of live performance, encouraging artists and audiences to explore new ideas and take risks. And Savage Tree Arts Project holds twice-yearly multidisciplinary festivals centered around a theatre piece. Its current Spare Rib Festival (April 1-23) features Claire Chafee's Why We Have a Body (described by director Melissa Foulger as "an archaeological dig into the depths of the lesbian mind") as well as short plays, vaudeville, visual art, comedy, burlesque, and dance.
Still, no other Atlanta group does pure and consistent actor-generated work like Out of Hand, and its mission statement makes that clear: "To create theatre as an event in the way a football game, a party, or a wedding is an event, in that everyone present is part of the action, is completely engaged, whether or not a key player. At this event the audience physically enters the world of the play. Our goal is to exploit the most essential, most thrilling things about theatre: the live presence of the actor, the communion of the audience, and the experience of touching, smelling, tasting the world of the play." And the effort has paid off: In 2002 the company was named one of the best new arts groups in Atlanta by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and "the city's best new company" by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and in 2004, American Theatre magazine cited it as one of a dozen young companies to watch.
Out of Hand does three productions a year: a classic, like August Strindberg's Miss Julie; a site-specific piece, like Charles L. Mee's Big Love, which it performed in 2003 with six actors in the outdoor courtyard of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; and an original work, such as its 2004 self-help parody Help! or the current Cartoon, which uses mismatched cartoon stereotypes, commedia dell'arte characters, stylized movement, and violence to comment on the state of the world today.
Other productions have been illustrative of the company's mission. Jean Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles (Indiscretions), mounted in 2001, was set in a dingy, cluttered mess of a home — a "gypsy camp" where the audience sat on beanbags, cushions, and egg crates and were often close enough to the actors to touch them, smell them, be splashed with bathwater by them, and share private moments with them.
The creation of Help! offers a good case study. It began with Knispel, de Man, Fristoe, and actor Justin Welborn researching and writing down everything they knew about self-help groups and motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and Dr. Phil. Largely in paragraphs, the writing went to Atlanta playwright Steve Yockey, who turned it into dialogue and scenes. The actors and the playwright then bounced ideas and words back and forth until Help! didn't need any more help to get on its feet; no director was credited for the production.
When audience members arrived, they were welcomed — a little too warmly — by a "life coach" and asked to choose one of four sections to sit in: "Drunk," "Poor," "Sad," or "Just Fine." A riotous, eye-opening journey — through "Healing," "Elevation," and "Love" to "Perfection" — followed. After receiving glowing reviews in the spring of 2004, Help! was redrafted and restaged that December and later performed the following summer at the New York International Fringe Festival.
Theatre in Hand
At the beginning of every rehearsal process, each Out of Hand cast goes through a company-designed boot camp. Fristoe says the boot camp has three aims: to develop strength, balance, and focus; to create a keen sense of ensemble through a shared physical and vocal vocabulary; and to develop a show-specific skill set.
For Cartoon, for example, the cast concentrated on stamina and jumping rope — a key part of the opening number, during which we meet the protagonist, a boy named Trouble; a dictator type named Esther (played by Knispel); a marionette named Winston Puppet; a suitor and a damsel; two almost identical schoolgirls (one played by de Man); and a teddy bear named Rockstar. Five of the eight actors in the cast have been with the project since early 2005, when it was still an amorphous idea in Yockey's brain. "We always talk in theatre about how it is a collaborative art form," Fristoe says. "And it is and it isn't."
For Yockey, though, Out of Hand's methods are "a pretty fantastic process," one that stretches him as a writer. "I don't think Cartoon is a play I would have written if I wasn't writing it for them," says Yockey, whose plays, he adds, are usually dark and psychological. "I generally write plays from a personal perspective. They're not about me, but I write about something I find interesting."
While the 70-minute Cartoon has a deceptively simple script, Yockey says that what the actors do on stage is anything but simple. It's metaphor-driven, more about juxtaposing ideas, and requires an audience: "It's like a machine, and the audience is the last thing you plug into it. The audience's expectations drive the machine." In addition to a "happy, sugar-coated opening number in a candy-colored world" that gets the audience "ramped up, involved, and invested," there's also an applause sign, more song and dance, gunshots, blood.
Innovation on a Shoestring
Out of Hand operates on a budget of about $90,000 a year, money that comes (in rough order) from ticket sales, contracted performances and boot camps, small individual donations, government funding, and in-kind or monetary corporate donations. Altogether, the cast is paid about $1,000 total per show. If the money runs short, the three producing artistic directors go without salaries even though their workloads approach full-time status: Knispel handles marketing; Fristoe oversees physical production, site maintenance, and set building; and de Man handles payroll, fundraising, and office issues.
Working this way pays off in excitement, Fristoe says. "If you're going to live in poverty anyway, you might as well have the creative capital."