Consider the last three plays directed by Alex Timbers in New York—Hell House, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, and Gutenberg! The Musical!—and a distinct aesthetic emerges. Scientology Pageant and Gutenberg! are driven by a clear fascination with historical figures—L. Ron Hubbard and the 15th-century inventor of the printing press—and a strong sense of irony. Hell House, on the other hand, eschews irony to faithfully re-create a "theatrical" experience used by evangelical Christians. All three plays are supported by the earnestness of their characters (and the actors who play them), making the work endearing, creepy, and cool. (Note: Timbers' Hell House is not to be confused with an unrelated, L.A.-based production with the same name that employed high-profile actors and took a satiric tone.)
"I think those three [shows] are particularly obsessed with a weird earnestness," says Timbers. "But if you look at contemporary theatre—sort of like Richard Maxwell and those sorts of people—the sort of fascination, Zeitgeist that is true of The Daily Show and what young people get excited about is work that goes beyond irony to look at sincerity. That is, you need irony to understand the theatrical experience."
The ambiguous territory between irony and sincerity is one that Timbers, 28, has been toying with since founding Les Freres Corbusier, an experimental theatre company with an accessible vibe, following his graduation from Yale in 2001 and subsequent move to New York City. In 2003 he got together with fellow Yalies Aaron Lemon-Strauss and Jenn Rogien to start the group, named for the fictional grandchildren of the architect Le Corbusier, characters invented for a play Timbers wrote at Yale. Timbers approached another Yale buddy, Kyle Jarrow, to see if he wanted to collaborate on a script. The result was a raucous tuner, President Harding Is a Rock Star, which proposed that the 29th president of the United States was a partying bad boy poisoned by his wife with a piece of crabmeat. It was kooky enough to get some looks from high-profile critics, inciting the upstarts to tackle their next decadent tale, The Franklin Thesis, penned by Bradley Bazzle and directed by Timbers, which reimagined Benjamin Franklin as a coke-snorting, time-traveling supervillain.
Timbers' ballsy choices and mature, professional persona have earned him additional high-profile gigs. Since his big downtown splash with Les Freres' Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses in 2005, Timbers has become the go-to man for productions with an unconventional concept, giving them polished, mainstream appeal without losing their oddball, edgy cores.
He was asked to direct Gutenberg! for an Off-Broadway transfer after its successful run in the 2006 New York Musical Theatre Festival, where it was directed by Dave Mowers and featured Christopher Fitzgerald and Jeremy Shamos as the two leads (Fitzgerald and Shamos joined Timbers for the transfer). It's playing at 59E59 Theatres through Dec. 31. Although it's not a Les Freres show, it could easily fit the group's roster: a wacky take on a historical figure, with goofy choreography and high production values achieved with simple means. Timbers never saw the original production and so approached everything with a fresh perspective. While holding auditions for an understudy for the two actors, who play 30 roles in the show, it became clear to Timbers that the type of actor perfect for the job was not someone trained in musical theatre.
"It's actually sort of like an alt-comedian who can sing," he explains. "So that's really interesting to me: A lot of people from our shows, particularly our Les Freres Corbusier shows, are people who are 'real' actors but who sort of have a real knowledge of the art of deadpan and complete conviction to what they're doing, who are really good with sharp beat shifts and sharp tactical maneuvers. And who can commit completely to different styles and not feel 'theatrey.' "
On top of opening three shows this fall, Timbers began collaborating last summer with David Dorfman, co-directing a dance piece with him titled underground, which combines dance elements and integrated multimedia flourishes with a young cast—an appeal to audiences that may not often turn up for contemporary dance. He was also recently asked to direct a one-woman show written by drag performer Kris Anderson and Elizabeth Meriwether (Les Freres and Meriwether collaborated previously on Heddatron, an adaptation of Hedda Gabler with robots) called Dixie's Tupperware Party—another piece that began with another director but for which Timbers was brought in to take it to the "next level."
All this additional directing work has reinforced the effort Timbers and others have exerted to develop the Les Freres brand, which mirrors other young, upstart companies around the country that attract young people to the theatre with biting critiques masked in lowbrow humor and clever, no-frills staging. The witty writing, historical research, and casting of actors who could be the audience's peers may seem easy, but with a misstep, the work can just as quickly come off as forced or desperate.
"In many ways our audience is partly people who hate—who don't really go to—theatre, who prefer to go to rock shows and things like that," Timbers says.
"What I tried when I came to the city was to find our own niche: 'What makes you different from everyone else?' And I had a fascination with historical figures and historical subject matter and an improv and sketch comedian's natural inclination towards parody and interest in amateurism," he explains, "but also sort of, like, high-gloss, high-tech production values. The company that we started, as the name suggests, is simultaneously celebrating avant-garde theatre but at the same time mocking it…simultaneously lampooning the subject matter but also being curiously rigorous with your academia."
Such commitment comes across most clearly in Scientology Pageant and Hell House. Scientology is running through Jan. 7 at the Fourth Street Theatre and Hell House ran Oct. 10-29 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. The latter is a re-creation of an actual Hell House, using a Hell House Outreach Kit manual (with slight variations), that involved 65 actors, 20 musicians, four stage managers, and additional actors who volunteered for bit parts. That the company pulled it off is a testament to the following Les Freres has developed and the trust it inspires.
Speaking of the 65 actors, Timbers says, "A lot of [them were] people we had worked with before, or they were friends or friends of friends. I think when you're doing a show that's sort of politically volatile subject matter, and you know there's very low pay and you're asking people to commit to this weird point of view, it's hard to go through an open casting call and hope that the people's politics match up to yours, because you're asking them to commit to this point of view but not to be so anti-evangelical that they're going to comment on their performance or freak out—and also not to be too fervently on the other end of the spectrum, fervently religious, that they're gonna have real problems doing what you're asking them to do."
Casting actors for Scientology Pageant, which tells the story of L. Ron Hubbard using the idiom of a Nativity pageant, poses its own headaches. Including a run in Los Angeles, Timbers has directed it four times with three different casts, including children ages 7 to 13. It can be a difficult proposition because, as he explains, "[we're] looking for kids who have professional acting credits but who aren't too professional, aren't too polished. And so we see a bunch of people, and we're trying to find people who aren't too charactery and are still interesting." And, obviously, Les Freres has to vet the parents.
Timbers' next big Les Freres project has been years in the making. Called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, it takes the man on the $20 bill for a ride, accompanied by an emo-rock beat, and flips the whole subject of the Trail of Tears on its head. If anything, it's the next installment in what Timbers likes to call "punk-rock PBS."