Acting Ensemble Brings a Wide Range of Poetry to Life With Improvisation

T.S. Eliot argued that poetry was to be read, not spoken.

But don’t tell that to the actors who convene every Sunday night at Cafe Beckett, tucked away on a stretch of Hollywood Boulevard better known for a proliferation of Thai restaurants than any kind of night life.

Then again, if you do tell this to the ensemble of “Rants and Rhymes and Lies,” they’ll lightly dismiss it out of hand. Perhaps poets, they note, aren’t always the best at speaking their work. Hand it over to actors, they add. Then see what happens.

“You hear these neutral-sounding readings from poets,” says ensemble member Ryan Cutrona, sipping on a glass of water at a round table in the rear of the coffeehouse with colleagues Jeanie Hackett, Rhonda Aldrich, Brian Mallon and Lynn Ann Leveridge. “But a neutral reading is a dead reading.”

Mallon quickly adds: “It’s why people tend not to go to poetry readings.”

People do tend to go, though, to “Rants and Rhymes and Lies,” which has been running for six months, possibly because it’s not a poetry reading. Rather, this group of classically trained actors (including Ellen Barber, newcomer Brian Brophy and occasional guests such as David Birney) improvise an evening of verse and prose, with each piece performed from the point of view of a character rather than as an abstract recitation.

Though the emotions behind each “character voice” are clear enough, what’s not at all apparent to the audience is that the order of performed work is never the same from week to week. “We never quite know,” Aldrich says, “what will come next.”

Every group has a leader, and Hackett and Mallon jointly take on that role here, albeit very casually. While they were based in New York, they were both inspired by the poetry performance ensemble amassed by actress Viveca Lindfors and called “An Actor Works: Poetry.” When they arrived in Los Angeles three years ago, they wanted to take Lindfors’ idea and run with it.

“It offered a way for actors to work in an entirely different way,” says Mallon, whose gentle brogue betrays years spent in Ireland after being born in the United States. “There is no director here,” he adds, with some audible relief.

Cutrona leans forward over the table: “The ensemble is the director. That is the only way we could possibly perform this.”

Cutrona, widely praised last year for “Nohow On,” his one-man show of lesser-known Samuel Beckett writings, was just the kind of actor Hackett and Mallon were looking for when they saw him read at Highland Grounds coffeehouse shortly before “Nohow On” opened. Like Hackett and Mallon, Cutrona has committed to memory dozens of verse and prose pieces. (They estimate that, between the three of them, they can call upon roughly 150 works for any performance.)

It was just this kind of formidable literary arsenal--ranging from W. B. Yeats and William Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell and Gregory Corso--that the group needed to fill an evening. But they wanted more voices, Hackett explains, so she invited Aldrich and Leveridge, fellow members of the former classical actors’ lab at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, as well as Deborah Davis-Price (now on leave from the group) and Barber.

“When we gathered everyone together,” Hackett recalls, “Brian and I assured them that this really could work, even though it seemed very unlikely that actors could improvise a whole show without a director, and just go with each piece as it came.”

After a brief rehearsal time, the ensemble tried the experiment in Cafe Beckett during September, 1991. It seemed to work.

Still, Aldrich admits, “I was scared at first. I found it hard to memorize all the poems and monologues I needed to draw upon. I started with the safe stuff I knew from theater, like Shakespeare’s comic characters. But I would have the same 10 pieces for each show, and I often found that I didn’t have something that would be an appropriate response to something that had just been performed. That’s over now, since I’m memorizing a new piece each week.”

Hackett observes, “None of us can really own a poem until it is memorized. Once you’ve done that, you’ve taken it in. Then you can use it if the situation is right for it.”

At one point, Hackett compares the group performance to “a dinner gathering of really interesting people who carry on some fabulous conversations,” and at another, to a jazz improvisation.

And, as any jazz hound knows, the key is listening. “You may have a piece in mind, all ready to go,” says Mallon, “and then you find that somebody has taken things in a completely different direction--moving from a theme of memory and loss, for example, to the comedy of the war between the sexes. Before you know it, you have to change course with it, and just junk the piece you had planned.”

“Sometimes,” Cutrona adds, “we do battle with poems. It can be a very healthy competition.”

Leveridge, like all her comrades, tends toward particular writers and themes: “domestic ones, I suppose,” such as Erica Jong, Ruth Dagon and Katherine Tynan. Mallon’s Celtic inclination for bards shows in work from Aoghan O’Rathaille to Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins. “I like irreverent voices, especially Dorothy Parker,” says Aldrich, while Cutrona feels “drawn to pieces that have a singular voice, the words of loners, outsiders and visionaries like Herman Melville or James Wright.”

“I lost my fiancee to cancer three years ago,” Hackett says quietly, “and I found myself gravitating to religious themes and concerns, like the kind expressed by Sonya at the end of ‘Uncle Vanya.’ I’m revealing myself through the reading of this material, and I know that’s true for all of us.”

But there’s a world outside the friendly, cappuccino-scented lair of Cafe Beckett, and plans are being hatched for “Rants and Rhymes and Lies” to be performed for radio and in local schools. Leveridge has already set up one performance at her young daughter’s school.

“We’re very happy with the way we’ve all grown up together with this show,” Hackett says, “but we also feel the need to expand on it, with new audiences, in different formats. The poets deserve it.”

“Rants and Rhymes and Lies” is performed at 8 p.m. Sundays at Cafe Beckett, 5649 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. Indefinitely. Tickets: $6. Call (213) 462-6844.