Actors Who Live the Part

One by one, the actors make their way through a deserted marble lobby to a rehearsal room at the Los Angeles Theater Center.

First to arrive is Kendrick Jefferson. The gangly Chris Rock look-alike, who also goes by the name Ian Loren, totes an appointment book stuffed with business cards and a copy of Back Stage West. Theater is his life--and his home. Jefferson lives in an air-conditioning duct behind a Hollywood theater.

As a member of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a theater group formed in 1985 for the homeless and formerly homeless, Jefferson makes the trek to downtown L.A. twice a week for five hours of rehearsal. After it’s all over--the months of practice, the brief moment in the spotlight playing to scant audiences, the $150 payment--he’ll return to his life on the streets. Still, the 27-year-old dutifully joins the unlikely troupe as it wends its way toward a precarious two-night run in which its members will attempt to connect with the skid row population--and themselves.

Just before 5 p.m., Tony Parker and Steve Chaney amble into the rehearsal hall, sharing an inside joke. A few minutes later, Rickey Mantley shows up, eyes peering out from under his Nike cap. In the hall, Linda Blaisdale gobbles pasta from a plastic dish before heading inside.

Near the stage stands writer-director Emmanuel Deleage, a 26-year-old UCLA graduate. It’s his play, “Selma Worth”--a story of the intricacies of skid row life and the challenge of breaking away--that is the focus tonight.

The actors mill around. Waiting. Jefferson kicks back on a couch. Parker and Chaney put on a CD by their band, Defiance. “Hey girl,” they call out as Blaisdale enters.

Eventually, Deleage steps forward. “Let’s get going,” he says, motioning to Parker and Jefferson to begin their scene.

They’re well into the rehearsal when the stragglers arrive. One of them, Joe Nobile, arrives without his script--but he’s forgotten his reading glasses anyway. Marcy, a recovering drug user, is a no-show, as she’s been for several weeks.

“You can’t hold it against them,” Blaisdale says. “If you’re looking for food all day, you’re tired. And if you’re in a program trying to keep away from whatever form of compulsive behavior you’ve got, this is the icing--not the cake.”

*

“Selma Worth” shifts among different visions of coping with homelessness. In the play, a skid row veteran named Blue leads a newcomer, Rick, on a tour of downtown L.A.:

Over here is Olvera Street, and there’s the Cinco de Mayo celebration. And this is the L.A. Mission, where you can get “three hots and a cot.”

Food lines, bed checks, seven-minute showers--everything’s here, Blue says. No need for a “cardboard condo”--unless you so choose.

A character named Selma, who’ll be played by Blaisdale, offers an alternative perspective to Rick, a down-on-his-luck musician. The social worker is fed up with Blue’s banter:

Blue’s a nice fella but he’s gonna keep you from getting back on your feet. Of course, he’s happy--he’s got no responsibility. He found a way to live off society without having to give back.

Deleage wrote “Selma Worth” during his senior year at UCLA based on conversations with a former member of the theater group, Ron King. To get a feel for life on the streets, Deleage hung out on skid row with King, who later died in a hit-and-run accident.

“I was astounded by the wit and intelligence of so many I ran into, which didn’t correspond to my stereotypes,” Deleage recalls. “These people had so much potential, so much to say, but were hampered by addictions or a series of misfortunes.”

Yet Deleage’s perceptions of skid row are precisely what irk Mantley. A self-described “stickler for verisimilitude,” he’d appreciate more authenticity.

“Happy-go-lucky Blue points out the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which isn’t even in sight of skid row. It may as well be in Brentwood, like the Getty, it’s that far out of mind,” he says. “Our world is so focused and circumscribed, we’re just trying to keep body and soul together.

“This isn’t a garden of earthly delights,” he continues. “Walking down the street, you’re assaulted by smells, misery, the depths of despair. The story needs to be told in a way that doesn’t slight these realities.”

Reality for Mantley is a sober-living residence a few blocks from LATC. At 47, he’s struggled with drug problems his entire adult life. Until 1997, he drew supplemental security income for people with disabilities. (“I had a double disability--depression and drug addiction.”) Though he’s been on skid row for the past three years, he is proud that he’s “never been homeless for more than a day or two.”

“I’m just on the cusp of sheer destitution,” he says. “I don’t want to fall into a bottomless pit. Skid row is a black hole. Life gets sucked in and doesn’t escape, the gravitational pull is so great.”

He joined the skid row theater group after reading one of its brochures. “LAPD is a way of getting back, learning to deal with people with different agendas and ideas,” he says. “I’ve been isolated for so long.”

But he fast became disillusioned, questioning the validity of the group. “This is what they have to show for 15 years? Is this a core of professional players? Has the LAPD improved the lives of its members?” he asks. “It’s better to create workshops that teach the craft, rather than put on [half-hearted] productions. Give people skills.”

For Mantley, writing is a skill and a passion he pursues with the Homeless Writers Coalition, a group of writers and poets from skid row. He’s penned a mystery novel, “Big Trouble in Big Bear,” and a semiautobiographical narrative, written in haiku.

“I have no illusions I can make a living writing,” he says. “I hope for a job so I can sustain myself and keep food in my body, a roof over my head.”

*

The Los Angeles Poverty Department is the brainchild of John Malpede. The 55-year-old performance artist and onetime advocate for the homeless launched the improvisational workshops for the skid row population after the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival when the homeless were “swept off the streets to sanitize the city.”

“People here need human interaction, a sense of community--and we can be part of that,” he says.

The federal government defines a homeless person as someone without a “fixed, regular and adequate residence”--including those living in shelters, welfare hotels, transitional programs, cars, abandoned buildings or on the street.

Figures compiled by the nonprofit Shelter Partnership show there are about 80,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County on any given night. The city of L.A. accounts for half that total, primarily concentrated in downtown’s skid row--an area bounded by Main Street on the west, Alameda Street on the east, 3rd Street on the north and 7th Street on the south.

“Driving through skid row, you see people waiting, just waiting,” says Earl Sherburn, community arts director for the Department of Cultural Affairs. “LAPD goes in the trenches and gives them hope--and a voice. They can tell their stories without fear of reprisal.”

The theater group has an open-door policy that, until recently, made for a volatile mix. Unstable schizophrenics would talk incessantly and erupt at the slightest provocation, says Deleage, who has been with the group for four years. In the early days, Malpede says, the shows were improvisational and much wilder, reflecting the chaos of the streets.

By 1986, LAPD was putting on two to four performances a year for skid row residents and others, including members of Change/Exchange, an intensive training program for professionals nationwide interested in developing community-based art. It now runs on a budget of $60,000-$70,000, which covers salaries for the two-person operation, administrative costs and $125 a month rent for a 10-by-10-foot office in an Echo Park church. The funds come from grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Sanwa Bank and other groups.

Next up for the group is a piece on the crack epidemic.

“We’re interested in getting the real deal out to Normalville, as one of our original group members calls it,” Malpede says. “And by providing an alternative to street life, we’re bringing a little bit of Normalville to skid row.”

*

Linda Blaisdale is sitting in the balcony of the LATC rehearsal studio, going over her lines with Deleage while the others practice onstage.

“I’m going to ask you questions,” she tells the director, “because I like to know what I’m doing. Improvisation doesn’t appeal to me. I have enough instability in my life.”

They go back and forth on a scene in which her character, Selma, responds to Rick’s request for help.

“Down here you can’t talk that angrily about people--they’ll come back and hurt you,” the director says. “But go faster, firmer, when you point out that you’re not the case manager or the counselor--that you just refer him to those people.”

“ ‘That’s not my job, Rick,’ ” Blaisdale begins, delivering the line with increased annoyance. “ ‘I got to go on my lunch break.’

“Is this where I’m supposed to smile?” she asks, putting down her script.

“Yes, but don’t shake his hand,” Deleage advises. “You’re tired of him by now.”

Blaisdale, whose character is the “angel of the Row, is a born-again Christian who regularly tithes to her church, despite her hand-to-mouth existence. And when she can, she uses her food stamps to buy groceries, which she gives to the Fred Jordan Mission.

“I like the fact that there are positives in this play,” says the 59-year-old divorced mother of four and grandmother of two. “I don’t believe ‘it’s your home so you gotta love it,’ like Blue does. But flowers do grow in the dirt.”

The eldest of six children, Blaisdale was the first in her family to get a high school degree. At 20, she married a man in the military and began drinking while they were stationed overseas. After they divorced, she took on a series of jobs and raised the family. Six years ago, she enrolled in college to get a teaching degree. But a series of family crises derailed her plan.

In 1997, she moved to L.A., where she lived at the Union Rescue Mission. “I found it untenable, she says. “If your clothes, jewelry or whatever were in the wrong place, they’d throw them away. I lost pictures, things my children bought me.”

Earlier this year, Blaisdale moved to the Weingart Center, a downtown transitional and emergency housing facility that helped her find work as a cashier at a Bunker Hill parking garage. But money is tight. This particular week, her check hasn’t cleared, so she can’t buy a bus pass. That means she walks to rehearsals--and everywhere else.

“LAPD is a commitment, a discipline, part of the healing process for me,” she says. “Still, I’d rather be in bed--or at the beach.”

*

Los Angeles Poverty Department bills itself as the first theater troupe in the country comprising homeless and formerly homeless people. Shows are mounted on a shoestring, held at venues ranging from downtown missions to the Los Angeles County Museum. The nonprofit group rents rehearsal space at LATC for $5 an hour. At the end of each production, participants are paid from $150 to $500 (up from $5 a show in 1985). Acting experience isn’t necessary; the only requirements are motivation and interest.

“Two times a week is a big commitment if you want to get anything done,” Kendrick Jefferson says. “They offered me a job at Universal Studios, but I couldn’t take it because of this play. That’s a small irony that’s not lost on me.”

Jefferson was born in Greenville, a Texas community marked by racial tension. His father left when he was 6 and his mother, a letter carrier, provided him a middle-class suburban upbringing. When she died in 1996, she left him a small inheritance--but he quickly burned off the funds.

Arriving in L.A. after his mother’s death, Jefferson had no friends, no job, no money. He lived at the Union Rescue Mission for four months before bolting for Hollywood, where he detected “more hope.”

While in the Central Library one day, Jefferson happened upon a book that mentioned the Los Angeles Poverty Department. “I had nothing to lose,” he says, “I figured, ‘This is for me.’ ”

Today, he’s waiting for his big break.

“I hunger for the chance to perform--and the perks that come with it. Adulation and money create satisfaction,” Jefferson says. “I have an agent I met in a bar who promised to blow up mini-headshots I took in one of those booths.”

There’s another reason for Jefferson’s dedication: “I want to change the image of the homeless as smelly and mentally ill,” he says. “Some are in situations they can’t control. I have no patience for people living off the system.”

Jefferson has worked on and off in positions ranging from telemarketing to a job at AT&T.; But searching for work is hampered, he says, by a lack of “business-casual” clothing.

“I have two sets of friends: my street friends, who call me ‘Ken,’ and upscale ones, who call me ‘Ian’ and don’t know I’m squatting,” he says. “I wish I was respectable again; this is very painful.”

*

It’s three weeks until show time, and Tony Parker is struggling to pin down his lines. An LAPD veteran, he’s been in five shows since 1992. The 43-year-old guitarist is accustomed to the time he must invest for barely an hour on stage--two hours on Thursdays and three hours on Saturdays until a week before the show. Then it’s every night for hours on end.

At one rehearsal, Mantley locks horns with Deleage over holes in the plot. Parker steps in to defend the play.

“Did anyone question Superman--flying in the air with a cape? Liberties can be taken,” Parker says later. “It’s very hard for Deleage. Though he’s open-minded, you don’t have a clue unless you’ve seen guys shot, beaten to death. You become desensitized--it’s like being on a battlefield.”

On one issue, however, he concedes Mantley’s points: “Few truly homeless people can stick with the group,” he says. “They don’t have the stability and can’t leave their property unattended. I pay rent [at my sober living residence]. I have a refrigerator. If I were in a box, I’d need a garbage bag or shopping cart to come to rehearsal.”

Parker is basically playing himself in the show--an unemployed musician whose wife has left him. In 1991, a failed marriage toppled a budding music career. Splitting from his wife--and being separated from his children--sent him into an alcoholic tailspin.

“In June 1999, I lay down in a box on Winston Street, rats scurrying back and forth. That was my moment of clarity--I couldn’t believe it had come to that,” Parker says. “Ten years ago, I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d be living on skid row. Impossible! I had a tremendous ego; my head was huge. I didn’t count my blessings. I needed to be humbled.”

*

Show dates are set. There will be two performances of “Selma Worth”--one on Saturday at the St. Vincent Cardinal Manning Center, the second on the following night at the Courtland Hotel.

The pressure is on--and weak spots loom large. Parker, who has one of the lead roles, is distracted. In a few weeks, he’s heading home to Detroit for the first time in five years. “My wife is interested in getting back together,” he says, “and my mind is there.”

As show time draws closer, even the normally low-key director is on edge. Nobile arrives at rehearsal late, then wants to leave early--in the middle of a scene. “Are you going to do that on Saturday night?” Deleage demands. Nobile shuffles back to his chair. In fact, he’s as committed as the rest of the group. He’s taken off 15 pounds, he says, so he’ll look better on stage.

Deleage has given Nobile a tough assignment. His character, Bla-Bla, must sing a rendition of “Those Were the Days,” an ode to fractured dreams. The heavyset 39-year-old sputters through the verses, karaoke-style, unaware that he’s trailing the tape.

Forming a circle next to Nobile, the rest of the troupe claps in support. Kicking their feet up, Cossack-style, there’s a palpable feeling of camaraderie.

The frustrated director stands back and watches--eventually deciding to forgo the tape. “Singing solo is scary but reinforces the point of the play,” he says. “Everyone has something to offer. Looking at him, you’d never expect that someone that rough has that sweet, beautiful side.”

Meanwhile, the performers are thrown another curve. Malpede, who hasn’t been a part of the rehearsal process, makes his first appearance this week. He engages the group in an exercise of improvisational gymnastics, unraveling scenes it took weeks to shape.

“Is this just an exercise to strengthen character--or for inclusion in the show?” Chaney asks repeatedly. Malpede only smiles.

LAPD has given the 44-year-old unemployed guitarist confidence--and tools--that help him function in the world, he says. But incorporating a host of new lines at this late date? That’s more than Chaney bargained for.

*

It’s one hour before curtain--if there was a curtain--at “St. Vinnie’s.”

All of the cast members show up--not always the case with past LAPD productions. Each actor is given $5 for dinner and time to unwind. Mantley finds a spot to read Tony Hillerman’s “A Thief of Time.” Jefferson and Parker let off steam by mimicking Rocky and Bullwinkle, Scarface and Brando.

Blaisdale arrives with a half-priced mug and a framed picture clipped from “Town and Country” magazine that she picked up for a dime at a library book sale. Props for Selma’s desk, she explains, help her get in the right mind-set.

The “stage” at the St. Vincent Cardinal Manning Center is actually the front portion of a cavernous room. The cast sets up folding chairs while bleary-eyed residents sit around, sipping coffee and watching “The McLaughlin Report” on TV.

Acoustics are poor; distractions are many. Phones ring, cans tumble down in the soda machine, a child walks onstage. “Are these for us?” asks a downtrodden audience member, eyeing a table full of cigarettes used in the play.

The play gets underway on time but has its ups and downs. Nobile forgets to pick up the microphone during his song. Most of the actors forget lines. But in the end, they pull it off. As they line up to take their bows, dutiful applause breaks out.

“It was rough in terms of structure, but, then, they’re not trained professionals,” says Robert Leeberg, a participant in Change/Exchange. “And they captured some authentic moments because they’ve lived this story.”

The play passes muster even with St. Vincent’s resident William Baker, 50. “You have to wean yourself from getting too dependent or you’ll be surviving instead of living,” he observes. “It’s easy to get stuck.”

*

The Courtland Hotel is located in “The Nickel,” slang for skid row and its main thoroughfare, 5th Street.

Tonight’s space is far more intimate than the shelter, and the lighting more forgiving. A small room adjoining the lobby is divided in half. In the rear is the 25-person audience--a mix of people “on both sides of the divide,” as Deleage puts it. A few feet in front of the first row is a tiny area where the story will unfold.

This run is smoother, the audience more engaged. A line about running out of tissue paper in public toilets draws knowing chuckles. After a faltering start, Nobile delivers “Those Were the Days” more forcefully than ever.

Whoops and applause greet the elated actors, who autograph programs afterward.

“I was afraid Joe would be an object of ridicule, but his song drew an ovation!” Parker says. “Last night, I had trouble keeping a straight face.”

Nobile is beaming, fielding the kudos. “I missed a bit of the song at first,” he says, “but I haven’t sung publicly for 15 years. I felt great when they clapped at the end--but, then, when you got it, you got it.”

Malpede, too, is proud. It’s less about turning out picture-perfect work, he says, than establishing a “gut-to-gut connection with other human beings with all their beauty and frailty.”

Deleage walks up to Mantley, so often a thorn in his side, and the two embrace.

“I came in skeptical and cynical with a very imperial attitude,” Mantley says afterward. “I thought I would teach people a thing or two, but I’m the one who’s been taught. I learned how to interact and the need for creative give-and-take. And in what other place could you walk off the street and be welcomed into the fold?”