COVER: Kiss me deadly

Jeremy Hechtman and the MainLine bring Chris Brophy’s SEXY DIRTY BLOODY SCARY back to the stage 15 years after its Fringe debut

“So they’ve all paid up?” “Mm hmm. There’s three words in show business: ‘Get the money.’”

I’m on the phone with Chris Brophy while the last customers trickle out and he closes up for the night. He’s the owner-operator of Rhode Island Reds Cafe in Hyattsville, Maryland—a combo dining room, art gallery, per­formance venue and organic food market that Brophy has run since he happily walked away from an earlier life as actor-director-writer for indie theatre and Fringe festivals. In the café’s mission statement, Brophy jokes about his new career, calling it “the only penance which can erase the shame of years of disgruntled whining servitude to others.”

But like Michael Corleone, just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

Some 15 years after a play of his toured Canada, Brophy got a call from Jeremy Hechtman of MainLine theatre, asking for the rights to restage the old work. So with a jolt of electricity to the temples, SEXY DIRTY BLOODY SCARY, a show Brophy brought to Montreal for the ’96 Fringe, returns in expanded, re-imagined form at the MainLine on Feb. 15. The ramshackle ven­ue and sleazy theatre-noir play seem a perfectly matched pair: a marriage made not so much in heaven as at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. Brophy, along with his co-actor wife, have been invit­ed to take part on a random night.

“It’s very exciting,” says Brophy. “I’m fascinated to see what they’re going to do with the piece.”

PULP FICTION ROOTS

It began in the early ’90s. Brophy was immersed in several theatre companies he’d founded in San Francisco, including the still-operating Bindlestiff Studio, and had received a developing play­wrights grant to commission a new work. Working with another actor, Johnna Schmidt, Brophy wrote the two-hander—and later married his co-star. “I wrote it with 12 or so characters,” says Bro­phy. “There were two central ones. My wife-to-be played the female lead, I played the male lead—then we’d do all the rest. Sometimes she’d play the blonde character, or I’d put on the bathing suit with fake boobs and play it.”

“It’s sort of based on a Jim Thompson novel who’s name escapes me,” Brophy continues, recalling the writer known for a hard-boiled, gritty style in the pulp fiction he littered with sociopaths, grifters and losers. “His novels hit the ground and then dug in deep—conceptually, that was the impetus for the play.

“It’s meant to make a social commentary on North American society’s preoccupation with mayhem and sleaze as a form of entertainment: from big time wrestling, to tractor pulls, to Quentin Tarantino movies. I like the idea that, like a sporting event, you can circumvent falseness in theatre by working at capacity, by being on the edge and just barely getting it done. Then it truly is what it is.”

As they ran through the disjointed scenes they initially performed in random order, Brophy wired switches around the stage that the actors could hit during the show, and that set a wheel of fortune in motion. Where it stopped determined which scene they’d play next.

After a run in San Francisco (“We got chewed up and spit out by the local reviewers”), Brophy rejigged the play, establishing a fixed scene order, financed a Canadian Fringe tour with his credit cards, and hit the road. At the Victoria Fringe the show attracted the attention of a patron who financed the company to bring it to New York. By the time they’d finished their run at HERE, Manhattan’s seminal performance centre, Brophy and Schmidt had done the show over a 100 times.

BRINGING SEXY BACK

Shift ahead to 2011, as Hechtman readies the MainLine version of SEXY, with rehearsals in full swing. “We’re doing what we’ve been doing for a couple of weeks now,” he says. “Just run­ning and running and running the piece.”

MainLine’s upped the production to a cast of five and added a live piano soundtrack. Joanne Sarazen plays Tre, a Cuban assassin who hobbles around with a leg brace. Remarking on the stage setup, “There’s bowling balls and swords, and a mini-accordion that I play very badly,” she says. “So much beautiful junk all over the stage that we’ll use and throw at each other at any opportunity.”

“We’re excited about creating a different show every night,” adds Patrick Charron, whose character is named Inky Bigiff. “Even in rehearsal, it feels like you’re being shot out of a cannon every day. There’s tango, there’s gambling, there’s S&M. People get whipped with belts, dismembered…”

“Yes, I’m the one actually making people bleed,” chimes in Cat “Blondie” Lemieux. “But I like to think that the sex, violence, blood, and scariness is all justified.”

Hechtman’s also brought back the “chance” motif Brophy had abandoned. “We have the big wheel built. We’re spinning it and trying to get it to where the actors have the scenes in their bones,” he says. “Enough to say, ‘Okay, scene 12, go! Scene 15, go! Scene 6, go!’ and it can all flow without them fumbling and trying to figure out where they’re supposed to be.”

Of the hundreds of shows Hechtman’s seen in his years managing the Montreal Fringe, Brophy’s play stuck in his head the longest. “There’s something about it that’s hard to put my fin­ger on,” he says. “Watching the show was like the first time I listened to a Tom Waits song. It sounded great. It invoked this fantastic visual imagery. I didn’t quite understand everything he talked about, but it resonated with me. I remember wanting to jump into the show and be part of it.”

Like many shows operating within the constraints of the Fringe, Hechtman thought it could be a spectacular piece of theatre if it didn’t have to set up and strike in 15 minutes and wasn’t squeezed into an hour and a half time slot. Ultimately, the hook for him was the decision to put every part of the play up for grabs on the wheel of fortune. “The very idea that we can have a show where the second thing that happens is maybe us taking a 15 minute intermission,” says Hechtman with glee, “or that the curtain call could happen third—it was just too good to pass up.”

BREEDING GROUNDS

Now that he’s MainLine’s full-time artistic director and no longer running the Fringe, Hechtman sees this type of production as the theatre’s future direction. “I have to figure out what shows to put in here and I like the idea of treating the Fringe as what it should be: a breeding ground for new work.”

He mentions MöcShplat, a Fringe hit that was ripe for the bigger staging it now enjoys at Centaur, and hints at a another possible Fringe-inspired adaptation. “There’s one I really liked called Danespotting. With some rewrites and a bigger cast,” he says, “it could be interesting.”

And while Brophy is just happy that there’s still interest in his play, ideally he’d like to see a couple things happen in the MainLine version: “I’d find it very gratifying if it’s a live, responsive room,” he says. “If we—the audience, the performers—could have a few cathartic moments en masse, if it was memorable and visceral, and all from stuff that I’d written on a page, then I’d die a happy playwright.”

Brophy also wrote Hechtman a note with a few ideas. “I suggested that if they could find a way to cast it with overweight actors, and somebody could kick the door open mid-scene and frol­ic in the snow, partially or completely naked, then get back on stage at the exact moment to meet their cue, I’d also die a happy playwright.” ■

SEXY DIRTY BLOODY SCARY IS AT THE MAINLINE THEATRE (3997 ST-LAURENT) FROM FEB. 15 TO MARCH 5. TICKETS COST $23. INFO: (514) 849-3378 OR MAINLINETHEATRE.CA

Short URL: http://www.montrealmirror.com/wp/?p=18696