Real stories, real people, on stage in Hermosa Beach
It’s a new take on an old concept. People have often unburdened themselves to strangers — on airplanes, trains, or sitting around a campfire. Presumably these confessions are unrehearsed, but imagine a similar scenario in which several men and women, one after another, get up on stage and for eight, nine minutes spill the beans about something personal in their lives. If it’s been written down and edited and rehearsed, to where it’s no longer spontaneous, it is now something else, a kind of staged reading or play? Let’s take a closer look and find out.
“The South Bay Stories Show,” which has two engagements or performances, if you will, takes place on Saturday evening at 7:30 and on Sunday afternoon at 1:30 in the Second Story Theater, located in the Hermosa Beach Community Center. It’s being produced by Jim Mueller, and directed by Tony Torrisi.
Torrisi was frequently involved with the Palos Verdes Players, one of the last area theater companies that often took chances with new or offbeat work. Although Torrisi is now based farther up the coast, he’s back on familiar turf and we didn’t miss the opportunity to catch up and to discuss his latest project.
Come gather ‘round people…
“I’ve been around a lot of years,” Torrisi says, “and I’ve directed close to 70 shows, and all the shows had actors in them with an actual script. The actors had to learn their lines, and we had to block them and tell a story. It was not the actors’ story, but it was the author’s story and it was [conveyed] by actors.”
Storytelling, as it’s being referred to in a theatrical context, is another puppy altogether.
“It’s real people,” Torrisi says. “What I mean by real people is they’re not actors, they’re people who have really no acting ability, who have written a story about themselves. And they’re going on stage and performing it.”
In the case of “The South Bay Stories Show,” everything originated with Jim Mueller, who then enlisted Tony Torrisi because they’d worked together in the past.
“When he told me about it,” Torrisi recalls, “I said, Jeeze, I’ve never seen a production [with] people getting up and telling stories and actually reading from a page, not even memorizing it. So I went to another theater that was doing it, and I thought I’d be bored out of my mind. I was sitting there and these people came, reading their stories, and I was mesmerized. These people could keep my interest by telling their story.”
Mueller is a professional writer, actor, and producer who also teaches writing classes in the South Bay. As their teacher, and their mentor, Mueller told his pupils to write about themselves. When read aloud, the completed assignment was requested to clock in at about eight minutes.
Mueller would read over the results and make comments. Sometimes he would suggest that the writer take the story in another direction, with the intent of keeping it focused on the individual telling it. Easy? Well, not always. Some people are more reluctant to open up and allow others a peek at what’s really inside, beyond the frontiers of the persona so to speak.
But also, Torrisi points out, “We wanted these stories to touch the audience — whether it was funny or whether it was something that was touching or sad. We got a mix. Jim would pass me the story and as a director I would read it and see how it flowed on the page.”
Of course, how something flows on a page and how it sounds to the ear when spoken aloud can be two different things, but at this point the focus was perhaps more on the narrative: Is the story interesting? Does it stay on target? Does it have a rhythm to which the listener can respond? Torrisi would read over the work the way he’d read over a traditional play, make notes, and then send it back to Mueller.
“Once we got a sort of finalized script,” Torrisi says, “we picked nine stories that we thought would work best onstage in front of a paying audience.” At this point, the storytellers were invited to the theater to get up and give spoken voice to their written voice.
“It was rough to be quite honest,” Torrisi admits, “because most of these people had never been on stage. Now my job was to take each one of these people and work with them for stage presence.”
More importantly, he told them:
“I don’t want you to read the script, I want you to tell me a story.” And to me he explains: “That was my mantra.”
True, these people aren’t memorizing their lines, but the words have to become unglued from the written text. Or, as Torrisi again stressed to everyone involved: “When I can hear the story, then you got it. Until that point you’re still reading it.
“And bless their hearts, they would go home and read it, and read it some more. I’d say, Look in the mirror, whatever; and they’d come back and we’d do it again–and you could see them flourish as storytellers. That’s the main thing I want. These are storytellers and not actors because they’re not interacting with people, they’re not telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end that has a point; but they’re telling their story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
Torrisi doesn’t address this point, but clearly there’s little room left over for spontaneity, even if a bit of improvisation can creep into the mix. Also, some people are born actors, or should I put it more bluntly, are born liars, meaning that how are we to know if these real stories by real people haven’t been embellished or even fabricated? Yes, people seem to speak openly about all sorts of topics, even those that until last week were taboo, but on the other hand a minute doesn’t go by that we aren’t self-censoring what we say out loud, and often censoring what we think as well.
True confessions?
Because we, as the paying public, don’t want to be bored, the event needs to be presented in the best way possible, and for Torrisi, as a seasoned director, this is second nature. The order of each storyteller can’t be simply, Okay, who wants to go next?
“The sequence is important,” Torrisi says, “because like a play you want to start strong and you want to end strong.”
As for what kind of people and what sort of stories we can expect to hear…
“There’s a story about a lady who worked for George Lucas. She was working with celebrities and riding in limousines, but then she was laid off and hit bottom because she couldn’t find a job. So she went from here to here, and her story [is about] her survival and what she did, and how she overcame it.”
Another woman, who in fact has written a book about the subject, tells about herself as a child, her father, and her relationship with her father. There’s a minister who preaches in prisons, and a teacher who works with kids in juvenile hall. And there’s yet another woman, this one having lost her husband of many years, who begins to deal with the loss by cleaning the house of his belongings.
Every piece, these and the others not mentioned, must have the ability to move us on some level, by touching our hearts or maybe our sense of humor. The program begins with live music performed by guitarist Michael Gratovich, then segues into the storytelling, one through nine, with no intermission. In less than an hour and a half the audience will have been taken on an adventure, presumably with many peaks and valleys. Hey, sort of like life itself!
Which also makes Torrisi’s task a little different, and this is a fellow who has been directing plays since 1988.
“This has taken over another part of me that has never been touched. In a way, as a director, I have had to change my whole concept of how I direct… I’m trying not to turn them into actors because I want them to be real. But again, these are non-actors reading a page, so they have to learn a little about presentation.”
A lot of work, then, for something that should flow and seem effortless.
Torrisi hopes for a good response, one that will encourage additional “South Bay Stories” to be presented in Hermosa Beach, or elsewhere locally.
“I think the audience will get their money’s worth,” he says, “if they’ve never been to something like this. We’re trying to say, Here’s a different form of entertainment and we think you’ll love it. So give me a chance and see these people, because you’re so used to going to a play with intermission and staying for two and a half hours.”
Or, as Torrisi sums it up, “These are riveting stories, it’s real courage, it’s real sadness, it’s real people.”
The real people are: Darryl Potik, Thom Spadaro, Paul S. Kaufman, Avra Diamond, Judy Nahman-Stouffer, Flor Wright, Karen King Russo, Angelique Blancas, and Dan Burley.
The South Bay Stories Show takes place on Saturday at 7:30 and Sunday at 1:30 p.m. in the Second Story Theater at the Hermosa Beach Community Center, 710 Pier Ave., Hermosa Beach. Tickets, $19, available through TicketTailor.com.
