Interview Summaries

By Linda Frye Burnham

All interviews were by Ferdinand Lewis. They took place between January 11 and 14, 2001, in Los Angeles, California. All have been edited for length by CAN. The full, unedited transcripts are available on request.

Interview with Craig Arteaga-Johnson, Side Street Projects

Side Street is a gallery and performance space newly moved to an office space in Skid Row at the time of the interview. Side Street moved from the affluent west side of L.A. to the arts neighborhood near Skid Row, which may be in the process of gentrifying. They partnered with LAPD as a performance site for "Agents and Assets," which is set in "an old corporate boardroom," according to Arteaga-Johnson. ["Agents and Assets" is a verbatim reenactment of an actual Congressional hearing into allegations that the CIA sold crack cocaine to the Los Angeles African-American community to finance the Nicaraguan contras.] He describes this partnership as a way for Side Street to get in touch with local artists and residents of Skid Row, who are LAPD's audience. "We found," he says, "that there was a lot of very healthy questioning: If you’re an arts organization moving to the Skid Row area of downtown, what is your relationship going to be with the people who are already here? What’s gonna be your relationship to the homeless community or the single-room-occupancy community? LAPD is an example of a group that involves the people who live in this neighborhood and really interests the people that live in this neighborhood and it’s a great way for us to open our doors to those people and begin to form partnerships with them as well."

He found the play’s issue – the drug war – particularly relevant to the neighborhood’s residents: users, former users, sellers and the police. "So, that’s been the most interesting thing, having the issue of relevance be answered so clearly and succinctly by this project, where in other projects we do, it’s not answered as clearly, because maybe other issues come with those projects," he says.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Craig Arteaga-Johnson, click here.

Statements by Karen Atkinson, executive director, Side Street Projects

Atkinson describes the relationship of Side Street and LAPD. Side Street usually supports both creation and presentation of work by artists, but this LAPD project was already in progress. Side Street provided the space, the set, lighting, volunteers and publicity. Side Street hopes to engage further with LAPD as "theater-in-residence," and is collaborating with the Homeless Writers Coalition on a history of Skid Row.

To read the entire (edited) statement from Karen Atkinson, click here.

Statements by Melina Bielefelt, company member

Bielefelt performs with LAPD and teaches LAPD workshops at the local women’s shelter. She met the company on tour when she was a student at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. "I pestered them and finally got together with them," she says. She finds the work personally valuable because "it's given me the courage to try to new things and to stretch myself in a different way, and given me the opportunity to give of myself, and a chance to work in a supportive environment. It's not the same kind of ego as other theater."

Other valuable aspects for Bielefelt are the positive effects on the actors, who learn to better express themselves and make further opportunities for themselves to get involved in the arts and politics. She says Malpede is adept at "bringing people together for forums and discussion. When we do stuff in shelters, there's often talking in the middle of the show, people will respond, cheering, talking back, and then there's always a discussion afterwards." She discusses ways to make the performances safe for audiences outside Skid Row, many of whom come "to support theater for change."

Bielefelt talks about what she has learned about making ensemble theater from working with LAPD: Find the community’s need to express a story, work improvisationally, agree on the end product, show up for each other, listen.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Melina Bielefelt, click here.

Interview with Robert Chambers, company member

Chambers is a first-time performer with LAPD, in "Agents and Assets," but has attended many of their plays and collaborated with them as the founder of the Homeless Writers Coalition, publisher of a Skid Row newspaper. He identifies Skid Row as "a negative culture" of "down-and-out alcoholics," the poor, families and "people affected by the crack epidemic." Within that culture, he says, "organizations like the Homeless Writers and LAPD form their own kind of communities. They bring together people with shared interests."

Chambers thinks the play was a success because it exposed the intentional introduction of large volumes of crack into the vulnerable community. "I think the highest purpose of art is communication and I think this is a very neglected area of our national history. I think it was another instance of pretty much a cover-up of real political issues that even the powers that be, the media that be, was afraid to touch." He said the performance was so realistic that audiences shouted back at it. "We did a couple of performances in some of the Skid Row hotels and a lot of people thought it was an actual event happening." He says the audience was "appreciative of it because it shows them that that life isn’t so hopeless, that there are people out there that do understand and have some light, what has caused and created their conditions."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Robert Chambers, click here.

Statements by Emmanuel Deleage, company manager

Deleage is a graduate of the UCLA World Arts and Cultures program who has been working with LAPD for about five years. He says he enjoys "theater that has a purpose." Discussing John Malpede's style, he says his main objective is "the intellectual and emotional development of the participants. His way of working is to give just enough instruction to allow people to take the art to their own level. In other theater, I've never had so much freedom to explore emotion and character as I have in this company." What he’s learned from LAPD is "to value every human being."

Deleage's leadership duties included leading drama workshops in drug-recovery facilities and community workshops with veterans. He says the "problems of Skid Row are almost beyond comprehension" Concerning LAPD’s "financially neutralized position," he says collaboration with other organizations is the answer to survival.

To read the entire (edited) interview Emmanuel Deleage, click here.

Interview with Denise H., company member, and William Wiggins, Skid Row resident

Denise H. is a first-time actor with LAPD who played Congresswoman Maxine Waters in "Agents and Assets" and found the play very enlightening. "We didn’t know that it [the spread of crack] started with the wealthy people and it never was meant to get down into the poor neighborhoods," she says. "That was pretty interesting." She says it "sickens you" to know the government "has their hands in." She feels "the more that people like John [Malpede] go forth with it, I think people will start to wake up and listen. Even those that are having problems, that’s out there, that’s doing it, maybe they’ll realize that somebody cares."

In this interview, Denise sometimes identifies with the people on Skid Row, and sometimes differentiates herself from them. Denise’s fiancée, William Wiggins, notes that people on Skid Row are living in boxes, "But you never see me and her, but we live there. You see, I’ve been so close to the boxes, I’ve slept in the park. I chose not to stay there. You see, the invisible-people community that live there chooses not to stay there in spirit." He feels their participation in LAPD is important and lends them dignity: "You see, there are part of us out there that’s here to give you something, that’s to give you an enlightenment on what’s going on with us, and what’s actually going on with us is that we’re not homeless nor are we helpless."

Denise describes the loss of her job and her spiral to Skid Row. Her anger has been fueled by her participation in this project and she talks about a poem she wrote about the power dynamic that caused them to become "castaways" who have "swayed off on this side" and doesn’t allow them a chance to redeem themselves.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Denise H. and William Wiggins, click here.

Statements by Jeff Gilbert, SRO (Single Room Occupancy) Housing Corporation

LAPD’s community partner SRO provided rehearsal space for the recent show. SRO develops and manages affordable housing, parks and open space and provides public-safety officers, social services, case management, nutrition and transportation to the population of downtown L.A.’s Skid Row. Their rehabilitation single hotel rooms are "residencies," says Gilbert. "This is not a flophouse. The act of handing keys to somebody can be transformative. It says, ‘You're home, you're in a community.’" Gilbert regards SRO's attention to preservation of the historic facades of the hotels and their "greening" of Skid Row as aesthetic. Many residents are not homeless, but artists who chose SRO as a lifestyle. They have created a "Skid Row Consortium" of artists and arts professionals.

Gilbert says "Agents and Assets" takes the performers (former addicts themselves) "out of the addiction for a moment and into public policy and art. It gets people to stop and take account of what their addiction means within the sweep of world history." He says SRO and LAPD have the shared mission of "helping people to grow to be more active participants in their environment" and "establishing normative relations on Skid Row. … . It's about making people stakeholders in their turf."

To read the entire (edited) statement from Jeff Gilbert, click here.

Remarks of John Malpede, founder, artistic director

In this short segment of a post-performance talk after "Agents and Assets," Malpede lauds two LAPD members who are active in local organizations that are "re-knitting a fabric that has been torn, that the drug war and other aspects of the total uncaring society have ripped asunder."

To read the entire statement from John Malpede, click here.

Statements by John Malpede, founder, artistic director

Malpede gives the chronology of his founding of LAPD, out of his involvement with homelessness issues in downtown L.A. "I didn't set out to found a theater that was going to run for 15 years," he says. "I was just following my research, and I found something that was important in the sense that it was fulfilling. It was an important place to be." His ideas for the theater were "to create community on Skid Row, and get the voice of Skid Row out to the rest of Los Angeles and beyond, to create a ‘safe space’ and to produce group activity that required people to work together." They worked collaboratively "to get around authorship issues" and because some people in the group couldn’t read well. Malpede would often cast against stereotype to give the actors a chance to grow.

He speaks of LAPD in the past tense, and at the time of the interview, the company was going on hiatus for lack of funding. The fact that company members rose to leadership in the company was once questioned by a funder. He feels the company was always fighting discrimination against community art, "a code word for bad art," even though, "in many cases, we confounded those expectations by producing something that was undeniably good art."

To found an ensemble theater, in Malpede’s view, you have to: start a nonprofit organization (to raise funds), be respectful of and take advantage of available resources, keep redefining what’s important to you, keep your ears to the ground and be responsive. He speaks of LAPD’s value as a change agent in Skid Row: "It contributed to what people needed on Skid Row and the people who were looking at that saw that. It contributed to thinking about what was needed in that neighborhood." He recognizes it as an idea that continues to travel: "It also got out to the world in a lot of different ways. More people know about LAPD than ever saw it, and it will continue to have an impact"

To read the entire (edited) statements from John Malpede, click here.

Interview with Tony Parker, company member, performer, workshop leader

Parker is a musician who lives near Skid Row and has been a member of LAPD since 1992. He says he was homeless for two years during that time, a "self-destructive" period in which he was unable to deal with the breakup of a relationship and "thought it was the end of the world." He met LAPD when he passed an inner-city law center where they were rehearsing and he joined in. He says the work has "braved me up in a lot of ways in terms of expressing myself" and it has "got me back in a positive flow of life." He says it does the same for other members: "We have a couple of members in this production here who were in drug rehabs, for instance, and a lot of times if you’re going through that kind of experience, you’re down anyway and what this does is it actually gives a lot of people hope and just a positive vibe. I’ve seen a change in people who just come in and become involved."

To read the entire (edited) interview with Tony Parker, click here.

Interview with Ibrahim Saba, company member

Saba has been with LAPD for three years and eight shows. He says he met John Malpede when both were cast in a show by well-known director Peter Sellars. He feels that "Agents and Assets" has "a more realistic touch, as far as something beyond the group. We are based on that real event. Other than that, other shows have been pretty much realistic, introspective of us, of people’s lives and living around these neighborhoods." Saba claims not to live on Skid Row, but in "some kind of micro-homelessness," never having "lived in one place and stayed there."

He describes Skid Row as a relatively stable place, where "you have a lot of activities around downtown. You have the libraries, you have access to shows. Just taking a few steps, you pretty much are involved, even though you’re not exactly part of it, but like the corporate world and the world of people with theaters around." He says it’s "not a place to stay and get yourself sober and look for change and then go," but rather a permanent population. He believes the play explores the fact that "so much drugs has come in here, that we could say that there is a sense of not caring for it, for so much of it and affecting so many people in negative ways." He describes the community’s largest drug market, which thrives all around the police station.

To read the entire (edited) interview with Ibrahim Saba, click here.

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