LAPD, Skid Row & The Real Deal

Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) is a performance group that grew out of a 1985 workshop for the homeless of Los Angeles. What makes this group different from other contemporary theaters that incorporate nonartist populations is the method of John Malpede. He brings to this work a patchwork of experience that includes a degree in philosophy, a lot of N.Y. street theater, and some radical late-'70s performance art with Bill Gordh (as Dead Dog and Lonely Horse). When talking about approaching a project as maverick as LAPD, he says, "It's all in how you hold it," and he holds it as lightly as possible, providing minimal direction and tolerating a lot of errant behavior. Elia Arce is a Costa Rican actress and filmmaker. She joined the group in 1986 and became an important performer and workshop leader in the group. This conversation excerpt between Malpede and Arce from June, 1988, begins with a free-form discussion of the importance of diversity in the group's makeup and its method. —Eds.

Elia Arce: ...countries...and...

John Malpede: ...and ages, too...

EA: ...and ages...exactly, and ages...and ages...that really...

JM: ...and mental states, too...

EA: ...and mental states...

JM: ...it makes it bigger.

EA: Exactly. And mental states.

JM: Ya.

EA: Is like multi. That's what I was saying. Is like multi-disciplinary, multi-racial, multi-cultural. Is just "multi." That's what it is, "MULTI." Multi-everything, which is funny because there is so much to deal with that we don't deal with things like color of skin, we deal more with circumstances. Circumstances are what the group have in common—what is shared, not the color of skin. So people just jump in and play those circumstances, regardless of their age, their color, their language.

JM: Right. That's how it works. We don't sit down and decide whether we want to have multi, multi, multi—we just do it. When we were having those meetings last week about what direction to go and all that, we just had two meetings. And that was good because we didn't decide anything. I don't want to get into the mode where we decide everything at meetings, 'cause then we're stuck with what we decided, which in our case will never work. We couldn't do that anyway. Impossible. It wouldn't work. All our decisions—the real ones—are nuts and bolts, you know, carpenterial decisions. And nuts and bolts means including what comes up as well as what you thought was going to come up. The decisions end up getting made in the workshops with everyone involved, putting themselves in the mix.

EA: Thinking quickly becomes tripping about the way you would like things to be, and not about the way things actually are.

JM: There are 15 different opinions about what actually happened in No Stone for Studs Schwartz: who the killer was, if Studs knew the killer, if he ever had gambling debts, if Studs had ever seen him before. All that stuff.

EA: Not being sure what the reality was...

JM: It's just that everybody in the cast had different opinions about it...

EA: But also, the people who came to see the show had different opinions.

JM: Ya. True. But also in different performances the ending—what happened—changed.

EA: Which changes the whole play around....Is like juggling, a juggling of the show itself. Because there are all these different things flying up in the air, all the people in the show and their own ideas about it, but sometimes one will fly higher than the other one will...which causes an adjustment.

JM: And then more adjustments.

EA: The strength of the group is also that each person gets to grow as an individual, and be part of a group, and grow in a group without having to be the same kind of [person]. Therefore, there is freedom for everybody to grow with their own personal identity. And actually what the group is about is that the stronger and more distinct these identities become, the richer the LAPD becomes. The differences are a plus. It creates a situation in which people who have absolutely nothing in common at all—or who have very opposite positions about life, about politics, about moral issues, about religion, about everything—are working together, doing good work artistically, serving the community and also ourselves as individuals. What's been great about all the imitation we've been doing is that we're mainly imitating ourselves—other people in the group.

JM: Like me imitating Jim in Studs Schwartz. In LAPD Inspects America it's really gotten out of hand.

EA: With everybody playing everybody else in the show.

JM: So it's been an element ever since the beginning.

EA: Huge! Because you see yourself in other people and you get to see what other people see in you. How they react to you. It makes you aware of how other people are really looking at you; it makes you aware of who you actually are.

EA: You never tell somebody, "You should do it like this, you should act it like this."

JM: Well, sometimes.

EA: But not all the time.

JM: No, not all the time. It's more like using what's there and putting all the pieces together...

EA: Uh-huh.

JM: ...to create a mess.

EA: All these elements are so different from one another. It's like a total rupture of the specialization.

JM: The specialization? In what? Performance? Theater?

EA: I mean, something this country is known for. I don't know if you know, but outside of this country one of the things that has always been criticized [about the U.S.] is this obsession [with] specialization. That people here are so specialized that there is only one person who knows how to put on that part of the wheel. So that if that person is not there, then we can't build the car because that person is not there.

JM: Uh-huh.

EA: So in LAPD, the fact that everybody knows the circumstances of the play and that they are willing to and can jump in and fulfill the other people's part makes the group stronger.

JM: Right.

EA: And less individual.

JM: They also change the other person's part. When they jump in and do the part, they do it differently. But also, they save part of what the other person had been doing. So the part gets enriched. People take over other peoples' great lines and save them. Just because they like that line, they use it. They save it.

EA: Uh-huh. So you are like a juggler trying to see how many pots and pans you can get in the air at the same time.

JM: The more the better.

EA: So you are like the balance, you know, like ...

JM: Right. That's why Kevin was saying I have a nondirectorial style of directing, or something like that.

EA: Because is like everybody trusts you, they jump. Is like you throw the pan and the pan is trying to do all these weird things in the air, because [it knows] you are going to catch it.

JM: Ya, right. Well mainly, I'm just trying to find a container large enough to justify everything that's going on. I mean, to comprehend all the wildness or whatever that's going on; sort of being able to wrap it in some way.

EA: I was saying the rupture in specialization forces people to learn the other parts. Like in LAPD. But this society pushes for specialization, which pushes for individualism. It's like if that person isn't there, the show can't be done. In LAPD, we're doing the total opposite. We're breaking through that. So then each person is important as an individual because each one has something unique to come along with. And it is great. Everyone has something great to give to the group. But, that doesn't mean that the show is going to stop if that person doesn't show up.

JM: The style we've come up with—where we swap parts, and swap lines, play one anothers' doubles, and nobody really knows who made up what any more—is turning out to be a very communal style. But the reason that came about was because it was impossible to get people to work together. After South of the Clouds, I said something in a magazine—that there was only one scene that wasn't a monologue because there were only two people in the show who could interact with the others in the way required for a conventional scene.

EA: Uh-huh.

JM: Which is true. So then the style developed out of giving in to that circumstance. Rather than trying to work toward everyone being able to play conventional scenes, we worked toward developing a layered look where different focuses could coexist at the same time.

EA: So the style came from taking the limitations of the circumstances and making them positive.

JM: Ya. Finding out what the people in this reality knew about better than anyone else. Well, what everyone else knows is how to behave. How to be polite and function in society.

EA: Ya. All these good productive Americans. But, nobody in the country knows what's going on inside their own head.

JM: Skid Row people do. And they don't edit their thoughts.

EA: As Jazz says, "They don't got nothin' but their muther-fuckin' opinions."

JM: I guess that's why so many white people want to quit their lives and join the group. It's why I do. A lot of improvised performance is about the performers' trying to get access to their unconscious.

EA: Is what the LAPD is so great at.

This article originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Fall 1988.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002