Love Seat: Couple’s devotion leads to avant-garde Test Market productions in Arts District

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2004 | 8:26 a.m.

It read, "I'm sorry too much. I love you."

His partner had "bailed," jumped out a first-story window and ran back to Cleveland to the city the two had left together on a Greyhound bus hoping to build avant-garde theater in Las Vegas.

It was the first of several fleeting partners for Hemmings, including one that left just as they were departing on a U.S. tour.

But at that point Francine Gordon, a high school English teacher in Cleveland, who met Hemmings online, joined him for the tour.

When they finished the tour, tired and broke in Cleveland, Francine said, "We're going to do this for real," and they headed back to Las Vegas to begin working.

Their first local production together, "Vampire Lesbians of Sodom," was performed on a windy evening in Katherine Gianaclis Park For the Arts on Boulder Highway, set unintentionally amid smoke from California wildfires that had blown into the Las Vegas Valley.

The audience was literally choking. In between the laughs were coughs: coughing and laughing, laughing and coughing. But most importantly, there was the laughing. The two had a live audience.

They've since presented a conglomeration of comedy, tragedy, wit and satire. Their Test Market Reel productions are a series of live sketches timed to recorded sound effects. (Will they throw the rock through the window before the sound of broken glass is played?)

This weekend in their SEAT Theatre (Social Experimentation and Absurd Theater), they host their third annual Samuel Beckett Festival, a two-weekend event anchored by Beckett's tragicomedy "Waiting for Godot."

Before rehearsals Hemmings and Gordon took a few minutes to talk about their projects.

"Pardon the mess," Hemmings, 30, said as he walked across the paint-splattered hardwood floors and onto the risers. "It's in transition right now."

It's 5 p.m. Hemmings and Gordon had just arrived. They almost always arrive at this hour. They produce 12 months a year. Their 1,400-square-foot rented theater in the Arts Factory is their second home.

"We would make it our first, but we'd have to get some permits," Hemmings said.

"We work all the time. We just do shows any moment that we can. There are so many plays we want to do."

"Normally we're playing one and rehearsing the other," Gordon, 32, added from the center of the room, where she was sitting on a crate dressed in a gray Timberland sweatshirt, green khaki pants, mustard-yellow socks and black shoes.

"I would say that we've only been dark four or five weekends a year, and three of those were because our air-conditioning was broken."

A prelude

With bachelor and graduate degrees in English, Gordon, who had started out at Northwestern University to study theater, was teaching when she met Hemmings.

She had answered an online personal ad he had posted two years earlier, when he actually lived in Cleveland and was looking to meet someone.

Hemmings replied anyway. The two began writing to one another. By this time he had left his sketch-comedy group, The Human Zoo, back in Cleveland and his job as a graphic artist to explore theatrical opportunities in Las Vegas.

When he arrived in Las Vegas there was no Cockroach Theatre, no Insomniac Project. No DAMN (Dramatists and Actors Meeting Now). He had no money, and at first he and many partners performed wherever they could find a stage.

Hemmings and Gordon opened SEAT in December. Their perennial favorite cult classic, "Psycho Beach Party," drew roughly 200 audience members last month. But they've seen plenty of empty seats.

They've performed to an audience of one, a woman who walked in after dining at nearby Tinoco's Bistro.

They have also played to an audience of two: women in their 70s who had driven to the Arts District to see "Phantasmagorie," a show that combined Test Market productions and the local burlesque troupe, Babes in Sin, which Hemmings describes as a rockabilly-type of Old Vegas as seen through David Lynch's eyes.

The women had heard about the production from their friends.

"We do have this group of older women who are obviously connected to each other," Hemmings said, adding that they began attending when Test Market presented a production about a rabbi and a Satan worshipper. The women came en masse.

"They keep coming," Hemmings said. "They really love it."

On deck is Mark Blitztein's "The Cradle Will Rock"; Mark Ravenhill's "Shopping and ----ing," a play about consumerism; and "Constant Binging Without Purging," a portrayal of a high-society woman's fall from grace (because of her weight) into the working class, which was written by Hemmings and Neil Frederick.

There is "Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead," a one-man social commentary on urban life, written by Obie Award-winner (Off-Broadway Theater Award) Eric Bogosian.

"We're not out to shock people," Hemmings said. "We try to pick intelligent pieces or things that intelligent people would want to see."

They realize (or have learned), however, that the audience might be sparse when it comes to heavy or dark works.

"A lot of these plays we have this year we just can't tell," Hemmings said. "I mean, with the Samuel Beckett Festival, we know we're going to lose."

All their time

Hemmings works for DirecTV. Gordon is a contractor to the Yucca Mountain project.

The two spend as much as $7,000 a month of their own money on the theater and don't mind putting in the hours.

"The greatest sin in the world is to waste time," Hemmings said.

This is a thought the couple share as they squeeze every second out of a minute, every minute out of an hour and every available hour of the day to produce theater, regardless of who, if anyone, shows up.

"The audience, it's important," Gordon said. "It's all part of it. But we choose what we want to do based on what we want to do."

To keep productions rolling, a season ticket holder (the only season ticket holder) helps build sets in the space they acquired last December.

The theater seats 25 to 45, depending on the show. With the aid of movable risers, audience and stage are shifted according to productions. For "Fool for Love," the audience entered across the stage.

When Test Market isn't presenting a play, it's showing an independent film or bringing in independent groups. Rarely can they predict a full house, but audiences are growing.

"Our first weekend in December we opened with (Beckett's) 'Happy Days,' " Gordon said. "We had weekends where we had seven people. Now if seven people come, that's a weak crowd."

With productions of "Lions Lost in Translation," a play depicting an English professor's descent into madness when he realizes he's becoming a metaphor of himself, audiences tend to shy away.

"That has just a lot of really heavy themes," Hemmings said. "That's why I don't feel bad when we have a weak house."

Gordon added, "To be a theatergoer, you really need to step into the unknown. It's risky. People turn on that television show and know what they're going to see."

Regarding Beckett, she says sarcastically, "He hasn't had anything made into a movie."

Beckett blues

Test Market would like to see its Samuel Beckett Festival turn into an event similar to the Shaw Festival in Ontario, which through the spirit of George Bernard Shaw presents several months of provocative plays.

So far Test Market has not been able to grab the interest from other local theater companies busy with their own seasons. They do occasionally borrow actors from other companies.

"We grab people from everywhere," Gordon said. "It's just a matter of what their schedule is like. Test Market is Ernest and me, but we pull in a lot of people."

At their first Beckett Festival, members from Cockroach Theatre and an actor from Las Vegas Little Theatre participated. This weekend's Beckett Festival includes T.J. Larsen from Insomniac Project, who recently directed Christopher Durang's "Desire, Desire, Desire," and Joel Wayman, who performed in "For Whom the Southern Belle Tolls."

"Waiting for Godot," a play where nothing really happens as two tramps wait for Godot near a tree on a country road, poetically arguing and discussing nothing, is a feat for any actor. Though written by the 1969 Nobel Prize Laureate of literature, live productions don't always welcome the best reviews.

"Most people are terrified of going to Beckett plays," Hemmings said. "They've read reviews of people falling asleep. The most difficult thing as an actor, (is that) it's a hard world to buy into. And if you can't own it, it just falls flat.

"That's why it is very difficult to find people to come out and do it. It's more of getting it right, the chemistry."

Other Test Market productions, written by Hemmings and other local playwrights, are more organic, including Iceberg Slick, with whom Hemmings teamed to write "Die Mother----ker Die!" a trilogy reflecting the blaxploitation of the '70s.

"We decided to put together a blaxploitation play for Black History Month," said Hemmings, who is black. "At first, we said, 'Lets do a LeRoy Jones piece,' then we thought, 'Nobody talks like this. This is so dated. We're propagating a stereotype at this point.' "

Gordon too, is writing works. Her novel, "Miseducation of a White Girl," which she wrote for a creative writing class to complete her degree in English with an emphasis on African-American literature, is being transitioned into a one-woman show that she will perform next year.

The novel is a series of short stories she based on her experience as a white teacher at a school on the east side of Cleveland, where 98 percent of the students were black.

Their shows, they maintain, will always be, in some way, thinking productions.

Regardless of audience numbers, Hemmings said, "We always want to do a show."

archive