On a desolate strip of Oliver Street, sandwiched between vacant houses and a cemetery, there's a door propped open at the foot of a concrete stairwell. The stairs lead to a vast industrial living space, where a cluster of actors huddle around a smoke-engulfed table in the back. One of them is pretending to be a cat, another a mouse. They're warning a third performer, who is playing a suicidal man, that he shouldn't jump in the Inner Harbor because it's full of toxic cotton candy.

The gathered actors are doing a read-through of the absurdist drama A Baltimore Love Thing, written and directed by 2004 Goucher graduate Tim Paggi, a soft-faced, blond young man with a slight "yeah, what about it?" twinkle in his eye. He's sitting with his actors in front of a black platform. A jury-rigged light system is gridded overhead; nearby, there's a circle of mismatched furniture arranged as a makeshift living room for the other artists who share this live/work space. It's a modest setup compared to, say, Center Stage, but for the core company of the Annex Theater—including Paggi, Evan Moritz, and Kaitlin Murphy, plus a rotating group of contributors and volunteers—it's all they need. 

Here at the Annex (named for its location in the Copy Cat Annex building in Station North), headshots and resumes are less important than a willingness to pitch in, whether that means sewing thrift shop finds into costumes, painting cardboard backdrops, designing posters, or running the lights and sound. When asked about his budget for this production, Paggi shrugs. "We'll just be finding whatever we can," he says.

A host of small, innovative companies have sprung up lately. Not far from the Annex, the Strand Theater opened on Charles Street this year, dedicated to contemporary works that emphasize women's perspectives. And in 2007 a troupe of Colorado theater grads dubbed the Single Carrot Theater began mounting productions at venues around town. Then there's Baltimore's neo-Dada supergroup, the Wham City arts collective, which has staged the occasional gonzo theatrical adaptation of works such as Jurassic Park. It's the logical conclusion to two divergent story lines in American culture—the lawless DIY ethic of punk rock and the spunky optimism of every Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney movie where someone crows "Hey! Let's put on a show!"

"As soon as we got this space in January, we got a call [about staging Wham City's] Jurassic Park," says dark-haired Moritz, a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, native who moved to Baltimore a year ago after graduating from James Madison University with a theater degree. He'd sensed opportunity—and community—in the city's burgeoning underground arts scene. The successful production of Jurassic Park in April brought a flurry of non-theater-related events into the space while the company put the finishing touches on Moritz's The Written World, a surreal, post-apocalyptic drama about a priest haunted by the departed spirits of a Jonestown-style mass suicide. It played for three nights in May, a limited run that's typical for theaters of this ilk.

Now, the Annex crew is planning a series of short vignettes replicating Hanna-Barbera cartoon shorts (complete with sound effects and music) and a production of Eugene Ionesco's 1959 Rhinoceros. "I've never been involved with theater before this year," says Rhinoceros director Kaitlin Murphy in a langorous whisper, her slender fingers cupping a cigarette. She has degrees in art and archaeology from James Madison University, but found theater to be a better way of combining her creative impulses and her need for community. "I like the aspect of theater that includes lots of people with lots of different interests," she says. "We just want to have a space where people can do new, interesting things like theater and experimental performance art, and also be open to a vaster part of the community."

If Annex Theater's guiding ethos is to stage the new and experimental, why perform Rhinoceros, a golden oldie from the avant-garde canon? "Our focus always has been, and probably always will be, to do original works," Moritz says. "Rhinoceros, under normal auspices, wouldn't be considered an original work, but in some way or another, [Kaitlin], along with us, envisions it as something that is original." And if Murphy's directorial approach is anything like the spangly, otherworldly caftans she and Grace Bedwell fashioned as costumes for The Written World, it promises to be unconventional.

Jayme Kilburn, artistic director and founder of the Strand Theater (you may have noticed its gorgeous Art Nouveau facade a block north of the Charles Theatre) offers a similar formula for her sixty-seat venue. A California native, Kilburn founded the Strand after a postgraduate internship at Center Stage, with assistance from Joy Martin, who owns the theater building, Club Charles, and several other properties in the 1700 and 1800 blocks of North Charles Street. A former actress, Martin shares Kilburn's vision for a venue that gives female playwrights and directors a much bigger role. "Our mission is to produce new works that inspire young audiences to see theater and to give women at least a fifty-fifty split," Kilburn says. "We have pledged to produce at least half the season [with] women playwrights, directors, and roles." So far she's making good on the promise with productions like The Femme Show, a multimedia, multi-performance revue with a traveling cast of lesbian performers, and (in conjunction with the Baltimore Playwrights Festival) Tim Paggi's Nonstop Realism, a collection of satirical vignettes, including one that ends in a "feminist working-class revolution."

In addition to their energy, ambition, innovation, and courage, the artists behind the new breed of underground theaters also have the size of their houses on their side. "When a theater is small, you can take more risks," Kilburn says. "There is not as much overhead, so you do not have to base the entire season on what you think people will pay to see."

But in an era when HD-TV is king and the music scene holds sway over many twentysomethings, how can you convince audiences to try live theater? "The cheaper theater is, the more likely people will come see it," Kilburn concludes. A night at the Strand costs no more than $15 and can be free on special event nights. The Annex asks for donations at the door, preferring not to turn people away just because a ticket's too dear. The idea is to keep the price point down and entice curiosity-seekers—especially those intimidated by the stifling (and inaccurate) reputation of theater as the province of snobs and connoisseurs.

"The amount of money in Shakespeare is unreal," says Moritz, who does freelance backstage crew work (with Murphy) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C. He doesn't have anything against Shakespeare, or Broadway, or any other big player in the theater world. "But there's something that [big theaters] can't fulfill," he says.

It's the age-old call-and-response between established masterpieces and brave new territory, the same westward expansion that fueled Tristan Tzara's Dada plays at Cabaret Voltaire, Bertolt Brecht, and New York's experimental Living Theater. "It's necessary in a larger community that there are multiple theaters, and each fulfills a different niche," Moritz says. "What can you do at the Meyerhoff versus what you can do at the Talking Head Club? It's just appealing to a different crowd."

Vince Lancisi, artistic director for the professional Everyman Theatre, seems to welcome the newcomers. "I think the work they're doing is really exciting." Any resentment that these arty kids might be poaching the young audiences who might otherwise fill his house? "Absolutely not. Theater is one of the few businesses where anyone who introduces anyone to the world of theater [benefits] the entire community," Lancisi says. "It wasn't so long ago that Everyman was the new kid on the block. To see these guys doing the same thing does my heart good."

As the Strand prepares for its spooky Halloween-themed production of Molly Rice's Watch, a Haunting that opens October 16, the Annex Theater continues to dive headlong into its fall season (A Baltimore Love Thing October 2, 3, and 4; Hanna Barbera October 24 and 25; and Rhinoceros on November 16, 17, and 18), transforming Baltimore's theater landscape one wing-and-a-prayer production at a time.

"I had a professor who always told us that if you could do any other thing besides theater, you really should do it," Moritz says. "Making money in theater is absurd. Even music, in a certain way, gets you quicker recognition and is a little more lucrative. What we're doing here is idiotic," he laughs. So, will Moritz be happy if Annex Theater never takes off, never operates in the black, or never garners more attention than the occasional write-up in a local publication? "Of course. As long as we still have people coming to see it."

—Violet Glaze wrote about Baltimore as Gotham City or Metropolis in the June issue of Urbanite.




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