BCKSEET troupe loses a venue, gains a nomadic freedom

A year ago this month, Greg DeCandia was running between Society Hill Playhouse's two floors, managing the mainstage for Playhouse doyenne Deen Kogan, and starting one of his own BCKSEET Productions shows in its cabaret Red Room.

Over five years, those shows ranged from Tony Kushner's Angels in America to two original musicals, DeCandia's Hung on a Blonde Ponytail and Kate Brennan's Some Assembly Required - the sort of thing his BCKSEET troupe has been doing from its 2000 founding at Emerson College through its Red Room residency.

By fall 2009 DeCandia was a board member of the South Street Headhouse District, BCKSEET's artistic director, and assistant to Kogan, who had founded Society Hill Playhouse half a century before. All was well.

Then a not-so-funny thing happened.

"I am done at the Playhouse," DeCandia said recently. "Deen informed me a few months ago that there would not be a place for me this fall, asked BCKSEET to strike our belongings at the end of Some Assembly Required's run, and since my wedding [to company member Brennan] and honeymoon occurred this summer and required some time off, my position would be terminated as of June 1."

He believes he was ousted "due to the general perception of me being her successor," something he says he never pursued or assumed he was. (Kogan declined to comment.)

He and co-artistic director Brennan, aware of how tenuous theater jobs can be, express gratitude for their Society Hill Playhouse years. And DeCandia is happily pragmatic about the future - and the present, which so far has involved a certain amount of reinvention.

"The blessing of the Playhouse residence was an opportunity to provide a lot of programming over the last five years," he said. Now that that's no longer economically feasible, company members "look forward to utilizing alternative spaces as well as the established theater venues of this great city. We hope our new nomadic status will give us additional exposure."

This fall, BCKSEET has focused on its Sunday Night Concert Series - three monthlong saloon-based theatricalized tributes to a trio of landmark albums.

"We want to celebrate the album as an art form, a form which is quickly disappearing with the advent of iTunes and YouTube," said Brennan. The company "settled on the three albums that were life-changing for us" - U2's The Joshua Tree, Janis Ian's Between the Lines, and, ending this weekend with a major Halloween costume event, David Bowie's glam-hammy The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.

"We're taking our shows on the road at 10 different bars" in the South Street area, DeCandia said of the concert series and, after that, the fifth year of BCKSEET's holiday show, The Eight Reindeer Monologues.

In addition, the company has set up an open shop, BCKSEET Creative Co-Op, for neighborhood performers and artists at 535 South St., where audiences and passersby can gawk at the rehearsal process, heavy-makeup application for the Sunday Night Concert Series, and anything else that happens to be going on inside.

"I really like the idea of theater on South Street again," says Michael Byrne (better known as drag queen Carlota Ttendant), recalling the days when the nearby Theatre of the Living Arts (TLA) was an actual theater.

Byrne is special-events director for ActionAIDS, and came to BCKSEET last year as an outreach partner - part of its work with a different Philly nonprofit for each of its projects. But he soon found himself cast as bile-spewing Roy Cohn in Angels in America (a transformative experience, he says: "Carlota is a love machine unless you get up in her grill, so if folks only knew of me from her - wow") and now is one of the company's directors.

Next spring, BCKSEET will settle back into theater mode with a residency at InterAct Theatre Company's new Upstairs@The Adrienne space, to workshop and present its first-ever commissioned play, Losing the Shore by Catherine Rush.

Actress/playwright/artistic co-director Brennan thinks of her husband as a resourceful visionary who could make a play of paper clips, floss, and three people snagged off the street. "We're fully appreciative of our time" at Society Hill Playhouse, "but it's a blessing to have more creative freedom and to move forward to find a home that is more fully ours."

For now, they're ensconced at the Creative Co-Op rehearsal space/gallery/box office that's part of the South Street Headhouse District's "Arts on South" program, where local artists and art organizations create and promote for the locals and the tourists. The kids participating in the site's Homeskooled Gallery curate rotating exhibits, and DeCandia and Brennan are seeking other local theater companies to take advantage of the location.

"With a dearth of space in town, I would think that more companies would jump at the chance to be part of a collaborative effort like this," Brennan says.

Homes away from home are the area saloons where they perform their concept-album musicals on Sunday evenings, among them L'Etage, Chick's Wine Bar, and Paddy Whacks Irish Sports Pub. Byrne, for one, has relished directing DeCandia in Bowie's over-the-top Ziggy Stardust. "I'm about to celebrate my 30th high school reunion and this album played a part," he says. "Freshman year at St. Thomas Aquinas was hell on Earth, so I reinvented myself listening to Bowie."

While the album sides spin to a close at the end of November with Brennan's take on Between the Lines, she and DeCandia are developing Losing the Shore with Philadelphia playwright Rush. It follows Adlai Stevenson (after his failed 1952 presidential run) and four affluent cruise-ship passengers during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

"BCKSEET aims to produce works that foster self-reflection and social awareness," says DeCandia, "both of which are elements of this commissioned work."

Having mounted their two individual original musicals in the Red Room, he and Brennan are currently collaborating on a new one. "It'll be touching and funny," she says.

Everything about BCKSEET is a work in progress.

"I could watch Kate read the phone book, I find her that completely captivating," says Byrne. "And between her and Greg, they're two amazingly talented folks dedicated to . . . doing a great job of nurturing a small company into a medium company."