Lee Breuer '58: Theatrical Alchemist for a Global Century

“I've wanted to express my gratitude to UCLA for a long time,” says Lee Breuer '58, the avant-garde theater pioneer who co-founded the world-famous Mabou Mines performance troupe in 1970.

“I was 16 when I came here — a little bit ahead of myself,” Breuer says. “I started out not knowing what the hell I was going to do. My mother wanted me in pre-law. UCLA was the place where my life went through a transition and I said, ‘Screw it. If I want to be an artist, I'll be an artist.’ Everything that I've done since in theater has grown out of the things that happened to me at UCLA.”

Breuer’s style at Mabou Mines has been defined by “mash-ups,” jarring fusions of genres or techniques from disparate cultures that may offend purists but that in Breuer’s hands seem to open up the significance of accepted classics, often obscured by their very familiarity. Breuer’s most popular work, revived several times since its premiere in 1982, has been “Gospel at Collonus,” in which the music of African-American churches brings to the fore both the passionate emotion and the ceremonial structure of Greek tragedy, an art form that had a religious as well as an aesthetic function.

His most recent production, “Mabou Mines Doll- House,” which played Royce Hall in 2006 as a presentation of UCLA Live, was performed on a scaled-down set dressed with playhouse furniture. All the male roles in Henrik Ibsen's nineteenth-century feminist trumpet blast were played by Little People.

“I’m trying to make a political statement without haranguing people from the stage,” Breuer told a rapt session of Professor Sue-Ellen Case‘s UCLA theater class the day after the first Los Angeles performance of “Dollhouse.” “The patriarchy is in reality three feet tall, but it has a voice that can dominate women six feet tall. At the same time, we’re exploring the metaphor from the woman's point of view, the way maternal love is lavished on these toddler-sized men, which only infantilizes them further."

It's an odd experience to hear an obviously gifted artist, a guy who has been astounding audiences for years, make the claim that he was utterly clueless about art when he arrived in Westwood in 1952 — a Valley kid who "barely got into UCLA at all with my B+ average. I had written a couple of short stories, so at first I took the short story writing class and got hooked on that. From there I decided to take playwriting from George Savage." A turning point for Breuer was a contemporary theater class that opened up "this whole world of European avant garde performance that changed my life. I was introduced in the space of six months to Beckett, Camus, Sartre.

"Don't forget," he continues, "I was still only 17 years old, and what fascinated me at first were things like Camus' public persona as a movie star artist. I wanted to play at being a French existentialist, which meant nothing more than drinking a lot of espresso and wearing a black turtleneck. That was the image. It was the first vestige of the '60s coming in. And when I started writing I wrote imitation existentialist dramas."

Breuer may have been imitating his idols in award-winning undergraduate plays such as “The Wood Complains” (1957), but the high-energy productions, which starred such gifted fellow students as future film director Paul Bartel '61 (“Eating Raoul”), "became kind of sensations, because they were totally different," Breuer says.

"The other thing at UCLA that I want to give homage to," he says, "is the little building we had, a little bungalow, that was called 3k7. It was a little theater given over to the students to mount their own productions. It was student run, student organized. The teachers did not arrive until opening night, when they became the critics. It was the greatest experience I ever had, because I had complete control over a production unit."

This experience was a huge boost, Breuer says, when it came time to leave his early artistic heroes behind and find his own voice. He migrated from L.A. to Big Sur (where he hung out with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and mowed Henry Miller's lawn) to San Francisco, where he got his first chance to direct at the now legendary San Francisco Actor's Workshop.

One key aspect of the personal approach Breuer discovered was casting a fresh, subversive eye over established international classics. In effect, he was one of the earliest postmodern theater directors — though he often complains about the sterile academic implications of the term. Breuer hybrids such as “Mabou Mines DollHouse” are lush and inventive productions that give the audience a lot to look at. "You can show people a good time and still open them up to new ideas," Breuer insists. "You just have to work a little harder."

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