Mud

Presented Sept. 6-22 by BroadAxe Theatre at Bongo After Hours Theatre, 2007 Belmont Blvd.

8 p.m. Thurs.-Fri.; 7:30 & 10 pm Sat.

For tickets, call 385-1188; $15

The life and times of singer-songwriter Steve Earle have been well chronicled. Nashville’s most heralded “unfavorite” son, he has had much attention in the popular and serious press in the past 15 years. He has also developed a reputation for social activism, most importantly as spokesperson for the movement against capital punishment.

Recently Earle added short-story writer to his list of activities, with his collection Doghouse Roses recently released by Houghton Mifflin. He’ll soon be a playwright too, as he continues to work on Karla, a piece inspired by the life of death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker. The play will eventually serve as a vehicle for Earle’s life partner, actress Sara Sharpe. Meanwhile, Earle has helped co-found BroadAxe Theatre, which opens its inaugural production, Maria Irene Fornes’ Obie Award-winning Mud, at Bongo After Hours Theatre on Thursday.

“BroadAxe started as a writing and an activism thing,” says Earle. “The idea evolved from Karla, which I originally thought would be a monologue. Then it got to be something more than that. I went to North Carolina one weekend, and the next thing I knew I had a theater company. Like a lot of things I do, it got out of hand.”

Earle claims strong artistic and personal ties to New York, L.A., and Chicago. Yet Nashville—where he’s hung his hat for 27 years—will be BroadAxe’s birthplace. “It’s a good place to live,” says the man who broke musical ground with 1986’s Guitar Town, “and I have friends who have moved here from New York and L.A.—people who are used to good theater. For a town this size—and one that’s in the South—theater is pretty healthy. But there’s nobody putting up stuff like Mud.”

If antiestablishment thought is a part of the BroadAxe philosphy, then the Fornes play makes good sense as an initial offering. The playwright, now in her early 70s, has long been a fixture of off-Broadway culture, first making an impact in the 1960s and ’70s alternative movement that included the works of Sam Shepard and Megan Terry.

Gaye Jeffers is the BroadAxe artistic director and also the director of the new production. In mounting the play, she has allowed for the fact that Fornes usually directs her own works, which often results in dramas that are difficult to categorize. “Fornes takes what she wants from all the traditions and creates her own style,” Jeffers says, “which is what is really interesting and challenging about the play.

“Mud was originally performed outside on a hill. And it was performed a lot in daylight, so you couldn’t have blackouts. So Fornes had to devise new ways to end scenes. She uses everything in her world that she sees and senses, and it comes back out in her work some way. Fornes was trained as a painter, and this background offers her a whole different viewpoint.”

Mud, which dates from 1983, concerns a woman who is trapped in a poverty-stricken environment. Uneducated and without any advantages in life, she searches for the knowledge to effect change, to get out of the “mud.”

“Fornes doesn’t define time or place,” says Jeffers. “A lot of people set Mud in the Depression. I chose not to do that, because personally I think it’s wrong to suggest that these people couldn’t exist in our time.”

There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, about playwright Fornes, who supposedly saw the original production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Though she spoke not a word of French, the then-24-year-old was apparently visibly affected for days by its subliminal power.

“Fornes does write from the Godot angle,” says Jeffers. “I have found similar Beckettian patterns that make meaning come home to the viewer. Yet it’s less obvious that there’s this repetitive sense of action and theme, which the actors and I would discover during rehearsal. Fornes reinterprets ideas throughout the play.”

Like most new theatrical ventures, BroadAxe has taken form as a small group effort. Besides Earle, Jeffers, and Sharpe, the other co-founders include Bongo After Hours producer Ken Bernstein and Jeff Atkins and Kay McCurdy, the last two having relocated along with Jeffers to their native Tennessee after significant time spent in the Chicago theater community. (McCurdy, Atkins, Jeffers, and Sharpe are all former theater majors at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.)

“In choosing this play,” says Earle, “we deliberately looked for something with no more than two or three actors, so the principals would be members of the company. We already had Sara and Jeff, so when we held auditions, we were looking for one role only.”

That role has gone to one of Nashville’s brightest talents, Jeremy Childs, who has also taken a spot on the BroadAxe board of directors. The company has near-future plans to re-mount Childs’ own Vampire Monologues, which was a surprise hit last year. And, of course, Karla will eventually be on the boards. “It’ll probably be finished by the end of the year,” says Earle.

At the moment, the not-for-profit BroadAxe is operating out of an office on 16th Avenue South. “Eventually, we’d like to have our own building,” he says. “We’d like to have a great home for the company. For one thing, the theater itself becomes a living, breathing thing at that point. You can provide a place to work, and you can bring in other works that maybe you didn’t create. To me, theater is about making the community you live in a better place.”

While BroadAxe will want to develop and present new plays, Earle is quick to state that the company is really more for the full-time theater people. “My main connection is as a writer. I’m producer by default. I enjoy doing it. But I’m also finishing another record. I’ve got a novel started. I’ve got a volume of haiku that I’m writing, and I already have a book deal for that. Whether I’ll ever write another play again, we’ll see.”

In the meantime, producer Earle concerns himself with theatrical realities like the space limitations at Bongo and the bottom line. “We’ve upgraded the theater a little, and Ken wants to improve it more. Mud will be lit at a level that shows [at the venue] haven’t been previously. And we gained space onstage without losing any audience numbers.

“Being our first production, we’ll probably lose money. Everybody’s being paid something. The only difference between this company and others is we are professional; we will pay actors.”

For the short term, anyway, BroadAxe Theatre is a reality, a company with the firm intention of carving out some new territory on the Nashville theatrical landscape. “We want to be able to do a lot of different things,” says Jeffers. “As a company, we want to do things that mean something to each of us—that we support—and things that don’t necessarily already have a voice here. Theater has something to do with being a responsible citizen and feeling strongly about something. Whatever you choose to do tends to say something about you.”