By Lisa A. DuBois

When David Alford lived in New York, he landed enough roles to keep him employed as an actor. Inspired by his success in the big city, the Juilliard graduate envisioned coming home to Tennessee in a blaze of triumph and founding a Southern theater company. In 1991 Alford did come home, and he did found a professional theater company. Now all he needs is one small blaze of triumph.

Alford has made it to television—as Intermedia’s “cable guy,” the spokesman for the cable company’s product line. But that’s not quite the celebrity inferno he had in mind. Instead, the ambitious young artistic director continues to hang his hopes for glory on Mockingbird Public Theatre, an emerging troupe with a reputation for mounting artistically acclaimed new and classic works by Southern playwrights, as well as timeless selections by Shakespeare, Anouilh, Shaw, Chekhov, and Wilde. In Mockingbird productions, intrigue always trumps razzle-dazzle.

This weekend Alford, Mary Tanner, and Reed Diamond (who appears as Detective Mike Kellerman in the TV series Homicide) will lock arms at TPAC’s Johnson Theater for a hit-and-run production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. The actors and director Rene Copeland are working pro bono, and all proceeds will benefit the theater company, which took a huge financial hit last year by linking up with the Actor’s Equity union.

In Mamet’s darkly humorous style, with its fragmented, overlapping dialogue, Speed-the-Plow examines the controversy between art and commercialism in the movie industry. Alford and Diamond play Charlie and Bobby, a couple of Hollywood filmmakers who have a chance to sign a big star for yet another prison-buddy movie, complete with grisly fights and special effects. In the role of Karen, Tanner pleads that they instead invest their resources in an art project about radiation and the decay of society. “The challenge in [directing] this show,” Copeland says, “is in presenting the issues—the true logical necessity of presenting commercially viable films, of course, and the true emotionally heartfelt need to do good.”

Whatever personal baggage audience members bring into the theater will divide them in their response to the satire. “You take [Mamet’s plays] out of the theater and into the street and home with you afterwards,” Alford says, “because you’ve got some things you have to work out. He doesn’t give you a nice pat answer at the end.” The actor notes that the language in Speed-the-Plow is designed for adult audiences—unless, he deadpans, parents want their children to “hear the cable guy say the f-word.” During the comedy’s 1987-88 premiere season (which marked the Broadway debut of Madonna playing opposite Ron Silver and Joe Mantegna), the playwright was glibly succinct about its theme. Hollywood, Mamet remarked, “is a sinkhole of slime and depravity.”

Copeland is staging the play in the round to magnify the intensity of the triangulated relationships. Most directors would consider this choice impossibly cumbersome, but Copeland is a longtime veteran at Chaffin’s Barn, where she managed to pull off a magnificent in-the-round presentation of Noises Off—a feat many said couldn’t be done. “When you’re an in-the-round audience member,” she says, “you see other audience members reacting too. I’m excited...they’ll feel like they’re sitting in that room [with the characters].”

As a company, Mockingbird has always gravitated toward intense plays in small, intimate spaces. In 1994, the group debuted Jean Anouilh’s Becket in the Scarritt-Bennett Center chapel, with Alford and cofounder Paul Michael Valley in the leading roles. (Valley is now appearing on Broadway as Thomas Jefferson in the musical revival of 1776.) Soon Mockingbird found a home at the Darkhorse Theater, where over the next several years it presented Fish or Cut Bait, Love and Privilege, Dearly Departed, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Night of the Iguana. In 1997, the troupe reached a milestone with its production of Hamlet, staged in collaboration with Humanities Outreach in Tennessee (H.O.T.) at TPAC’s Johnson Theater. Rife with Generation-X themes, the Shakespearean war-horse inaugurated Mockingbird as an Equity theater.

“Our hand got forced,” Alford says of his decision to go Equity, which came about after he hired a number of union actors for Hamlet. Two days after he opened negotiations with Equity, someone in town reported the company for scabbing. “I’d heard about that happening before, but I don’t know who or why anyone would want to do that. It annoys me because it’s really impractical in Nashville for actors to be exclusively Equity. There’s just not enough work. But artistically we’d cast people we knew were Equity, and we really wanted them and felt the show would suffer without them, so we decided to bite the bullet and take the financial hit.”

The company is now carrying a $15,000 debt, hence the benefit show. If things go according to plan, Mockingbird will retire the deficit by the end of the 1998-99 season. One strategy for achieving this is to move the annual A Southern Christmas Sampler from the 50-seat Scarritt-Bennett Center to the 100-seat Belmont Mansion. Last year, the holiday offering, staged as an intimate parlor gathering in which audience members mingled while actors sang and told stories, sold out all 17 performances before the first show opened. “The Christmas Sampler has taken on a life of its own,” Copeland says. “It’s popular beyond our wildest dreams, because it’s the opposite of the [typical] holiday spectacle. It’s a chance for people to feel like they’re part of a personal experience.”

Next season Mockingbird will also mount a new comedy by Randy Hall, The Widow’s Best Friend, a Southern tale about a group of women who gather to help a recently widowed pal—only she refuses to accept their charity and condolences. Also, H.O.T. is again sponsoring Hamlet, moving it into the 1,100-seat Polk Theater at TPAC, thereby reaching five times more high-school students than last year. The season concludes with a double-bill of classics—Anton Chekhov’s The Boor and George Bernard Shaw’s Overruled.

In February 1999, Mockingbird will initiate a showcase of new plays, the New Southern Theatre Project, or NeST ’99. The company will select three original works, which must have remotely Southern themes, to be featured in staged readings by professional actors and directors. The winning playwright will receive a cash award. Even though the company has yet to make a call for submissions, Alford says, playwrights have been sending him new plays to consider. Mockingbird will announce an official solicitation later this year.

So this little upstart troupe struggles along, aiming for greatness but dealing with the financial costs associated with audience growth and artistic demands. If Alford has yet to create the blaze he so desires, at least his theater is emitting a constant and steady glow. Some would argue that’s better anyway.

Mockingbird Public Theatre presents David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, 8:00 p.m. May 29 and 30 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater, 505 Deaderick St. Tickets are $26 for the show only, $40 for the show and a catered question-and-answer “Diamond Reception” after Saturday’s performance. Proceeds benefit MPT’s 1998-99 season. For tickets, call Ticketmaster at 255-9600.

Mockingbird Public Theatre presents David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, 8:00 p.m. May 29 and 30 at TPAC’s Johnson Theater, 505 Deaderick St. Tickets are $26 for the show only, $40 for the show and a catered question-and-answer “Diamond Reception” after Saturday’s performance. Proceeds benefit MPT’s 1998-99 season. For tickets, call Ticketmaster at 255-9600.