Artist Goes Beyond Reality in ‘Wedding’

The Los Angeles Theatre Center has hired Gronk, a Southland artist, to create the sets for the world premiere of “Stone Wedding.”

The production, Friday through Jan. 22, is about a Southwest town that is devastated by the loss of its young men to the Korean War and then undergoes a mystic transformation.

“Mystical forces, released by the townspeople’s grief, resurrect the ancient Aztec god of blood, war and sacrifice, who promises to bring vitality back to the town--for a price,” a theater press release says.

The play opens in an operating room where one of the town’s wounded is having brain surgery, Gronk, a native of East Los Angeles, said in an interview. An operating table will be center stage beneath a spare metal scaffolding structure, he said, pointing to a model with a miniature table. Then the otherworldly transformation begins.

“The sides (black floor-to-ceiling flats) move in so that now we’re inside of the man’s brain,” said Gronk, a.k.a. Glugio Gronk Nicandro. Then with theater magic, the scaffolding, forming the outline of an ancient Aztec pyramid, suddenly comes to life “and the spirit of the patient is transformed into an Aztec god figure.”

Through movement of the black flats, the set will also turn into a church and other sites.

Gronk described the style of the play and his set designs as magic realism, where a hyper sense of reality is tossed askew with a touch of the inexplicable.

“This is not a definite vision. The hospital has to be imagined, the church is imagined. I thought that magic realism would work in the theater, as it does in literature, if you gave the audience a lot of opportunity to use their imagination.”

Several large painted flats that Gronk has made for the play have a hard-edge, Expressionistic style, typical of the work of the former graffitist. One surrealistic piece shows the inside of a woman’s house with a window that looks onto a volcano spewing thick, black smoke.

“Sometimes theater sets look so flat. I wanted this to be painterly and have a rough and unrefined look,” said Gronk, who in January will have his first New York gallery show.

“Stone Wedding” is the collaborative project of playwright Milcha Sanchez-Scott and LATC’s Latino Theatre Lab. It is directed by Jose Juis Valenzuela and produced by Diane White, who said she hired Gronk because she wanted a Latino naive artist.

“I’m a big fan of naive art, and so is Jose Luis Valenzuela, and we saw “Stone Wedding” in terms of naive artwork,” White said.

Gronk, whose work is currently included in a traveling exhibit of contemporary Latino art due here in February, has often doubled as a performance artist, early on with an anti-art-establishment collective called Asco, which he co-founded in the ‘70s.

“A lot of my work has a very theatrical slant to it, so this is very much in keeping with what I do,” he said.

Two recently published guide books may be of special interest to individual artists and small arts organizations.

“Money for Artists: A Guide to Grants and Awards for Individual Artists” features more than 280 grant organizations and programs with contacts, eligibility requirements, award amounts, deadlines and other details. For information, contact the Center for Arts Information, 1285 Avenue of the Americas, Third Floor, New York 10019; telephone (212) 977-2544.

“The Road Map to Success: A Unique Development Guide for Small Arts Groups” will help readers identify and deal with problems of small arts groups. It covers three types of organizations: “Artist-Founder-Led,” “Community-Based” and “Collectively Run.” It includes a self-evaluation kit. For information, contact Massachusetts Cultural Alliance, 33 Harrison Ave., Boston 02111, Attention: Road Map.

Local artists are scheduled to help decorate a 12-foot-long chocolate and raspberry birthday cake for the fifth-anniversary celebration of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary. The Dec. 10 fete will take place at the TC at 8 p.m.; proceeds will benefit the museum. The party will feature a marching band, champagne and a dessert buffet. Ticket may be reserved by calling (213) 612-1736.