It’s hard to miss the big blue building that’s somewhat reminiscent of a warehouse on the side of Sepulveda Boulevard. What may not be so obvious is that the building is home to one of the city’s oldest and most adventurous small theaters.
Founder and director Ron Sossi’s mission for the 35-year-old Odyssey Theatre is to make it a place that not only showcases international and avant-garde contemporary plays, but that welcomes students by making theater an accessible and interesting art.
“We do anything to encourage students and young people to come,” Sossi said. “The nature of theater in this country is that it’s not a popular art form, especially among people who don’t already have gray hair.”
Sossi, a UCLA film school alumnus, does everything he can to make sure that money is not the reason that students don’t visit the Odyssey Theatre. Student rates begin at $10 – about the same cost as seeing a movie in Westwood – and there are other ways to score free tickets to a play, such as volunteering to usher at two shows.
Eager to make plays affordable to young people who are not necessarily in school, the theater also has a program in which people under 25 can pay $12 for tickets.
Sossi says that he wants to break the stereotypes that people have of theater being an intimidating or boring art form by making it approachable and entertaining for students.
He attributes much of theater’s unpopularity among people to their lack of exposure to it. He notes many of the people who venture out to see a play for the first time often return to see others in the future.
Ever eager to see theater become a more popular past time among students, one of Sossi’s future plans is to have a panel of students debate how they can make theater a populist art form.
“Conventional theater has the image of being dry, ‘cultural’ and not exciting, so we try to do the opposite,” Sossi said.
Indeed, one look at the unfinished exterior of the building, and its low-tech, intimate theaters inside is enough to eradicate many of the preconceived notions people may have of theater being too high culture for them.
The theater hosts post-show discussions, typically on Thursday nights, that are open for anyone to meet and talk with the director and other people involved in the play.
Additionally, each of the three theaters within the Odyssey boasts only 99 seats, so that even the furthest seat is relatively close to the stage.
In the past, this has gone beyond just having the actors and audience feed off of one another’s energy to include actual dialogue between actors and audience. One past play had an ad-lib portion in which an actor joked with individuals in the audience. Another time, a woman in the audience was so worked up she started shouting at a stubborn character.
The avant-garde nature of the works being presented at the Odyssey make it a counter to mainstream theaters in Los Angeles. Those theaters tend to show traditional plays which cater to aspiring actors looking to show off their talents to agents in the audience.
“When we pick plays we pick them based either on the material itself – if it is dangerous, controversial, or interesting or if the style is unordinary,” Sossi said.
One of the plays currently being performed at the Odyssey is “Things We Do for Love.” The play takes place on a three- level stage, where the actors on the top level are only visible from the knees down, so they must act with their legs and feet. The audience can only see above the shoulders of the actor who is painting a pornographic piece on the ceiling of the bottom level.
“The attraction of theater is that it’s an event,” Sossi said, “There’s nothing dangerous happening when you see a film – it’s all in a can. When you see theater, there’s a sense that something unusual can happen that isn’t predictable.”