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Meet Devon Armstrong of Downtown Repertory Theater Company in Highland Park, Sierra Madre

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Devon Armstrong.

Devon, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started the Downtown Repertory Theater Company in 2009 when I was 20 years old and a junior in college. Every summer my friends and I would come home to find that all the summer shows in L.A. had been cast a month or two prior, leaving us sitting on our hands, with no opportunity to audition. I wanted to create an opportunity for myself and my friends to flex our artistic muscles and play the roles we wanted to play without having to get anyone’s permission.

We couldn’t afford a theater space and wanted to be in the middle of the explosively expanding arts scene in Downtown L.A., so we asked Tom Gilmore, a prominent Downtown developer if he had any empty storefronts we could use. He said no, but he did have the entire 6th floor of the parking structure at Fourth and Main, which would be vacant for three months until his lofts opened in the adjacent building, and would we be interested? We jumped at the space but weren’t exactly sure what to do with it. It was cavernous and completely empty. Just a twelve-foot ceiling and an acre of polished concrete floor striped with parking spaces.

At first we tried to figure out how to construct some sort of theater in a corner of the structure. Maybe we could build flats and use them for walls—in essence, creating a Hollywood-style black-box theater within the space. But eventually, we saw the space for what it was: not a liability, but an asset. An opportunity to stage a kind of theater that neither we nor the Downtown audience had seen before.

We put on The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and had Satan driving onto the “stage” in a 1966 Buick Skylark convertible with “Sympathy for the Devil” blasting on the stereo. Freud came out of the darkness riding a bicycle.

We did Macbeth and staged a battle scene by putting the bleachers in a circle in the center of the space and having two SUV’s perform a screeching car chase around them. That definitely kept the spectators at the edge of their seats.

By the end of the summer, we’d truly embraced the first line of Peter Brook’s theatrical manifesto “The Empty Space”: “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

The following summer, we made the move to the Pico House at Olvera Street, a three-story brick structure built in 1870, with multiple interior balconies in a soaring atrium. We did everything we could with no-cost effects. We poured buckets of water along the balconies so it would rain down and simulate a storm. We placed the audience on the upper floors so that the play was staged around and beneath them. We created original theater that would take place throughout the building so that the audience could choose their own storyline, and each come away with a different version of the story.

After ten years and dozens of productions, we have yet to perform in an actual theater.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Putting on site-specific theater in Los Angeles is one giant obstacle after another. On the sixth floor of the parking structure, there were no electrical outlets, so we had to run 800 feet of extension cords up the stairwells from the ground floor. There was no place for the audience to sit, so we had to beg my childhood elementary school to let me borrow the portable bleachers from their basketball courts. When we tried to take the bleachers up to the sixth floor in our borrowed pick-up truck, we discovered they were too tall, so we had to offload them and push them up the parking ramps six floors by hand. On the way, we discovered the bleachers were infested with black widow spiders and had to run out for a can of Raid. We didn’t have a sound system to run sound cues, so we opened the doors of the Stage Manager’s Honda Civic, and played them through his speakers. We had no lights, so we angled our cars strategically and used the high beams.

Our second performance space, the Pico House, is an active historical monument by day and does tours and events. Each performance we would come in and build the theater from scratch—bringing in our lights, chairs for the audience, set pieces and props–and at the end of each performance, we would strike the entire kit and caboodle, leaving behind no evidence that there had been a show there the night before. It was a tremendous amount of work, but seeing how we creatively reimagined the space kept our audiences coming back year after year.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
True to our roots, the Downtown Repertory Theater specializes in putting on immersive and site-specific theater. We’re currently running an original, immersive show called “The Assassination of Edgar Allan Poe” at Heritage Square Museum in Highland Park. Audience members are free to choose their own storyline as they trespass through four fully-dressed Victorian mansions, a train depot, a drug store and a church. The play teases out the fevered final days of the Master of the Macabre, and each audience member leaves with a different perspective, and unique experience. (Through August 18th, 2019: details on downtownrep.com).

We also offer a Shakespeare-in-the-park festival every summer in Sierra Madre, as it has always been part of our mission to make high-quality theatre available for free to the public. The festival is supported by donations from local organizations like the Rotary Club and the Sierra Madre Community Foundation, and from fans who enjoy the warm summer nights, picnics, canines and a classic play under the stars. This summer features “Much Ado About Nothing” with a Dolce Vita twist. (Through August 17th, 2019: details on SierraShakes.com)

In addition to theater productions, the Downtown Repertory has also produced a number of filmed projects, one of which, a series called “Empty Space”, follows the misadventures of a hapless theater company and is currently on Amazon Prime Video.

What were you like growing up?
I’m a native Angeleno, and when I was in grade school my mom and dad took me and a couple of my friends to see a Halloween screening of a horror movie (I believe it was “Nosferatu”) at the downtown Orpheum Theater. This was before the restoration of the Orpheum, and it was still in a spooky state of arrested decay, with rotting curtains and stained carpets. This was also before the internet, and my parents had heard about the event through word of mouth but didn’t know the details of exactly what was on the bill for the night. As it turns out, before the movie, there was a burlesque act that featured an octogenarian who had been doing shows for sixty years, who did a striptease that started in a monster outfit and ended in nothing but pasties and a G-string. My parents were mortified. My friends were shocked. I thought it was great.

As the son of an English teacher and a location manager for film and television, I grew up around both the entertainment industry and classic literature. My mom introduced me to Shakespeare, and my dad picked me up from school and took me places in downtown that other kids didn’t get to see. Decaying abandoned theaters and spooky warehouses. Small wonder I ended up doing immersive theater in unconventional spaces.

Pricing:

  • Sierra Madre Shakespeare Festival – Free (donations gratefully accepted)
  • The Assassination of Edgar Allan Poe – $35

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