Staging his life

In 1966, Simon and Garfunkel’s sophomoric tune “The
Dangling Conversation” asked, “Is theater really
dead?” Forty years later, the answer is “yes” to
many residents of Los Angeles ““ a city dominated by film and
television.

Compared to New York, the theater community of Los Angeles may
seem to be in decline, if not already extinct.

But Tom Burmester, a UCLA alumnus and founder of the Los Angeles
Theater Ensemble, proves that theater is far from taking its last
breath.

After obtaining his master’s in fine arts from the UCLA
School of Theater, Film and Television in 2004, Burmester achieved
a rare success in developing the Los Angeles Theater Ensemble, one
of the few theater companies to have opened four plays with
outstanding reviews in its first season.

With the help of several other UCLA students and alumni,
Burmester started the ensemble after producing the Ghost Light
Theatre Festival in Davis, Burmester’s hometown. Growing up
in Davis with a director as a father and five siblings, Tom is the
only child who followed in his father’s footsteps.

And his life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk.

“When Tom grew up, he and his family hit hard times and
depended on donated food,” said ensemble member and
fourth-year theater student Albert Meijer.

Through tough times, Burmester has nonetheless remained involved
with the stage. In 1996, Burmester traveled with the Barnum &
Bailey Circus, along with a friend who worked as a professional
clown. Burmester worked as a stagehand, mostly cleaning up animal
excrement, until one day he left.

He said his experience with the circus did not deviate far from
the stereotypical image of an oppressive ringmaster who locks his
freak show performers in small cages.

“The quarters of the train we lived on were very small,
and many of the performers did seem like asylum-escapees,”
Burmester said.

While he has directed over 30 plays and has participated in too
many productions to count, as his father brought him into theater
at a young age, Burmester said he only began to develop his
experimental voice as a director halfway through his time at
UCLA.

He characterizes his style as somewhere between the theater
styles of Eugene O’Neill and Robert Wilson.

Burmester’s bizarre life has at times taught him to be a
realist, as much in his theatrical style as in his attitude toward
a life in theater.

To compensate for the virtually absent income one makes
producing theater in Los Angeles, Burmester continues to work at an
Apple computer store in these early stages of his

ensemble’s development.

To further the ensemble’s progress, Burmester also wants
to develop a community of theatergoers and participants in Los
Angeles.

This means performing shows that are just as entertaining as
they are meaningful.

“Humor is a big part of what connects us. It’s a
human understanding of the craziness in the world,” Burmester
said.

“We’re trying to make it easy for people to come
into our community. We’re fighting the conception that
theater has no place here in Los Angeles. People have said to me,
“˜Why aren’t you in New York?’ But there’s
an audience for theater here ““ they just don’t know it
yet,” he said.

The idea of community also transfers to Burmester’s
directorial style. In any performance by the Los Angeles Theater
Ensemble, his influence is felt in the energy the performers evoke,
as he passes his own passion for theater along to the cast.

Last Saturday night at the Powerhouse Theater in Santa Monica,
the ensemble performed their latest play, “Stone Cold Dead
Serious.”

Before the show, Burmester set up refreshments with his
girlfriend and co-founding member, Lauren Eckstrom. During the
show, he sat with the audience, laughed when they laughed, and
cringed when they cringed.

While he is the artistic director of the ensemble, he sees
himself at the bottom of theater hierarchy rather than at the
top.

“When you get a director who’s over-zealous of their
own vision, a lot of times they stifle the actors,” he
said.

But Meijer sees Burmester as someone who takes up good
leadership more naturally than servitude.

“Tom is sympathetic enough to show the best in the
performers. He’s unsympathetic enough to show the worst in
them. And when Tom is at his best, this is what you see.”