Bricolage Theatre hitches up to trailer-park realism

No one's saying "trailer trash."

Burdened with a borderline learning disability and various family dysfunctions, the characters inhabiting David Turkel's West Virginia "Holler" are financially and even socially impoverished. From a distance, the play's brothers seem to embody negative social stereotypes, but Turkel is determined to look beyond their colloquialisms and explore their complex humanity.

The world premiere of "Holler" is the third production of Bricolage Theatre, a new company on a mission to combine insightful stories, dynamic visuals and found performance spaces.

Turkel, who wrote "Wild Signs," Bricolage's 2002 production, also will direct the story. Set designer Rob Hirst re-created the stark images of an authentic West Virginia trailer park by purchasing an actual mobile home, hacking it into pieces and carting it in 16-foot sections to the South Side Brew House stage. Under Rob Long's creative lighting, the set includes the trailer and skeletons of broken motor vehicles.

"[Hirst] really built a beautiful stage," says Turkel. "It's vital. It's an interesting new way for me to work in terms of how realistic it is. I mean, all of the appliances and plumbing actually work. It's really specific to what happens in this space."

The key to what happens on stage, however, was determined by painstaking rewrites. Turkel says his cast -- Bricolage artistic director Jeffrey Carpenter, Elena Passarello, Greg Coughlin, Daryl Fleming, Terry Parshall and Dereck Walton -- were given a lot of latitude in paring down the final script.

"As soon as there's somebody embodying the role," says Turkel, "the mood is different, the timing is different, the texture is different. [As a playwright] you find yourself making choices for the immediacy of things; you want to up the ante on conflicts."

"Holler," he says, is "sort of a morality tale" about two grown brothers living together in a West Virginia trailer park. One may be challenged mentally, but the other is challenged morally.

"It's sort of a commentary on what intelligence is," he says. "Is there such a thing as a smart dumb thing? Can you be good to the point of it being a handicap?"