John Edgar Wideman hits the L.A. stage with ‘Storytales’

When two-time PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist John Edgar Wideman finished his most recent book, “Briefs: Stories for the Palm of the Mind,” two years ago, he opted to take an unorthodox route to release, putting it out himself through the self-publisher Lulu. Partly, this was a family decision; Wideman’s son worked for the company and, as the author recalled this week by phone from his home in Manhattan, “To do a book with him was pure joy.”

At the same time, 71-year old Wideman, who has also won a MacArthur genius grant, was interested in playing with new forms, with seeing how the changing infrastructure of publishing might be exploited to get his work across in different ways.

And on Saturday, his work will be at the center of an experiment of a different sort -- a one-night-only performance called “Storytales,” produced by Los Angeles’s own WordTheatre, presenting 28 microfictions from “Briefs” at L.A.’s Ford Amphitheatre.

A benefit for the WordTheatre in the Schools program, “Storytales” isn’t the first time that material from “Briefs” has been staged, but Wideman says, these events were more traditional, involving performers reading from the book. “Storytales” is different, a full-scale production, blending Wideman’s narratives with dance and hip-hop, and featuring actors including Bill Cobbs, Keith David, Dennis Haysbert and Tracie Thoms.

For Wideman, seeing his work interpreted in such a way is “a real act of faith. Anything could happen.” But he’s intrigued by the possibility of performance taking the book in a direction he might not otherwise anticipate.

“I don’t feel the stories need anything but words to be appreciated,” he says. “But theater is a cultural project that crosses all sorts of lines, and the idea that the stories could be mixed and interpreted on the fly by dancers and other performers is exciting.” So exciting, in fact, that he will be coming out from New York for the performance.

At the heart of the project, Wideman suggests, is a sense that literature is bigger than we can imagine, that it can encompass many approaches, many strands. “You can’t talk about American literature,” he says, “without including everything. As many voices from as many sources -- this is what makes a canon.”

That’s also the idea behind “Storytales,” which is the inspiration of WordTheatre artistic director Cedering Fox, and includes a campaign to bring 600 students from Title 1 LAUSD high schools to the event.

“Nobody knows what to do next,” Wideman acknowledges, alluding to both the up-in-the-air state of publishing and the ongoing challenge of engaging readers, of nurturing an audience. “So you take a chance. You take a chance any way you go.”

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