Frederíque was born in Paris and studied theatre at the Conservatoire. She has directed more than eighty productions in the United States, including works by Strindberg, Rozewicz, Vinaver, Horowitz, Fornes and Barker. She received a Dramalogue award for her direction of Dissident, and has led the company as Artistic Director since its founding in 1987. Her 1998 production of George Sand: An Erotic Odyssey in Seven Tableaux was nominated for four L.A. Weekly Theater Awards, including Best Director. She was nominated again for Best Director for MedeaText: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore (2000). In 2005 she won the LA Weekly Award for Best Direction (one act) for La Lecon (The Lesson).

So says Frederique Michel, artistic director of Santa Monica's City Garage, which she runs with her husband, scenic designer and dramaturge Charles Duncombe Jr., in an alley behind the Third Street Promenade's food court. There are no dicks in evidence during this afternoon's rehearsal of a scene from the Kaufman-Hart chestnut Once in a Lifetime, although three of the run-through's nine actresses are nearly completely naked. The topless women seem so blithely unaware of their nakedness that its shock effect soon wears off, as it no doubt will when the scene is later played for the L.A. Weekly's annual theater awards show.

"I love a woman who is not perfect," Michel had confided in her mascara-thick Parisian accent before the rehearsal began. "Nudity is not always particularly pretty, but it is always a powerful statement."

Michel and the Garage (the theater's located in an old brick car barn once home to Model T's and Packards) have a reputation for presenting work that has been challenging but often, some might say, challenged. Where else in L.A. would you find plays by Heiner M�ller, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Tadeusz Rozewicz -- let alone with more female flesh than at the Hooters just a few doors down? On the other hand, the quality of the work has varied wildly from show to show, although there has been a discernible improvement over the last few years.

During the Once in a Lifetime rehearsal, Michel sits in the dark, her face an expressionless mask -- only her hands move about as she instructs the ensemble on a difficult movement number involving a synchronized dance kick. For the first hour, a Pomeranian dog that is part of this production barks incessantly.

"If you are not kicking at the same time, you will look stupid!" she calls out.

Twenty years ago, Michel arrived in L.A., via London and Montreal, to break into movies. She'd been classically trained for the French stage and revered Marivaux and Shakespeare, as well as the theories of the late Polish critic Jan Kott. Michel, however, found L.A. to be "a meat market, the belly of the whore. This is a city that creates monsters."

Michel was repelled by what she saw as a culture of hypocrisy about sex -- a low level of pornography informing everything, she says, from the Weekly's "escort" ads to Times reviews that carry nudity advisories. "People in this town think nudity is dirty and always equate it with sex. You don't learn to love a woman through pornography."

She soon dropped her acting ambitions and, by the mid-1980s, founded the Aresis Ensemble in Santa Monica, performing first in a theater off Main Street and later in one on the pier. Today she is proud of the fact that City Garage is now the only company in town that doesn't cast from the outside, auditioning instead among its 35 members, whom Michel directs in acting workshops with her own steely panache.

"I hate acting teachers," she says, "because they just want to create a safe place for their students and tell actors how great they are even if they are not, because they want their money."

Yet Michel's venue is no charity rental, and, in addition to box-office receipts and grants from Wells Fargo Bank, the California Arts Council and the L.A. Goethe- Institut, the company is kept afloat through a system of dues in which Michel's actors pay $60 per month. [Note: membership dues were entirely eliminated in 2003.]

"I'm a tough person to work with," she acknowledges. "I tell my students I'm not a baby sitter, I'm not your mother, a lover or psychiatrist."

True enough, despite her petite figure and girlish sweaters, heels and anklets, Michel can be an intimidating presence. One actress fled her class before even enrolling, then returned days later, to heatedly inform Michel that she was not taking the workshop.

Michel takes it in stride. "I scare people so much," she says. "'Oh, you are working for that French bitch!' is what people tell my actors when they hear they are in a play here."

By the end of rehearsal for Once in a Lifetime, the actors have begun to kick more or less in unison, using the word inspiration from the script. Even the Pomeranian has calmed down and is no longer barking.

City Garage has come a long way in a few years, starting to pull off some difficult and often dense texts with remarkable skill. If it can maintain a consistent level of performance and direction, and overcome the prurient snickers about its insurgent nudity, City Garage stands to become a serious destination for audiences attracted to cerebral works.

"'Inspiration' is the cue," Michel calls out to her actresses about the dance kick, her mouth finally buckling into a faint smile.

FREDERIQUE MICHEL, artistic director of City Garage. High points: The Fetishist/The Night Before the Forest; Medeatext: Los Angeles/Despoiled Shore; The Skriker.

-- Steven Mikulan, (L.A. Weekly, April 19 - 25, 2002

"I am very tough! They call me the Torturer, the Monster!' Frédérique Michel admitted gleefully. Michel is the diminutive, outspoken. and often controversial artistic director of City Garage, an ambitious Westside LA. Theatre company in which actors depend on getting a rigorous intellectual and emotional workout in productions of rarely seen European and American dramas.

The company is entering its second year in a comfortable and well-designed venue in an alley behind Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, after having moved from locations on the nearby pier and in Venice. The company has a decidedly non-commercial but artily upscale reputation. Michel, a tightly wound, vivacious brunette who speaks in a heavily French-accented English thick with philosophical argot, seeks out and presents production whose intellectual and aesthetic content might daunt (or simply not interest) many other local companies.

Although the troupe takes as its "niche" plays by modernist European writers such as Beckett, Genet, and Fassbinder, Michel denied any bias against U.S. authors.

"I do a lot of American work," she pointed out, citing Jacquelyn Reingold's Girl Gone and a play by noted L.A. writer Phyllis Nagy. But, she admitted, "My tendency goes toward modern European writers, because I think it's better to produce new work from other countries. It's more exciting for people to come see something different."

Not surprisingly, some productions are more successful than others. Occasionally, Michel's stagings have an off-putting. pretentious hauteur; it may be largely an occupational hazard of the material. Still, virtually all her productions, from Heiner Muller's elegantly fragmented Hamletmachine to Marguerite Duras' wistful, moody Savannah Bay - feature visual!y dazzling images (her regular designer is Charles A. Duncombe) and arresting performances.

Another mainstay of her shows is free and abundant nudity. Indeed, it seems that nearly every show has had a moment in which an actor or actors, often irrelevantly, doff their clothes. This isn't intended to shock or titillate. Michel said.

"You see. I'm French," she explained. "My father was a painter -- and when I grew up, every Sunday in the living room, my mother was naked on the table. Or some other woman. To me there's nothing wrong with nudity. It's beautiful."

Her insistence on nudity has led some performers to leave the company -- or, when they refused, to be asked to leave. But it's her company, after all, where her own aesthetic -- and her fiery fierce-tempered personality -- has free rein. Other directors might be uncomfortable with the label of "difficult to work with"; Michel accepts the title happily.

"I don't coddle," she warned. "I don't babysit. I'm not a psychiatrist -- and I'm not an acting teacher. Actors are always surprised because I do not tell them. 'Ah! You did such a great job!' if I don't believe they did."

Maybe that's why, she said, there are so few substantive conflicts with her performers: If they don't share her vision, they are welcome to go somewhere else. "If you don't trust your director," she said, "well, just don't work with that person. Because it's not going to go anywhere."

When prodded about her past, Michel somewhat reluctantly revealed that her training was in the classical Theatre at the Paris Conservatory, and that she appeared in numerous productions in her native France. But she hastened to add that she has essentially rejected everything she learned during her training years.

Wherever she got it, she does have a distinct directorial vision. It's clear when she speaks about her productions that she's done her homework, both in interpreting the text and in carefully planning out what she wants her performers to do. Indeed, she said, "I'm a very visual person," she explained. "I stage like a choreographer." In fact, the only director she said she admires is the late Bob Fosse.

But it's not just Michel's aesthetic and temperament that sets her apart in this entertainment industry town.

"I don't 'showcase'." she said, rolling her eyes at the vanity performances that comprise the Alpha and Omega of all too many local theater productions. Michel casts only from within her company, but general auditions for the group are always advertised in Back Stage West. And, while Michel keeps an open ear for the ideas of the people who are involved with the group, she again reaffirmed that it's her instincts that drive the company.

"I tell them when they audition for me that I can be very difficult. If you can follow this and work hard, we will do good work together. But it's not easy."

Article by Paul Birchall, reprinted from Back Stage West, February 20, 1997.