‘We Really Wanted to Start a Theater of Our Own’

To call the Courtyard Playhouse in Rolling Hills Estates “intimate theater” is decidedly an understatement.

“We practically have to choreograph the actors and the audience,” said David Catanzarite, who directs the playful sex comedy “6 Rms Riv Vu.” It opens a 6-weekend run tonight in the one-time jewelry store, where audience and actors share one long room. The fire code limits occupancy to 49 people--players and spectators combined.

“We usually play to full houses,” quipped Jolie Key, a member of the Actors’ Repertory Theatre, which is marking its first anniversary at the theater created for the troupe.

And in a sense, the small theater--on the third level of the Courtyard mall near the May Co. --symbolizes who the actors are and where they want to go.

Youthful for the most part, they are serious about theater and ambitious to develop professional careers. And they would like to move someday into larger quarters at the mall.

Terry Anfuso, board president of the 35-member group, said the company was created by some South Bay performers who appeared last year in “The Women” with the Palos Verdes Players at the Norris Theatre for the Performing Arts.

“Several of us were good, top-quality actors, and we really wanted to start a theater of our own,” she said.

After searching for space in such places as warehouses, stores and office buildings, the group settled on the Courtyard because the mall offered low rent, Anfuso said. And, courtesy of the jewelry store, they got a classy facade--shiny black tile and a display window suitable for playbills.

The theater is officially an Equity-waiver house, which allows members of the actors’ union to work without pay. Box office receipts pay the bills, and on occasion the actors have to dip into their own pockets.

In the lingo of contemporary theater, Anfuso said, Actors’ Repertory falls between community theater, where many act for the fun of it, and fully professional groups such as the New Place Theatre Company, the resident company at the Norris.

“We want people who are aspiring for careers and are not here to play,” said Anfuso. “We are not interested in the hobbyist.”

John Athas, who is in his third show with the group, was a professional actor in Dallas and came to California “to see if I could pursue my chosen career out here.” He describes the company as a group with “real love, real care, not egocentric actors with their neuroses.”

Variety appears to be the guiding principle of play selection, which is done by a play-reading committee and the board. There are some practical considerations, group members say. Because of the small theater, plays can’t have too many characters or require elaborate staging.

In an opening season that included an Agatha Christie murder mystery and a spoof of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” group members say their greatest success was “The Curious Savage,” a play about an elderly woman who inherits $10 million and succeeds in preventing her children from getting the money by putting her in an asylum. The company was thrilled when the playwright, John Patrick, called to thank them for staging it.

Children’s plays are done every Saturday at 1:30 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. The current offering is “I Am Something,” written by Shelley Abrams, a founder of the group. Admission is $4.50 for the children’s theater.

Bob Randall’s “6 Rms Riv Vu” (a newspaper ad about an apartment for rent) is played against walls covered with classified ad sections. It is about a man and woman who are friends but married to other people. They get stuck in the apartment when the superintendent inadvertently removes the doorknob. The pair make love after a great deal of hesitation, then decide to end it and return to their spouses.

Athas, whose easy, genial stage style reflects his experience as an actor, plays the man, opposite Tammi Widmann, who sees the role as a break after taking acting classes and trying out for parts elsewhere. She said she was “ready to take any part I could get” and was thrilled that it was the lead.

Director Catanzarite said the play is a comedy with something to say about marital fidelity in an age when “the code of marriage is important again.” The 1972 play has been updated with a few punk characters and a rubber Godzilla that is inflated as a counterpoint in the seduction scene.

“Everything is fast,” he said, “We’ve even speeded up the music.”

And in the small theater, he added, the audience practically feels the actors. “They’re almost on top of you.”