When the House Really Is a House : Theater: Some impresarios bring the Bolshoi to town. Jeannine Frank brings entertainers to living rooms. There’s not a bad seat in the place.

Think of it as Home Sweet Theater.

Virtually every weekend, part-time impresario Jeannine Frank has an entertainer booked somewhere on the Westside. Recently, it was Dale Gonyea, a comedian and classical pianist. What set the evening apart was where it took place.

Instead of playing clubs and theaters, Frank’s entertainers put on what she calls Parlor Performances in private homes. While the audience snuggled into the sectional sofa in a Santa Monica living room, Gonyea tried to knock ‘em dead over the coffee table.

The result is a far closer relationship between entertainer and audience than conventional venues provide, according to Frank and her regulars.

“There’s an intimacy that goes with being in someone’s house,” says Lotus Weinstock, a comic performance artist who often plays parlors as well as clubs and theaters. “There is not that separation where they are in the dark. We can read each other.”

Weinstock, whose comic gifts were honed during her engagement to the late Lenny Bruce, jokes that playing real houses forces her to do without sophisticated lighting and “to climb over the occasional kitchen table.” But what people’s homes lack in theatrical equipment, they make up for in other ways, she says.

Audiences are more relaxed in a home, according to Weinstock, and better able to concentrate on the performance. “People are not dealing with drinks. People are not dealing with smoke. People are not dealing with that harshness that goes on in a club.”

For the performer, she says, one of the charms of playing a living room is not having to share the makeshift stage with anyone else. “The fact that I don’t have a time limit like I do in a club is the most liberating thing of all,” says Weinstock, who can do an hour or more of material in a home instead of the 15-minute routine that is standard for a comedy-club appearance.

A writer of satiric songs since childhood, Frank has booked more than 25 parlor performances since she began in January, with a show by friend Weinstock in a Hancock Park home.

Before that first show, Frank sent out announcements to dozens of friends and posted flyers at the Zen Bakery and other Westside hangouts. Weinstock announced the appearance during her club dates. Fifty people showed up--a sold-out house.

Frank, who makes her living as a paralegal and free-lance photographer, says she was confident the idea would work “because I’ve always loved things in homes.”

When she was a student at UCLA, she recalls, she and her friends routinely entertained themselves in each other’s homes. “Often on Sundays we’d pick a play and have a potluck lunch at someone’s house and read ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ or ‘The Rivals’ or whatever.”

A Brentwood resident, Frank, 41, estimates that 700 people have attended parlor performances so far. Her stable of performers has grown to about 20, including songwriter-satirist Dave Frishberg and Sheri Glaser, who has used parlor performances to try out new characters for her one-woman show, “Family Secrets.”

If a single thread unites the performers, Frank says, it is a penchant for political and social commentary. Like the people who come, she says, “many have a ‘60s sort of consciousness.”

Frank, who charges $15 per person per performance, says she has had no trouble finding people willing to volunteer their houses. The hosts are not paid but are given complimentary tickets to upcoming shows. Once Frank sweetened the deal by having the homeowner’s piano tuned.

Frank carries 50 folding chairs in her compact wagon to supplement existing seating. So far there have been no complaints from neighbors about the concerts, she says. “They are only at a house once, and I try to choose places where parking is not a problem. Besides, the neighbors are usually informed--and invited.”

After each performance, the audience and the entertainer mingle over coffee and cake. The mingling may be a major factor in the concerts’ success, says Frank, who estimates that half her regulars are single.

“It’s a friendly group and you can come alone,” she says. “And it’s a party afterward.” Certainly, the audience enjoys talking one-to-one with the entertainer, but they also seem to like talking to each other.

“They’re not single events, but I know a lot of dates have been arranged at them,” she says--including some of her own.