Pacific Ensemble Has Little Space but Lots of Imagination

A subliminal sound of ticking can just be heard at the Pacific Theatre Ensemble in Venice, like something about to explode. The walls are already expanding. What up until recently was the group’s well-known “shoebox” theater space has already doubled itself.

The ensemble has taken over the property next door to its original Venice Boulevard home, where its acclaimed hit staging of John Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera” has been extended through Dec. 16. This weekend the ensemble’s holiday production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Long Christmas Dinner” opens in the new theater.

Since its founding five years ago, Pacific Theatre Ensemble has gained a reputation not only for exceptionally high-quality productions--The Times’ Sylvie Drake called “Beggar’s Opera” “lip-smacking”--but for the group’s unique ability to visualize and conceive large-cast productions in an infinitesimal arena.

Managing director Steve Markus, who has designed the sets for most of PTE’s productions, explained that the design process “really starts on the first day of rehearsal and develops throughout the whole rehearsal process. So much of that has to remain incredibly malleable. The decisions come from how the space works best. In larger venues, you often don’t have that freedom.” Necessity is the mother of invention.

According to PTE artistic director Stephanie Shroyer, this necessity has other advantages. “The thing that excites us, and where we’re at our creative best, is that we tend to look for work that does not allow, in fact encourages the audience and the actors to just do away with any type of separation. As an audience, whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to participate, you’re going to have to work to watch this play. It goes back to the original ritual of theater in the beginning of time, when it was always participatory and the event always changed.”

Audience members at PTE are irretrievably in on the action. In “Romanoff’s” the audience became customers in a 1940s Hollywood nightclub; in “Slaughterhouse on Tanner’s Close,” the viewers were strung out on scaffolding lining the walls, as though observing the gory goings-on in an operating theater; in “Beggar’s Opera” the audience is even more within the action. As Markus said, “We have people in chains being brought down directly over the audience’s heads. If that were happening to you in a subway, you might get a little nervous about it. But there is a trust that’s developed in that little space.”

In “The Long Christmas Dinner,” the audience sits alongside the cast in the dining room that’s the setting of Wilder’s multigenerational drama. “In this sort of environmental approach,” Markus said, “you’re given the freedom of knowing you can stick the audience where they’ll fit. It’s remarkable, when it’s done with delicacy and gentleness, what one can ask of an audience. I think ultimately they relish it.”

So far, PTE’s audiences have relished wherever they’ve been put, and with the current expansion they’ll have double the opportunity to experiment along with the company.

Pacific Theatre Ensemble’s second space will also allow the work of the group to expand. Markus said, “We serve such a distressingly small audience (about 30 in each space) for no good reason except the fact that the walls are where they are.”

The company is chomping at the bit with the opportunities the expansion provides. Leaning forward intently, Shroyer added, “We’ve got the first three months of 1991 set--we’re doing what we call our ‘co-op season.’ There won’t be tickets, because it’s on a workshop basis, and our company--the 60 actors in the company--have selected three plays, and we will be performing between January and March three large-cast ensemble shows with minimal lighting and some costumes.”

The plays are Keith Reddin’s “Life and Limb,” Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters” and a new play called “I’ll Die Happy” by Oliver Goldstick, one of PTE’s associate members.

“They’ll be open to the public at no charge,” Shroyer said, “but not for review. It’s like an experimental or new play series, with short runs.”

During the past year, Pacific Theatre Ensemble has operated an apprenticeship program in conjunction with Ronnie Rubin, head of Theater and Arts at UCLA Extension, who has been interested in forming a partnership with a professional theater company. Ten apprentices from the UCLA program were involved in all phases of the production of “Beggar’s Opera,” and seven remained with the show even after the completion of the program in early September.

Rubin told PTE that she was looking for a resident theater company and was very interested in beginning a program akin to San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre or the National Theatre Conservatory in Denver.

“They haven’t been able to offer their students any way to begin to work with a theater company that’s actively producing--theater professionals,” Shroyer said. “So they said, ‘Let’s expand it, let’s go for the conservatory situation.’ So, in January we’re going to start a 20-week full conservatory program, ending in May. Those students will study with members of the company, having regular classes and workshops. They’ll be asked to participate with whatever’s going on with the company, attend rehearsals, see what it is to produce. And new, exciting ideas come through the students. We’re thrilled to have this relationship with UCLA.”

PTE’s UCLA conservatory program is only part of the explosion that’s beginning with the new space on Venice Boulevard. Within two years the group will have outgrown its present quarters and will move into a larger 99-seat venue, which will triple the audience in either of its present theaters. That’s the second step in the program.

Still stretching its muscles after outgrowing the first space, there is no doubt, Markus said, that “our third step will be into a 400- to 500-seat theater. The timetable is within the next five to six years. I have no doubt that within three or four years after moving to our 99-seat theater we’ll feel the same way about that. Even though we’re in a recession, I feel we’ve going to defy all notions of the economy receding, because the growth of theater just indicates that. We’ll probably be here on the Westside--our roots here are really starting to dig in--and the community is really starting to open up to us and embrace us. It’s the right community for us.”

He added, “Our production of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ on Santa Monica Pier last summer was our first step in doing free theater. That’s important to us. We do between 15 and 20 plays a year. There are a lot of people who enjoy a lot of plays here that we do for free. It’s not within their means to spend 20 bucks to go out and see theater.”

With a broad smile, Shroyer said, “There was nothing more rewarding in our Shakespeare on the Pier, than people who had never seen theater before and were there every single performance. You could tell they were different after that experience.”

Even regular audiences for the group’s mainstage productions find they’re different after a Pacific Theatre Ensemble evening. Can the inventiveness continue? The ticking goes on. “There are only as many ways to use a space as there are ideas in a head,” Shroyer said. “Because of our collaborative nature, 60 heads are not going to run out of ideas for a long, long time.”

“The Beggar’s Opera” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays at 705 Venice Blvd., Venice, through Dec. 16. $15 to $17.50. “Long Christmas Dinner” plays at 8:30 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays and at 5 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays at 707 Venice Blvd., Venice, through Dec. 23. $15 (or $13 with a non-perishable food product for the homeless). Information for both shows: (213) 466-1767.