PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : The Golden Theatre: Innocence Revisited

On a corner going north on San Fernando Boulevard, time has suddenly met itself coming and going. A mall is taking shape around the huge store IKEA; while down the block old-fashioned shopping lingers in buildings that are simple and unadorned--like faces that have never known makeup.

One shop reconditions sewing machines; another sells hearing aids. A small sports shop has only a few sizes in anything, while across the road Sam Leifer hovers like a small, twitching rabbit, his menswear piled around him, hanging from doors, shelves, lamp-fittings. He was born in Vilna in 1907 and holds onto courtly ways, tending his customers six days a week and calling it “waiting on them.”

In a cavern opposite, half a million old books have been stuffed into shelves. Browsers finger romantic novels half a century old, longing perhaps for days when a trusting heroine could afford to wait. On old book covers, sweet, patient women gaze at heroes in white tie and tails, at boas and feathered hats in the untroubled distance.

There is a tiny theater on the corner too, in which a ‘30s-and-’40s review is to open. “Club Indigo Memories in Blue”: its poster matching those moments captured on novelette jackets in the quiet bookstore.

The theater is another throwback to that more innocent past. Performers with other lives hurry to rehearse after work. Dancers paint scenery, scrounge lumber, sell tickets, invent costumes, learn songs and routines with unflagging zest, a zest we once called “amateur”--those who perform for free, who give wholeheartedly.

The owners of the Golden Theatre met in a high school show. Gregg Scott Young is both choreographer and director who, as a boy, had neither dancing nor acting lessons. Theater was not in his family’s vocabulary. His father managed a graveyard shift at Safeway, his mother worked in Wrigley’s gum factory--what strange chance brought this earnest, pale man to broad dinner theater, dreaming of Art in his 99-seat house, reaching out to Fats Waller, Cole Porter and Gershwin behind a Burbank shop front?

The cast: Joe, selling restaurant ads, had a starring role in the last production, “Noises Off,” and wanders about the place with the slightly pudgy satisfaction of a man who has been close to Dramalogue nominees. Elizabeth, married, tall, colorless and round-shouldered--she emerges in dance as a snake would from an old skin, fluid, graceful, luminous.

Carl, co-owner of the Golden Theatre and chorus boy, has each complicated step down pat: the school captain eager to set a good example. Vernon, in bright red sweats and baseball cap, falling over himself in the few feet of stage allotted, to shine, to surpass. Plain faces, reworked ones, too-small bodies or a mite plump--finding on this valley stage a chance to be reborn, to recreate a joy.

There are many who cannot resist the call of these eager faces, the unexpected thrill of performers who give everything (and occasionally too much). Stalwarts turn out for all Golden productions: “West Side Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “Working,” whatever. They sip refreshments in the lobby and know not to hog the velvet love seat, or to lean on the tables that do not match or to drop crumbs on the bits of carpet and vinyl so carefully and energetically cleaned. The shabby, touching hodgepodge that is small theater: on a shoestring, desperate to please, no effort too much and always personal.

Innocence from another time? Listen, for a moment, to those old songs we think we know so well--standards of a black-tie Fred Astaire era, of elegance and light carelessness. And remember: days of Depression, of segregation, of hunger and war. Ah, innocence revisited: an illusion in the air, just more candles in the dark.