Nomadic Playhouse Hoping for a Final Set Change : Theater: After 28 years, the Huntington group may land a permanent home as part of expansion plans for the library.

On Ron Hayden’s first visit to the Huntington Beach Playhouse, he needed a map to plot his route through quiet residential streets and darkened corridors of a closed elementary school leading to the tiny, makeshift theater.

“The second time I went, I didn’t have a map, and I got lost,” Hayden said. “I got in two minutes before they closed the doors.”

Since the playhouse was founded 28 years ago, it has led a nomadic existence, squatting for stints in a high-school band room, a hotel dining room, an empty shopping-center store and a barn. Its latest shelter, the former site of Ernest H. Gisler Middle School, is not only transitory, but also sequestered amid a housing tract.

After years of foiled attempts to establish a permanent theater in downtown Huntington Beach, Phil de Barros, president of the playhouse’s board of directors, last fall suggested to Hayden that it be situated in a new wing of the Huntington Beach Central Library.

Hayden, as Huntington Beach’s library director, liked the idea and has been working with de Barros on plans to move the nonprofit community theater to a permanent home in a prime location, as part of the library’s expansion.

For de Barros, who has been affiliated with the Huntington Beach Playhouse since he first appeared on its stage in 1967, the opportunity makes this “perhaps the most critical time in the history of the playhouse.” He has been lobbying the City Council to redraw plans for the library expansion’s second phase so that a proposed auditorium also will include theatrical facilities. The council is scheduled to take up the issue later this month.

Although funding for the project has yet to be established, Hayden said he’s hopeful that, barring bureaucratic snags, the plans will be approved. He also said that construction could begin as soon as this fall.

Huntington Beach Mayor Peter M. Green said that the City Council is determined to turn the playhouse plans into a reality.

“The Huntington Beach Playhouse has done so much for this city for so long, the city almost owes it to them to give them a facility where they can exercise their talents,” Green said this week.

Along with providing a permanent, more accessible home, a move to the library would offer a host of advantages for the playhouse.

It would more than double the current facility’s seating capacity from 150--including standing room--to 320. The library, on Talbert Avenue near Golden West Street, also offers more parking and is one of Orange County’s busiest libraries, attracting about 3,000 visitors a day, Hayden said. Those visitors, among them many college students and art-minded residents, could provide new theater audiences, Hayden says.

A new theater in a multimillion-dollar library expansion “would be a much better atmosphere than a school that’s closed,” deadpanned Bill Verhaegen, the playhouse’s business manager and a member of its board of directors.

The playhouse moved about four years ago into the Gisler Middle School site, at the end of Strathmoor Lane, remotely distanced from Atlanta Avenue and Brookhurst Street. That was shortly after the Huntington Beach City School District closed the school in June, 1986, due to declining enrollment. Volunteers revamped the school’s auditorium into a cramped theater and lobby.

“We’re not much for decor here,” de Barros said. Given the little space to work with, the lobby doubles as the playhouse’s set construction area.

Founded in 1963 by local theater enthusiasts Bill and Helen Susman and Bobbi Murphy, the Huntington Beach Playhouse opened with a production of “Harvey” in the Huntington Beach High School music room. Workers had to tear down sets after each performance and could not affix anything to the walls, recalled Helen Susman, who, along with her husband, lives in Costa Mesa and still avidly supports the playhouse.

Occasionally, the high-school band needed the music room on performance nights, “so we’d go anyplace we could get,” said Murphy, now 88, who has lived in Mission Hills since leaving Huntington Beach, and the playhouse, in 1973.

Within a few months, the Huntington Beach Co., the city’s largest landowner, offered the playhouse use of a barn it owned at rent of $1 a year.

“It was an actual barn,” Murphy said during a recent telephone interview. “It had a bunch of hay in it. And a white owl lived there. Pigeons lived there, too--and they didn’t mind their manners, so we cleaned up.”

The place that came to be known simply as “The Barn” accommodated up to 120 patrons and was the Huntington Beach Playhouse’s home for the next 13 years, longer than it has stayed at any other location.

During the early days of The Barn, it had no restrooms.

“Our only facilities were down the hill,” Helen Susman said. “So on opening nights, you’d have a line of ladies in formal gowns waiting to go to the outhouse. It was quite a site.”

Said Murphy: “We had that place so long, we felt it belonged to us. But its time finally ran out in 1976, as the barn was demolished to make way for redevelopment.

The playhouse evolved into a dinner theater for a spell, staging performances in such venues as a former Hyatt House hotel in southeast Long Beach. In 1979, it moved into a vacant shop in the newly opened Seacliff Village shopping center near City Hall, where it stayed before moving to its current site in 1987.

While Redevelopment Agency proposals to build a performing arts center downtown proved futile, the school location has kept a roof over the playhouse for a relatively moderate price--about $5,000 for its five-show season.

But playhouse officials fear that, depending on the school district’s plans, the theater soon could be homeless again. The district has no immediate plans to sell or lease the site, “but those options are always there,” district spokeswoman Catherine Wheeler said.

Meanwhile, several obstacles still lie between the playhouse and a permanent home. The $5-million, first phase of the library expansion is approved and funded. But the next step in the project, including the proposed auditorium-theater, lacks funding at the moment.

In addition, changing the auditorium plans to accommodate a theater would add about $457,000 to the projected $1.5-million cost of the second phase, Hayden said. Nevertheless, he remains hopeful the new playhouse will be built within two years. He said he is confident the money can be garnered from public and private donations, including an intensive fund-raising campaign that de Barros said playhouse members would willingly launch.

Hayden also is hopeful that once the upfront costs are covered, the playhouse will make money and continue to grow.

“If they have a following now out in the boondocks, just imagine what it would be at a cultural center” in a heavily trafficked library, he said. “The support is really limitless.”

De Barros, meanwhile, said he is approaching the opportunity with “cautious optimism.”

“We’ve been here before,” he said. “But this looks better than it has in the past.”