Dessert Gets Equal Billing on Theater-Eatery Circuit

Have a piece of theater with your coffee?

Increasingly, that is the question being asked at San Diego’s coffee houses and restaurants. Though dinner theater may be on the decline--with the notable exceptions of the Mystery Cafe at the Imperial House restaurant, the Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre in Escondido and the Pine Hills Dinner Theatre in Julian--dessert theater seems to be on the rise here.

It’s a marriage made in munchie heaven.

For the eateries, the plays bring in new patrons, sometimes during off-hours, and help build a reputation for supporting artists. And for the playwrights and performers, places like the Big Kitchen, the North Park Coffee Company and, now, Croce’s Top Hat Bar & Grille, provide a low cost--if not free--place to try out their work and be seen.

Croce’s Top Hat Bar & Grille, the largest of the spaces with 200 seats, will be the site at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Saturday for Cathryn Pisarski’s “Afternoon-Beforenight,” a story about three women talking over salsa and chips in a restaurant. The effort is part of ArtWalk.

“Croce’s is about helping artists to get started and to have people listen to them,” said Ingrid Croce, who owns Croce’s Top Hat Bar & Grille and who wants theater people to check out the downtown spot as a location to do other pieces, too. “I think that it would be wonderful to offer the Top Hat stage Saturdays and Sundays during the day.” Pisarski’s piece, which will be free, got its first airing in February at the North Park Coffee Company, which has been presenting short theater pieces for about a year. This weekend there, you can catch a new one-act about two homeless people called “Ben and Martha” by local playwright Carl Borkowski. The show, which is also free, runs Friday and Saturday from 8-9 p.m. and again May 17-18 and May 24-25 at the same times.

The North Park Coffee Company has provided Borkowski with his first opportunity to get produced. The space is small--accommodating a maximum of 33--but Borkowski has already had the satisfaction of having people sit on the steps just to hear a brand-new work by a brand-new writer.

“It’s a perfect venue because it’s free,” Borkowski said. “It’s so difficult to get something put on without any money. And it gets us out there so that we’re seen.”

Jan Markiewicz, a co-owner of the North Park Coffee Company, said art has proved good for business, too.

“North Park is really dead at night,” Markiewicz said. “And, for a coffee house, we had very little business in the evening. When Cathryn (Pisarski) approached us last year, we were willing to try it out, and we got a great response. This last week with “Ben and Martha” we had a full house both nights.”

But the restaurant with the most established reputation for presenting short, quality theater now is the 30-seat space in the Big Kitchen in Golden Hill, where for two years John Highkin’s Project Theater has produced works by the likes of Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee, David Mamet and Vaclav Havel. The emphasis at the Big Kitchen is not on new work but on one-acts by known writers performed by professional (Equity) actors.

Havel’s “Audience,” a semi-autobiographical story about the Czechoslovak dissident playwright (now president) just finished a run at the Big Kitchen, but Highkin said it is very likely that the show, which has been packing in patrons for play and pie these last few weeks, will return after a short hiatus.

Highkin said he and the Project Theater actors first saw the Big Kitchen venue, which Highkin has frequented as a customer and sometimes chef, as an opportunity to do work that they couldn’t do elsewhere. The process, to their surprise and delight, has had unforeseen rewards, leading to jobs at other theaters for most of the artists involved.

“It allows all of us greater say over what we choose to do,” Highkin said of his work at the Big Kitchen. “It allows us a measure of independence over the pressures of getting other people to hire us. And it’s gotten me some reputation, where I had absolutely none before. It has been instrumental in my being able to work and grow as a producer.”

A reader called to ask if the Southeast Community Theatre had the legal right to integrate Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” with “Comments . . . (On: For Colored Girls . . .)” by Aiodun Oyewole. The dual-play show is at the Lyceum Space through May 25. According to the production’s director, Floyd Gaffney, the Southeast Community Theatre obtained royalty rights from both playwrights to present the plays and also, because of the unusual circumstances, obtained the rights from Oyewole specifically to use just fragments of his play (an equivalent of two pages from his work’s original 60 pages). But, although Shange’s play is used intact, no special permission was requested from the playwright to inject Oyewole’s work into her script. As it turns out, the results of the mix drew criticism, and Gaffney is reworking the show somewhat.

PROGRAM NOTES: The San Diego Actors Theatre presents the San Diego premiere of Michael Cristofer’s “The Lady and the Clarinet” May 31-June 30 at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s small space on 547 4th Ave. . . .

The $5 per ticket San Diego Theatre League Sneak Preview series continues with the first performance of A.R. Gurney’s “The Snow Ball,” at the Old Globe Theatre on May 2 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the Times Arts Tix, Horton Plaza Park, Tuesday-Saturday from 10 a.m.-7 p.m. . . .

And baby saves $2: Any patron who brings a picture of his or her baby will save $2 off the general admission ticket price for the Sweetooth Comedy Theatre production of Christopher Durang’s “Baby With the Bathwater.” The show runs May 3-June 8 at Sweetooth’s new home, the Maryland Hotel at 630 F St., San Diego. . . .

The third annual San Diego International Children’s Festival, featuring storytellers, puppets, musicians, comedy and bubbles galore will run through Sunday at Mission Bay at Mariner’s Point, directly across from the Bahia Resort Hotel. Call 234-5002 for more information. . . .

The Park Dale Players, an Encinitas-based group now in its sixth year, will be making its downtown debut Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Lyceum Theatre with “Video Victim,” a story about a boy addicted to video games. It will also be performed at the Poway Center for the Performing Arts May 5 at 2 p.m. and at the Moonlight Amphitheatre May 19 at 2 p.m. . . .

CRITIC’S CHOICE: ALIEN MOON RISING AT NEOFEST

And now for something completely different--which is how one can describe most of Sushi Performance Gallery’s Neofest offerings. Dancenoise, Mimi Goese and Tom Murrin will assault patrons with their own unusual brand of humor in “The Full Moon Show” at Sushi Performance Gallery Thursday-Saturday. Murrin, known as The Alien Comic, will perform “a Salute to Luna Macaroona,” a fast-talking, constantly moving piece in which he metamorphoses himself through costuming H with garbage as he talks. Dancenoise, a two-woman group of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton, will present “When Women Had Tails” and Goese, who has been described as a chameleon of the grotesque, will do “Bombardment,” which touches on everything from Pinocchio to mass murder.