Going Uptown : New Era Is at Hand for the Bowery, Which Begins Its 10th Year With a Name Change

Now is a bittersweet moment to those who have followed the wild artistic trajectory of the Bowery Theatre, the theater that started its rough-and-tumble life in 1982 in the 99-seat basement of the crumbling (and since demolished) New Palace Hotel at 480 Elm St.

On the eve of the Bowery’s 10th anniversary season, it will become the much more respectable-sounding Blackfriars Theatre.

The change is official with the opening of the company’s San Diego premiere of Beth Henley’s “Abundance” on Sunday.

Blackfriars will reside in the elegant, 78-seat Bristol Court Playhouse of the Bristol Court Hotel (just renamed from the Kingston Playhouse and the Kingston Hotel after a change in ownership).

It’s a tale of something lost and much gained.

What has been gained is as significant as survival. Expelled from the New Palace Hotel for a redevelopment project in November of 1988, the Bowery was at risk of extinction. The company’s founder, Kim McCallum, had resigned his leadership in May of 1988, and the team of Mickey Mullany, business director; Ralph Elias, artistic director, and Allison Brennan, development director and Elias’ wife, kept the theater’s name alive while they scouted for a new home.

That home, which they built out of a storefront owned by what was then called the Kingston Hotel, became the Kingston Playhouse.

What has been gained, too, is professionalism. Under Elias, who is an Equity actor along with his wife, the Bowery became an Equity theater in 1989--one of the smallest companies to ever do so.

And yet there is something lost as well--a quality as gritty and earthy as the name, Bowery, implied. There was something about walking through the mean streets of 5th and Elm, down the steps of the dingy hotel, into the basement where the players had to work around the pillars to perform. The tensions from the street outside the theater seemed to turn up the voltage on the stage.

But, as in “Abundance,” a play about mail-order brides venturing out to the American frontier in the 1800s, the theater is exploring and testing and questioning itself. Does the name Blackfriars signify a change in direction? Is “Abundance” in any way a departure from the shows they used to do?

Elias, Mullany and Brennan all say no. “Abundance,” they agree, is definitely a Bowery show. And they couldn’t be more intimately involved with the project: Elias is directing, Brennan is starring and Mullany is producing.

“They say if a gun is fired, it’s a Bowery show,” Mullany said with a laugh as he sat on the stage of the theater next to Elias and Brennan. The tradition, she explained, goes back to the Bowery’s biggest hit in the McCallum days--”When You Comin’ Back, Red Ryder?” A gun, pointed at patrons in a diner by an angry man (played by McCallum), was the driving force in the show.

“I read the review and said this (“Abundance”) is a Bowery show,” Mullany said.

“I read the review, and said I want to do this show,” Brennan said.

“What a Bowery show is I don’t know,” Elias said. “But one of the things that made it attractive is that it’s about two women. I got a script and read it, and it had something in common with ‘Teibele and Her Demon’ (a popular and critical hit from the first season) and ‘Stories About the Old Days’ (a critical hit from last season that never found its audience). It’s a show about women and about a man and a woman.”

It’s also a story about venturing out and taking chances. In one sense, building a theater in a space where no theater previously existed is not unlike settling the West as the women in “Abundance” do.

Elias and Brennan say their understanding of the women settling the West is personal. Their own move from New York to San Diego in 1986 reflected a desire to explore new territory.

“We wanted to leave New York and come back to America. San Diego was a theater scene that was growing but not so totally developed that it was a closed scene,” Elias said.

“We came in our little covered wagon--my mother’s old Chevy. We came for opportunity. We crossed the desert. We chose San Diego so we could pose the question of whether we could continue as theater actors,” Brennan said.

Both performed widely in town, as had Mullany, before coming to the Bowery.

One element Blackfriars shares with the Bowery of old is living close to the financial edge. Struggles continue as the theater juggles what Elias describes as “a small manageable debt that averages $10,000.”

The debt situation has been better. It’s also been a lot worse.

When Elias took over the theater, he inherited a debt of about $20,000 with about half the company’s current assets, he said.

He knocked half of that out with the first show he directed for the Bowery, “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea”--a much-extended runaway hit by John Patrick Shanley, the writer of “Moonstruck.”

The Bowery Theatre later opened its first season at its new home auspiciously with a series of hits: “Italian-American Reconciliation,” “What the Butler Saw,” “Teibele and Her Demon.” The budget grew from $78,000 to $187,000 in fiscal 1989, and the troupe finished in the black.

The management at the Kingston Hotel signed a three-year rent-free lease with the troupe in 1989. Lee Julien, then general manager of the hotel, found the association profitable. The theater increased hotel dining business and was an attraction to hotel guests. Dan Campbell, the new general manager of the Bristol Court, said last week that he plans to continue the arrangement and even “enhance it.”

But that lease didn’t guarantee financial security. In 1990, the lead actor in “Jesse and the Bandit Queen” was injured, and the company shut down for two weeks. The Bowery lost about $7,000 and began a downward financial slide that continued with a Community Collaborations project of “I Am Celso,” and the first production of the next season, “The Glass Menagerie.” The debt peaked at $38,000 and forced a reshuffling of the season and the staging of an original production, “Laughing Buddha Wholistik Radio Theatre,” as a fund-raiser.

Space was sold during the wacky radio format to anyone who wanted to deliver a personal message during the show. Space was sold on the wall of the theater for people to write on. Buttons were sold, tapes--anything that anyone wanted to buy.

It was such a success that the troupe plans to bring back a new installment, “More of the Laughing Buddha Wholistik Radio Theatre” in early December and running through Jan. 5.

“Laughing Buddha” follows “Abundance.” The company’s four-play season continues with the Southern California premiere of “The Puppetmaster of Lodz,” a show about a Holocaust survivor who communicates through his puppets. The show had been postponed from last season because of the company’s financial difficulties and will now open in early February. Elias will direct. The season concludes with “Stage Struck,” opening in late April. Mullany will direct.

Mullany will also leave the staff of the theater after producing “Abundance.” Her leaving may usher in yet another era for the company. For it was Mullany, more than anyone else, who kept the company alive during its darkest hours. It was she who gave McCallum the emotional license to leave and concentrate on the job he had been working toward since 1985 and since obtained: that of artistic director of the American Southwest Theatre Company in Las Cruces, N.M.

It was she who kept the severity of the financial situation from Elias, who was first hired as a free-lance director in 1988, at her recommendation.

“The financial situation was so bad she didn’t tell me how bad it was,” he said referring to Mullany.

Elias’ first paycheck came from Mullany’s savings account--though he didn’t know it at the time.

“I considered it an investment,” Mullany said. “There are very few actor-owned companies.”

But for Mullany, the investment hasn’t brought her everything she wanted. As an actress and director, she found producing took too much time from the artistic end of the theater.

“There have been a lot of challenges, a lot of stresses and strain. There has been a sense of why am I doing this. I’m interested in poking my head out and seeing what else is out there,” she said.

In the meantime, Blackfriars will continue at the Bristol Court Playhouse. It will try to maintain its reputation as one of the finest of San Diego’s small theaters. It will try to reach new audiences--which Elias said is one of the reasons for the name change. Blackfriars was the name of the playhouse to which Shakespeare’s company moved in 1608 after years at the Globe Theatre.

Not a bad mental association when one considers that the most popular theater in town is the Old Globe.

But most importantly, it will try to survive--no mean feat at a time when most theaters seem constantly beset by recessionary winds. And to survive without compromise.

“The goal that has been there all along is to do good work--to do significant good work,” Elias said. “Survival is an ongoing consideration. Last year, we were under such survival pressures, compromises were made. But I made a real resolution five to six months ago not to back into any artistic or organizational decisions.

“Last year ‘Speed the Plow’ (which did a little better than break even) was my third choice, and I sidled into the decision to do it. Then I put myself in a compromised decision by being in it.

“I feel really good about ‘Abundance’ because it deals with what we’ve always been interested in--the myth of the West. The minute I read it, I knew I wanted to do it.”