STAGE : No Big Production : With ‘Parlor Performances,’ Jeannine Frank brings together performers and audiences on a suitably intimate scale

“Parlor Performances” may not be the best name for what Jeannine Frank has been bringing to private homes and art galleries throughout Los Angeles for the past year or so, evoking as it does the image of polite, blue-haired ladies stoutly clutching their teacups under the wrenchingly dissonant onslaught of amateur musicales. But her program may be an idea whose time has come.

Commercialism and numbers crunching have gained such a lock on the art and entertainment scene that a lot of audiences are gasping for air in search of the fresh point of view, the felt experience, the unprogrammed human touch. It’s as though the mass media have created another level of need for escape, not into exorbitant fantasy, but into truth-telling. That, at least, is what fueled the growth of stand-up comedy through the mid-’80s, and more recently, rap music, storytelling and free-for-all poetry fests.

Enter Parlor Performances, an instinctively fin de siecle way of starting all over again.

“I used to go to all the comedy clubs,” said Frank, a wiry, intense woman of 42 with short dark hair, a bright smile and feverishly alert brown eyes. “In fact, I was in the Off The Wall comedy improv group--Robin Williams once played my husband in a sketch. I saw David Letterman and Richard Lewis when they were starting out.

“But like everything else in the past 30 years, we’ve found our idealistic lives can no longer sustain us. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’d never go to clubs like the Improv now. I hate to be forced to drink, I don’t smoke, and there’s no depth or enrichment to the performers. I’m sure that reflects what’s been happening to us over the past 30 years. Everything’s a business, or becomes business.”

The performers who come to Frank’s programs are decidedly un-businesslike and have included Dale Gonyea (who’s offered his own small contribution to the lexicon of modern psychology in his discourse on “pianist envy”); the witty songwriter and performer Dave Frishberg, who wrote “My Attorney Bernie” and “I Can’t Take You Nowhere” (“You knock back the schnapps / You talk back to cops / You walk in the room and conversation stops”); and political satirist Paul Krassner.

Composer-lyricist Allan Chapman played his song about super-agent Mike Ovitz taking on God as a client and warning, “If you ever leave me, you’ll never work in this universe again.”

Comedienne Emily Levine, who’s spent the past couple of years developing a routine called “Chaos, Paradox, Dark Matter . . . the cosmological girl,” is a periodic regular. Levine’s billing carries this tag: “Village Voice calls her ‘brilliant,’ the Times calls her ‘a stand-out as a stand-up’ and her mother calls her every week.”

Laurel Olstein recently performed her program on Dorothy Parker called “Laughter, Hope and a Sock in the Eye,” as did Susan Van Allen in her and David Ford’s sendup of “Jersey Girls,” who sound quite a bit like the Long Island bimbettes who primped in the movie “GoodFellas.”

Parlor Performances seems a natural enterprise for someone of Frank’s high energies--to round up audiences for a recent weekend with Berkeley monologuist Josh Kornbluth, she personally dropped off flyers in every law office in Century City’s twin towers--44 in all. But she came to the idea of parlor performances late, after picking up and dropping a number of other career options that took her through the academic world and show biz.

“I grew up in Silver Lake and thought I’d be a teacher. I went to UCLA and actually have a teaching credential,” she says. “I lasted one day. My student teacher supervisor was a Nazi who gave me a B when I deserved an A. It was a personality conflict. Just my luck. There are 12,000 other teachers in Los Angeles who didn’t have this trouble. I went to work as a researcher at UCLA for a marijuana study and a geriatric project. Then I was a paralegal person. I tried photography, which I still do--bar mitzvahs and weddings, that sort of thing. I enrolled in the Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop and tried my hand at specialty songwriting in comedy.”

Frank’s first crack at hosting a performance party came after a woman had invited Frank’s brother, who is a folk singer, to perform at a private gathering. There was one small problem--the woman didn’t have a piano. Frank did. The party moved to her place and the idea was born. Comedienne Lotus Weinstock was Frank’s next guest, then Emily Levine, and then the phone started ringing. This was in January, 1990.

“I started getting calls, eight or 10 a week, from all over the country and Canada,” Frank continued. “The presentations outgrew my apartment. So people in the audience would come up and say, ‘I’ve got a big house you could use,’ and I did. We’ve gone to as many as 30 homes around the city. I really make sure the performer has a full house, even if I have to give comps. I like to feel that for every performance I put in the best effort I can. I’ve had some atrocious submissions. One of the hardest things is turning down someone who’s made a great effort. But I want to love my shows. If I don’t, what’s the point?”

There have been the usual oddball candidates. Palmists. Hand-writing analysts. An ex-convict wanted her to hire an insult comedian and book a house of 200 so that a woman who had pressed charges against him could be invited and humiliated in public. Occasionally she’ll answer a request for a dinner date at the end of which, instead of being asked out again or even suffering the dubious acknowledgment of an indecent proposal, she’ll see her companion whip out a videocassette of his performance.

Frank doesn’t always get who she wants either, but she works at it. She’s booked political satirist Darryl Henriques, but she keenly missed having his brother along. “He’s the world’s greatest bubble-blower. He blows bubbles you wouldn’t believe. I was going to do them both, but he got called to Japan to do a theme park.”

Currently she’s pondering a balloon sculptor she thinks she’s heard much about. “If he’s the one I’m thinking he is, he’s very avant-garde and very good. Or he may just be another balloon act. I’ll have to see.”

Once Frank sets her cap on a certain artist, she does everything she can do to make the performance event a family affair. “I try to get the right audience and the right venue. People do get to know each other. I know of a couple who met through Parlor Performances and went off to Bali together. It’s important to me that everyone has a good time in an intimate setting--that’s why I serve coffee and cake afterward. A lot of times everyone will troop out the door and I’ll be there late at night, rearranging furniture or sweeping the floor.”

Frank has had her share of disappointment, but experience has sharpened her critical eye. “You’ll see someone do a warm and wonderful act and you’ll think that’s the way they must be in their everyday lives. It’s been a shock to discover that that’s not always true. Usually the people who are understated in their approach, who say, ‘I think you might find this interesting,’ will turn out to be exceptional. The people who come up and tell you how wonderful they are--those are the ones you look out for.”

Nobody received the full Frank treatment more than monologuist Kornbluth, whom Frank tracked down in Berkeley and invited to Los Angeles, where he gave three sold-out performances. Except that, by his own description, Kornbluth grew up as “a Jewish atheist communist kid,” he could almost pass as a contemporary Robert Benchley, someone who affects normality while preposterous things happen to and around him. For example, he majored in oboe at Princeton University only because he was set upon by muggers who stole his violin, and he reluctantly left a career in journalism after discovering a pathological inability to meet deadlines--he failed at every one assigned him.

“I’m so excited to be in Los Angeles,” he said. “I can feel such a potential for ennui, and I’ve so enjoyed hating the Dodgers and the Lakers. But I’m prepared to sell out. I want to be seen sitting next to Dyan Cannon at the Forum.”

Not only did Frank arrange for Kornbluth to come to Los Angeles, she chauffeured him around, booked full houses for him, and invited (and got) press reviews. At a late lunch, after she had made her Century City run, Kornbluth sat next to her munching on a sandwich while she gave an interview. He peered over at her plate and said, “Can I have that olive?”

“This is absolutely the last thing I’m doing for you,” she said, dropping it on his plate.

She had hoped to book him again in January, but his career is gathering steam now and he’s playing The Second Stage in New York instead. This has left Frank feeling an unexpected vulnerability that begins with the question: Should an effort like this entitle her to some form of remuneration, or a producer’s credit down the line (as sometimes happens, for example, in the theater when original productions move into commercial venues). She says she telephoned Kornbluth’s manager, who discouraged any claim on her part. “And I was really saving that olive for myself,” she laments.

“I have no overhead, but I don’t have equity or a bond either. I don’t know if I can be seen as an illegal operation. I haven’t talked to a lawyer. People say I should incorporate as nonprofit. But I haven’t looked into that yet. I haven’t even applied for a grant. The way it works now, I split the door with the performer (tickets range from $10 to $20) and I pay expenses and PR. There isn’t much left over. I’d like to be able to do advertising, or even put out a newsletter.”

In the meantime, she scours the city looking for new talent and earning good reviews of her own from the people she’s presented.

“There was a long period of time when I didn’t want to perform anymore,” says Emily Levine, who is one of the pioneers of contemporary women’s stand-up in America and has been a successful screenwriter and producer for more than 15 years.

“When I knew I was going to do my program at the Tiffany Theater earlier this year, I thought I’d use the Parlor Performance as a warm-up. Three days before I was scheduled to appear, the war in Iraq broke out. I felt very depressed. But to be there, with people sitting on sofas and chairs instead of in tiers, felt much more convivial and inviting. I could say what was on my mind in an atmosphere that was much more intimate. As it turned out, I wound up not liking the theater as much.

“The club scene has become too much about domination--you’re raised up on a stage and the lights prevent you from seeing anyone beyond the first couple of rows. The highest compliment for a comedian now is not to say that he or she was funny, but that he took charge of the audience. With the Parlor Performances, it’s not just about you. People come alone, or in couples or small groups. They talk to you. Sometimes they talk about each other. It’s a communal feeling. That’s what theater used to be, before the idea of community was broken up into target audiences.”

Of Frank, Levine says: “She knows a huge amount of people from all through her life and has kept that network going. I don’t want to make her sound like a Jewish mother, but she has a quality of generosity and hostess-ness, and she insists on a high level of performance.”

Levine also thinks that it may be time for Frank to think seriously of putting Parlor Performances on a more secure organizational footing. “She’s concerned about not assuming ownership over the performer, or of assuming proprietary rights. That’s a wonderful thing. But I think there should be a way where she could do more for herself.”

It may be that, despite Frank’s philosophic disclaimer, her enterprise will have to become a business after all. “The thing that thrills me most is going out there and finding people no one knows,” she said. In the meantime, she and Parlor Performances are enjoying the rarest of pleasures in the modern entertainment world--a true age of innocence.