Trading Gnu for the New : Stage: Theater director is ready for a different challenge. He’s going to produce movies.

Jeff Seymour, despite appearances, isn’t always calm and controlled. The director recalls one problem-plagued preview of David Mamet’s “A Life in the Theatre” when the challenge of orchestrating 26 scene and costume changes left him rocking in a fetal position on the patio behind his Gnu Theatre, trying to figure out why he wanted to do the show in the first place. “I made a mistake, I made a mistake,” he remembers muttering to himself.

Somehow, Seymour pulled the production out of the fire and now considers it the most satisfying of the 19 shows he staged at the North Hollywood theater. He said the crack in his demeanor at the preview was only a sign of “metal being forged,” his description of gaining strength under pressure.

Whether the metal is strong enough to withstand movie making is another matter, but he’ll get his test soon enough. Seymour, one of the city’s most prolific directors and an important force in the San Fernando Valley’s cultural life, is hanging up his hat--or some of his hats--for the time being. After running the Gnu Theatre for seven years, directing every show, designing and building every set, understudying countless parts, taking reservations, vacuuming the carpet before performances, greeting the audiences and winning awards and a loyal following to boot, the 34-year-old Seymour is turning over his theater-related responsibilities to others.

Seymour is producing a screenplay he co-wrote with Ken Berris, a commercial director. Within a few weeks, he hopes to have a star in hand and the money in place. He predicts that the cameras will roll in May. The script is based on “Brothers,” a play by George Sibbald, that Seymour directed at the Gnu Theatre several years ago. The movie, budgeted at less than $3 million, is the first of several he intends to produce with his two partners, Berris and Frank Murray, managing director of the Duval Group, an investment banking company. Berris will direct the feature.

“We’re raising the money ourselves,” Seymour said. “Several studios expressed an interest but they just wanted to buy the script flat out. . . . We want to do what everyone wants to do when they make a film. We want to retain control.”

Seymour insists that he’s not abandoning the Gnu Theatre. He keeps the title artistic director and will co-produce all future productions. “Nothing will go on without my OK,” he said. “I don’t want this place to become just a rental house. I’d close it before that would happen.”

Others will submit plays they want to produce and Seymour will choose. The first project in the post-Seymour era has already been set: Several one-act plays will be directed by Daniel Rojo. “He’s been a friend for about 12 years,” Seymour said. “I trust him.”

Seymour also will continue teaching his four three-hour acting courses at the theater. “Teaching isn’t an encumbrance,” he said. “It’s how I kept the theater alive, really. It’s also a way to make a living. And I enjoy it. I come from a family of teachers and I never want to stop teaching.”

As for directing and designing, Seymour will let others fill the bill. “It’s just time. Seven years. Nineteen shows. I don’t know what else I can do.” But no, it’s not a case of burnout, Seymour added in an interview on the set of “The Speed of Darkness,” his last production.

“I love everything about this job. . . . The challenge of building a snow machine as I had to do for this last show or making it rain in ‘American Buffalo’ or creating an earthquake for ‘El Salvador’ or taking a new piece, a world premiere, and finding a way to make it work. . . . I adore it. But after being completely inundated, I just want to do something different, something I don’t know nearly as much about.”

After what he hopes will be a successful foray into film, Seymour said he will return to directing plays. “I have a dream about opening a 300- to 500-seat house with a conservatory in Los Angeles. It would have a restaurant and bar and production offices for the film company. That would be my dream. Who knows if it will happen?”

But, then again, who besides Seymour, a transplant from Virginia, would have known that the Gnu Theatre would happen?

Seymour, a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Pasadena, started out as an actor and still considers himself a good one. He scored with a wide range of ethnic characters on shows such as “Hill Street Blues” and “Knots Landing” in the early 1980s. But after some initial success, the ethnic look was out, the blue-eyed blond was in and, Seymour said, his acting career sputtered.

In the meantime, Seymour taught acting classes in his living room and put together a weekend theater at the Briarwood School, a private preschool on Riverside Drive, with portable risers and makeshift sets. “The only problem, and this was a great source of amusement for our patrons, were these little toilets for the kids. And the sinks were really low, you had to lean way over to use them.”

In 1982, after a season of plays, school officials gave Seymour and his Gnu Theatre the boot. “That’s when I decided big was better,” he said. Seymour rented a 15,000-square-foot office building on Burbank Boulevard between Vineland Avenue and Cahuenga Boulevard to convert into a performing arts center. “I designed this multi-theater, multi-dance studio and tried to raise $600,000. I ended up losing $40,000 of my own.”

Asked how he could afford to lose that much money, Seymour replied: “I can’t. I was dead. I hocked a family heirloom. I did everything I could to keep going. In hindsight, it was a dumb thing to try to do, but I learned a lot about the business.”

In 1984, Seymour drove around the Valley, looking for another space for his Gnu Theatre--so named after the African antelope when a friend suggested the title and Seymour thought it was “catchy.”

Seymour came across a deli and liquor store for lease on Magnolia Boulevard and after looking the place over, he rejected it as inadequate. When he later found out that in addition to the deli, he could lease the house next door, Seymour decided to stake his claim. The garage would be turned into a dressing room, the back yard would be used for set storage, and the space between the house and the theater would be converted into a patio green room. With a carpenter friend, Doug Honkala, Seymour spent 2 1/2 months rebuilding the deli into a 49-seat theater.

On opening night, 15 minutes before curtain, he was still painting a set of abandoned theater chairs he had found. Other seats that had dried in time were bolted down and Seymour rushed into his house with paint thinner to try to remove splotches of “industrial gray” from his hair before he took stage. He was acting in his own first production. Somehow, he managed to put the show in motion for the 20-member audience only a few minutes late.

In the seven years since, he has pulled off a number of theatrical coups, producing the world premieres of John Ford Noonan’s “Spanish Confusion” and John Patrick Shanley’s “Italian American Reconciliation.”

But his biggest claim to fame occurred with a one-two punch for the 1988-89 season with “El Salvador,” which won four Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards for best production, best direction by Seymour, writing by Rafael Lima and performance by James Morrison. This was followed with a highly acclaimed production of David Mamet’s “American Buffalo,” which proved to be the theater’s biggest commercial success, selling out its 12-week run.

The success had a way of generating its own momentum. Joe Spano, formerly of “Hill Street Blues,” said he was so impressed with “El Salvador” that he agreed to work with Seymour on “American Buffalo.” Playwright Barbara Bishop was so taken with “American Buffalo” that she lobbied Seymour to produce her play “Siblings” as his next production.

The shows were attracting the area’s top drama critics and the sort of attention Equity-waiver productions generally do not receive. All this will be topped off Monday at the Pasadena Playhouse when Drama-Logue magazine awards Seymour its 1991 Publisher’s Award for his body of work at the Gnu Theatre and his “painstaking commitment to excellence in every detail.”

This ascent, however, has by no means been smooth. During “American Buffalo,” his personal and working relationship with Elizabeth Reilly started to unravel. Reilly, who was listed as managing director and provided costumes and set decorations for the Gnu productions, filed suit in Los Angeles Superior Court, accusing Seymour of deceit and mismanagement in running the theater. She also contended that Seymour reneged on his pledge that they would be partners. Seymour denied all charges in a brief filed in Superior Court. The case is still pending.

At about the same time, Seymour was locked in a legal battle with the Dramatists Play Service and John Gottlieb, a producer at the Burbank Theatre Guild, over the rights to produce Lee Blessing’s “Independence.”

Gottlieb contended that he had exclusive rights to the play. Seymour disputed this and rehearsals for both productions proceeded for a time. The Dramatists Play Service was caught in the middle and reversed itself several times. In the end, Gottlieb won a court injunction halting the Gnu production only days before the show’s opening. The play was finally staged at the Gnu Theatre nine months later.

“Yeah, it was a very tough year--are you kidding?” Seymour said of his legal disputes with Gottlieb and Reilly. “It taught me a lot, though.” Going back to a favorite analogy, Seymour added, “I look at it like metal being forged. You just have to be strong. This business is fraught with stuff like this. If you want to play, you pay. It’s part of it.”

If these and other pressures ever got to him, his colleagues say Seymour never let it show. Actor Leo Rossi recalls that there were blowups among the high-powered cast of “Italian American Reconciliation.” “But Jeff handled it like a gentleman. He never raises his voice, he never loses his composure. It’s almost scary,” Rossi said.

“There are no mood swings,” said Spano, who won a Drama Critics Circle Award for his role in “American Buffalo.” “There’s always a crisis, especially in tech week where there’s too much to do and not enough time. But at rehearsal, he’s calm. Amazingly calm.”

Moreover, Spano said, Seymour has the ability to truly collaborate with actors. And from directing actors to building sets to cleaning the carpet, “he gives himself so totally that you have to admire him. You have to give credit and credence to anyone who puts that much energy and effort into something.”

Writers, such as Bishop, give Seymour high marks as well. She said her play “Siblings” grew up with Seymour’s production. “He has a very clear idea of what aspects of the play would appeal to the public. Sometimes that meant I had to get my personal catharsis out of the way. . . . But I trusted Jeff to make at least interesting choices if the choices weren’t my own. And that’s what Jeff did. I was very happy with it.”

Whatever Seymour did, he did it with very little money. Not counting the rent, Seymour said he spent an average of $3,500 per show. “He builds the best sets as cheaply as can be done. This guy can recycle anything,” said actor Bobby Costanzo. Seymour also saves by performing multiple functions in a production, including set and sound design. “It’s such small potatoes how much money actually goes through here,” he said.

Though limited budgets, legal battles and the constant demands of doing one show after another can be daunting, Seymour nearly jumped out of his seat when asked if he ever thought of giving up. “Never,” he said. “Anyone can give up. For me, it’s never a consideration. When I can’t lift my hands anymore, when I fall to the ground with no energy, then maybe I’ll give up. Maybe. But you can always come up with another option. You have to keep happy and lucid, and you have to figure it out.”