Paul Verdier’s Stages at 10: Honors and a Celebration : Stage: After a decade, the director is hard put to explain his company’s survival and success. Next up--a festival of Quebec’s rising star, Rene-Daniel Dubois.

Eugene Ionesco, French master of that style of theater frequently labeled absurd , is nevertheless a practical man. When visiting Los Angeles in 1982 to check in on his friend and former student Paul Verdier, Ionesco was amazed to find that Verdier was giving the A-word new meaning.

His younger pupil was not only trying to get a small, experimental theater started in the middle of Hollywood, but also trying to fashion it out of a former apartment building and yoga center. Even the man who had imagined rhinos ruling the world in his play “Rhinoceros,” couldn’t see how Verdier could make a theater out of this.

“He looked around one of the rooms we were tearing down,” Verdier says, “and then he looked at me and said, ‘How the hell are you going to do this?’ ”

On the 10th anniversary of Verdier’s Stages Theatre Center, the Argentine-born, French-trained director-actor can laugh at Ionesco’s question, but still doesn’t quite know how to answer it. Just as he can’t quite explain how his theater, the recipient of the 1992 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Margaret Harford Award for sustained excellence in smaller theater, has lasted for 10 years.

By all rights, it shouldn’t have.

Slotted on an obscure block of McCadden Place between Sunset and Hollywood boulevards, Stages was founded by Verdier and his wife, Sonia Lloveras, with the mission to produce frankly literary playwrights from North and South America and Europe. More often than not, these were playwrights of whom Los Angeles audiences had probably never heard.

Verdier knows, for example, that while Quebec playwright Rene-Daniel Dubois is a rising star in Canadian theater, he is virtually unknown south of the border. (Dubois’ film adaptation of his play “Being at Home With Claude” is drawing sold-out crowds in Montreal and may be headed for the Cannes Film Festival.) So naturally, Stages is opening a Dubois festival next Tuesday to kick off its yearlong series “Voices of the Americas,” with a full staging by Verdier of “Claude” and Florinel Fatulescu’s staged reading of “Don’t Ever Blame the Bedouins.”

“He’s a very controversial figure in Canada,” Verdier said over the din of workers sprucing up the theater before the festival. Habitually pacing the floor of his sun-drenched office, Verdier spoke at length in sweeping sentences, his arms gesturing like pistons, his eyes bulging like an eagle swooping down on prey.

“Dubois,” he says, “defends Quebec culture passionately, unashamedly, against what he feels is the Anglicizing of his people. He came here last year. We walked along the beach, talked of our views of theater, and his passion was so strong, but nothing like when Sonia and I went to hear him in a Quebec reading a month later.

“We were the only non-Quebecois in the audience,” Verdier said. “Suddenly, in the middle of the reading, Dubois paused, then said, ‘Are we aware that we’re a dying culture? Do we know how to stop ourselves from dying?’ He’s an extraordinary presence.”

Dubois--who has had to bow out of a planned residency at Stages due to “exhaustion,” according to a spokesman at Canada’s Los Angeles consulate--is only the latest in Stages’ several attempts at surveying a given playwright’s work. An Ionesco festival in 1982-83 marked Stages’ maiden voyage, followed by surveys of French writer Marguerite Duras, Argentine playwright Eduardo Pavlovsky and Italian playwright Eduardo Erba.

“I suppose a basic principle of Stages,” Verdier said, “is that when I believe in an author’s work, it’s important to take a comprehensive look at the work with productions and readings in the original language and English, and, hopefully, with the author present.”

Verdier says he’ll keep the theater dark for months if he can’t find the right play and cast. In this way, he’s been compared to Joseph Stern, whose acclaimed Actors for Themselves group at the Matrix Theatre sometimes produced only once a year. Unlike Stern, however, Verdier rarely welcomes rental productions, out of concern, again, for quality control.

He chafes at rejection, such as being turned down for a recent Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department grant on the grounds that Stages was insufficiently multicultural. “Long before multiculturalism was in vogue, many of our shows had multiracial casting, such as ‘Exit the King’ and ‘1789,’ ” says Verdier, referring to his English-language premiere of Ariane Mnouchkine’s French Revolution epic. Feeling the need to buttress his case, he points to Stages’ upcoming plans for “Voices of the Americas”: a production of Pavlovsky’s latest, untitled play followed by an exchange series with the Tijuana Cultural Center.

“Many times,” he says, “I’ve thought of closing for good, and even now, I know I can’t go on as I have. But then I think of the gifts I’ve received: Ionesco writing a new piece for us, or having Simon Abkarian, who spent a lot of time with us here and is now a big star with Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil, hugging me after a performance and telling me, ‘Tonight, I play for you.’ ”

At moments like that, Verdier muses, just maybe, he’ll go another 10 years.