Basement Theatre Enters a New Stage

When “The Threepenny Opera” opens this weekend at the Basement Theatre, the play will mark two milestones for a group of community actors that has performed in Pasadena and La Canada Flintridge for 30 years.

Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s story of Mack the Knife is the group’s first musical, as well as its first professional production.

For decades an all-volunteer, community theater group, the Basement opens Friday as a 99-seat Actors’ Equity Assn. theater.

“It’s a step toward growth,” said Jim Nasella, a theater board member and one of three “Threepenny” producers. “We’ve wanted to do it for years.”

The Basement Theatre is the performance division of the La Canada Players, a group founded in 1961 that has survived for three decades on a shoestring budget, struggling to build an audience and at the same time offer serious and experimental plays.

The actors, directors and technical artists involved in the theater group acknowledge they are bucking a trend by deciding to upgrade to professional status during lean financial times.

The Basement Theatre, which operates out of a church basement, doesn’t have a patrons’ group or even an occasional society gala.

Members freely admit that a quarter to a third of their audience is made up of friends and family of the cast and crew.

And this year is the first time they have applied for grant funding. They got two grants, from the Pasadena Arts Commission and the cooperative National/State/County Partnership, which will help pay salaries and other expenses. The group’s leaders seem almost timid about asking their audience for money.

“We have to find a way to do that tactfully,” said Kathryn Bikle, the group’s president. “How much junk mail can you get begging you to send money?”

Nasella added, “It doesn’t seem fair asking people to pay for their tickets and then hitting them up for donations as well.”

Over the years, all the time and energy that has gone into the Basement Theatre has come from volunteers.

“Theater blood is theater blood--if you love it, you’re there,” said Bikle, explaining why actors, directors and technical artists would work for free. Nasella, for example, is a television assistant director who has worked on the “Knot’s Landing” and “Perry Mason” programs.

But come Friday night, small salaries will be paid to the cast for the first time in the theater’s history.

The Basement Theatre actually had to scale down its auditorium in the basement of the First Congregational Church of Pasadena to become eligible for Actor’s Equity status.

The basement seated between 200 and 300 people, too many seats to qualify at the minimum Equity wage level, which was all the Basement could afford to pay. The auditorium had to accommodate fewer than 100. So theater volunteers simply built a wall halfway across the auditorium, cutting the seating down to 99.

In most cases, the biggest financial burden on local theater companies is the rental of a performance hall. That’s where the Basement Theatre has gotten a break.

When the group started in La Canada Flintridge, productions were staged in storefronts and at a high school gymnasium. In 1979, the group performed in an old junior high school auditorium.

Seven years ago, the First Congregational Church, 464 E. Walnut St., came to the rescue with a permanent home for the group. The church charges the company a minimal monthly rental. “They like us to be there, they think we’re good for the community,” Nasella said.

The church has not tried to exercise any artistic control on the performances. “They are very open-minded,” he said. “I suspect if we paraded nude people across the stage, it might get back to them, but even then I don’t know if they’d say anything about it.”

Nasella said he does not feel the newfound professional status of the Basement Theatre will cut into the audiences of other local theaters, such as the Pasadena Playhouse. “I don’t really feel that we’re competing,” he said. “I think we’re just in different leagues. We help each other by stimulating the theater environment.”

Lars Hansen, executive director of the Pasadena Playhouse, agreed. “It’s terrific,” he said of the Basement’s new status. “More good theater breeds more good theater. We wish them the best of luck, and we’ll help out in any way possible.”

Taking the risk involved in going professional--paying actors and playing in a smaller auditorium--will be worth it, board members say, as a way to attract some attention outside of Pasadena.

“No. 1, it gives you much more exposure,” Nasella said, explaining that large newspapers and industry publications will review small professional plays but tend to stay away from community theater productions. “It also exposes us to more talent, not only actors but art directors and technical people. It should make our shows more stimulating.”

The Basement plays host to an eclectic mix of five or six plays each year, including updated versions of Shakespeare, avant-garde original plays, mysteries and classics.

In recent years, Bikle said, the group has put on a post-nuclear holocaust interpretation of “Macbeth,” as well as a modern version of “King Lear” entitled “K. Lear, CEO” set in a corporate boardroom. “This is the kind of stage where you can take a concept and go all the way with it if you want to,” Bikle said.

The Alternative Stage, a separate season of plays on the same stage by the Basement Players group, has produced several new works, including the West Coast premiere of “Charisma,” a finalist in the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Festival.

Last year on the Alternative Stage there was a compilation of four one-act plays, all written and directed by group members, entitled “Eat Your Hair.” “It gives us a chance to see what works and doesn’t work,” Bikle said of the second season.

“We’re not into ‘Hello, Dolly!’ and that kind of crowd-pleasing stuff,” she said. “It’s an interesting challenge we’re trying to meet, to get people out for non-traditional theater.”

Although average audience size has increased over the past three years, Nasella said, all the money earned from one show has always been put directly into the next production with little left over for improvements.

“We do need more word out about our work, because of the subject material,” Nasella said. “I strongly feel there are enough people in the San Gabriel Valley interested in this type of theater who don’t want to drive to the Westside, where they might see more theaters doing this kind of thing.”

Typically, audiences at the Basement Theatre span all ages and ethnic groups. “It’s a pretty eclectic patronage,” Bikle said, “a little bit of everybody. We have a group of seniors that comes and we have some kids that come because they or their parents are interested in theater.”

Nasella and Bikle said most of the actors who appear in Basement Theatre productions are already professionals who work in commercials, television and films at least part time. Only a small number, however, are employed full time in the entertainment business.

The creative rewards of doing serious theater are attractive to actors, even when they don’t get paid, Nasella and Bikle said.

“Most of the stuff you get paid for in this business is just awful--laxative commercials and most of the shows on television,” Nasella said. “We try to do things we like and enjoy doing.”

“The Threepenny Opera” opens Friday and runs through June 6, at 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, at the Basement Theatre, 464 E. Walnut, Pasadena. Tickets are $10; $8 for senior citizens and children under 12.