Sledgehammer Finds a Home

Sledgehammer Theatre is no longer homeless.

The 7-year-old San Diego company has signed a six-month lease, with an option to extend for 2 1/2 years, at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse, which had been managed since 1976 by the San Diego Repertory Theatre. The San Diego Rep did not renew its lease for financial reasons when it ran out in April.

Before the San Diego Rep gave up the space, it helped pass the lease to Sledgehammer, a company it has encouraged and supported artistically over the years.

Sledgehammer will rename the theater St. Cecilia’s, the original name of the former funeral home the San Diego Rep transformed into a roughly 190-seat theater.

Sledgehammer will begin its first season in its new space June 12 with the West Coast premiere of Mac Wellman’s one-man show, “Terminal Hip,” which is set to run for four weeks until July 5. In August and again in the winter, the company plans to mount “The Saint Plays” by Erik Ehn for four-week runs.

The move to a permanent space signals a new direction for Sledgehammer co-founders, Scott Feldsher, 28, the artistic director, and Ethan Feerst, 27, executive director.

Though Sledgehammer has produced four shows at the space, 1620 6th Ave., under the Rep’s management, the company is best known for working at unusual places in unusual ways. In 1988, it presented “Blow Out the Sun” at the old Carnation Milk Factory, and audiences were ushered from scene to scene set in different parts of the abandoned, cavernous site. In 1989, it staged “Endgame” in a vacant storefront and “Pre-Paradise Sorry Now” at an abandoned warehouse.

The company received a San Diego Theatre Critics Circle Award in 1989 that commended the company for “outstanding achievement in the creative carving of theatre out of the void, and in their proof that rowdiness and art are not necessarily contradictory terms.”

The move to the 6th Avenue Playhouse also will mean a substantial increase in expenditures for the company, which had a $12,000 annual budget three years ago and now carries an annual budget of $75,000. Feerst estimates that the budget will increase to about $125,000 by next year to cover the lease after the initial six months. Feerst also hopes to raise money to remodel the interior of the theater, including extending the stage and changing the seating arrangement.

Artistically, the company plans to increase its focus on new American writers such as Wellman and Ehn. Wellman’s last show with Sledgehammer, the world premiere of “7 Blowjobs” ran 4 1/2 months, ending in January at the 10th Avenue garage at 10th and E streets. It left the company with a small surplus.

The theater is in negotiations to take that production to Chicago in the winter.

Sledgehammer also plans to sublease the theater to other companies, Feerst said. A new theater group, Stiletto Theatre, may present “Julius Caesar” in the space in October.

Feerst acknowledged that responsibility for managing a space will be tough, but “it would be tougher to be a theater without a space. We’re talking about growing from a tiny to a small theater company. It was becoming impossible and impractical to do the site works. . . . We’re still small, so we can be resourceful and still do theater on our own terms.”

The Sixth Avenue Playhouse was the San Diego Rep’s first permanent home, and the Rep had used it to mount such successful, long-running shows as “Working” in 1980 and “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know,” which ran for a year there, from mid-1988 to mid-1989. But the company has struggled financially in recent years.

It will continue to produce at the Lyceum Space and Lyceum Stage in Horton Plaza, which it began to manage in 1986, but its budget, which has shrunk from a $2.5-million peak in 1989 to just less than $2 million now, will not afford a third.

“We’re having to scale back our expenses,” said San Diego Rep Managing Director Adrian Stewart.