Manhattan Company Finds a Home for Its Comedy in L.A.

Q: Did you hear the one about the comedy theater in Manhattan?

A: It got mugged, and moved to L.A.

That’s a punch line Steve Kaplan might get a chuckle from, especially if his lauded company, Manhattan Punch Line, avoids a mugging with its L.A. run of “ ‘Best of the Fest’ Goes West” at the Coast Playhouse.

Kaplan is the latest in a seemingly endless stream of New York theater artists to make the permanent move to The Coast. (If you don’t believe it, just spend some time in Dodger Stadium the next time the Mets are in town: You’ll be surrounded by fresh L.A. residents crowned with Mets caps.) While Southern California has been experiencing a business drain, it has been gaining an influx of New Yorkers attracted by Los Angeles’ busy network of film, television and theater.

If you still don’t believe it, then look at the directors helping Kaplan in the staging of an evening’s five one-acts. Ex-New Yorker Dennis Erdman (who most recently staged Alan Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind”) directs Peter Tolan’s “Pillow Talk,” while Kaplan’s former assistant at the Punch Line, Robin (“A Girl’s Guide to Chaos”) Saex stages Tom Donaghy’s “Portfolio.” (Kaplan is in charge of the rest on the bill: David Ives’ “The Sure Thing,” Michael Aschner’s “Trudy and Paul Come to the Rescue” and Ron Carlson’s “The Table Cloth of Turin.”)

“I told Steve that the Punch Line could really thrive in this town,” says Saex. “This city has no problem embracing comedy, partly because it’s not burdened with New York’s pretensions.” Erdman notes a little more cautiously that “if New York theater people aren’t all pulling up stakes and moving out here, they’re at least seeing L.A. as a viable venue for their work.”

But some are pulling up their stakes without hesitation. How quickly did Kaplan make the move? “The Punch Line closed its last festival of one-acts on June 24, and I flew out to L.A. on June 26, and started putting the new show together. No kidding.”

In conversation, though, Kaplan--whose thoughtful, casual appearance gives him the look of a rabbinical student on vacation--tries to kid as much as possible. “In New York, I wanted to be the Joseph Papp of comedy,” he said, referring to the late theatre impresario, “but it became clear that Joseph Papp couldn’t even be Joseph Papp anymore.”They’re not zingers, certainly not punch lines, which Kaplan admits he’s never been very good at anyway. He started off as a stand-up who bombed so badly “that the clubs wouldn’t even let me come back to eat.”

He moved into directing, and then took the ultimate gamble of starting up a theater. But in the early ‘80s, he found a New York so “ultra-serious, so full of plays with characters dressed in black named ‘He’ and ‘She’ ” that a pressure valve, a real comedy theater, seemed necessary.

Kaplan admits that using the name Manhattan Punch Line might, on one hand, suggest a stand-up club or an improv outfit. But the name stuck, and in no time word spread that the Punch Line was the place to go if you were serious about being funny--whether you wanted to write, act or direct.

The main stretch of the season included revivals of comedy classics, such as “The Front Page.” But Kaplan says: “The cornerstone of our identity was the one-act festival. At least half of the writers in our eight festivals were first-timers, and one-fourth of the plays were published.” Saex, for instance, directed Howard (“Search and Destroy”) Korder’s first produced piece, “Life On Earth,” which was later incorporated into his full-length play, “Boy’s Life.” The festivals have been sweeping enough to include Korder’s dark comedies, Romulus Linney pieces and lighter works such as Ives’ “Sure Thing.”

“We’ve tried to widen the definition of what comedy could be,” Kaplan says. “Comedy never does what drama does--telling us what we could be--but instead tells us what we can do to live with ourselves. With that in mind, we brought in artists of all types. But it was always guided by a central factor, which was to get people with real talent together, and see what they could do.”

Unlike “Best of the Fest,” which Kaplan and producer Drew Dennett culled from several past festivals, each annual orgy of one-acts (which amounted to 10 fully staged plays and 15 to 20 readings during three months) resulted from a marathon reading at Punch Line offices. “It was like sleep-away camp,” says Kaplan, “where we’d slump across sofas and spread out on the floor, arguing over maybe as many as 1,000 submitted scripts, until we got it down to 60.”

Kaplan smiles thinking back on it, but becomes a bit pained recalling the elements that conspired to close his theater down.

“Oh, there were so many. A real basic one was wanting certain actors, and they’d be in L.A. working on a series. All of the talent started moving out here. New York state arts funding was cut in recent years by 75%, and so was city funding. Donating corporations were leaving Manhattan. Expenses kept going up. The film business which could support actors and others was drying up in New York. All of it has just been killing small theaters there.”

Other than the venerable companies such as American Place Theatre and Manhattan Theatre Club, the other theaters were dying--even Ellen Stewart has threatened to close her seemingly immortal La Mama.

Kaplan kept going, and Saex is somewhat amazed that he hung in as long as he did: “There was the pre-therapy Steve and the post-therapy Steve. The pre-therapy Steve tried to control everything around him and couldn’t; the post-therapy Steve was able to go with the flow and accept what was going on. As he was growing personally and artistically, unfortunately, the economy worsened. It’s to his credit that he managed to keep the Punch Line going until this year, with everything falling apart.”

So now Kaplan is in the Promised Land. But what would stop the new Punch Line, if and when it gains a home of its own (not necessarily the Coast Playhouse), from turning into just another L.A. comedy showcase?

“The guiding principle of the Punch Line,” Kaplan insists, “is talent, and talent never comes prepackaged and tidy. It’s always quirky, and hard to find. Showcasing is about cutting the cloth just so to please someone else, and we’re not going to do that.”

Specifically, Kaplan and company are staking out a place for the new Punch Line with this introductory festival, spreading the word throughout the city’s vast network of writers, actors and directors, and seeing what comes of it. Saex confidently predicts that a future one-act festival is just a matter of time: “Steve will get 800 to 1,000 script submissions, easy.”

Besides, Kaplan says, “This town has gone through enough aftershocks and fires and droughts. It needs a few laughs.”