Directing a Mom-and-Pop Production : Theater: North Coast Repertory in Solana Beach offers eclectic fare in a homey atmosphere.

It all started with an ice-cream cone.

In 1981, Olive Blakistone and her husband, Tom, stopped for ice cream at the Lomas Sante Fe shopping center near their home here, in north San Diego County. They noticed several empty spaces and pondered the possibility of starting a theater.

They began with a $13,000 bare-bones investment, opening the North Coast Repertory Theatre on May 21, 1982. Eleven years later, the company is bucking the recession, growing and thriving with a $390,000 budget, a comfy, 194-seat house only six rows deep, and an eclectic season peppered with local premieres by the likes of Jon Robin Baitz, Larry Kramer, Harvey Fierstein and Vaclav Havel.

(Havel’s “The Memorandum” was chosen in 1989, when the dissident playwright was in jail; it opened the following year as he was named president of Czechoslovakia.)

Currently, the company is presenting the San Diego premiere of Mark Harelik’s “The Immigrant”--a poignant story about Harelik’s immigrant grandfather, who became the first Jew to settle in the small new town of Hamilton, Tex., at the turn of the century.

North Coast, which draws patrons from throughout Southern California, is 25 miles north of San Diego, and although the fare may be international and eclectic, this remains a mom-and-pop operation. Olive Blakistone, 63, is still the artistic director and picks all the shows. Tom Blakistone, 75, a retired aerospace engineer-inventor turned business consultant, is the unofficial, unpaid business manager, who refers to himself as his wife’s “loyal, kept slave.”

They keeps costs down by using a hard-working six-person staff--and hundreds of volunteers, who usher, paint sets, strike sets, clean up, do computer entries, work the box office and prepare the food for the company’s opening-night parties.

Remaining non-Equity also helps.

As revenues increase, the Blakistones have increased stipends to their actors to about $50 per week of performance. But despite their original long-term goal of going professional, the Blakistones say they doubt they can ever afford to do so while keeping tickets at $12 to $14 each. (They also give seniors, students and military a $2 discount; season subscribers get seven plays for $80.)

From the days when Blakistone had to cajole actors into auditioning, the theater has developed into a showcase for talent that is often visited by critics, actors and representatives of other major theaters. Mark Hofflund, former play-development associate at the Old Globe Theatre and now managing director of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, directed there, as did Andrew Barnicle, who is now artistic director at the Laguna Playhouse in Laguna Beach.

Comedian Henny Youngman attended the company’s previous show, “Greetings!,” and Neil Simon’s brother, Danny, came down from Los Angeles to check out the production of Neil’s “Broadway Bound” (he liked it).

But it is ticket sales, not VIP visits, that provides 90% of North Coast’s revenues. That means the biggest reason for the company’s success is its programming. All plays are picked, simply, because Olive Blakistone likes them.

Four of the seven plays in the 1992-93 season are area premieres: “The Immigrant,” Larry Gelbart’s “Mastergate,” Tom Dudzick’s “Greetings!” and Richard Nelson’s “Some Americans Abroad.”

But Blakistone doesn’t choose plays strictly because they are new, she insists. She selects works that reveal a commonality in different cultures, which in a way reflects her own upbringing--a lesson in diversity.

Blakistone was born amid the religious tensions of Belfast, Northern Ireland, with a Protestant mother and a Catholic father (whose family disowned him). She spent many years stationed with her father, a British army officer, in Singapore and later in India--where she learned Irish dancing from soldiers and joined an Indian community theater.

“My parents grew up (facing) prejudice and were themselves quite prejudiced,” she said. “My response has always been a reaction to what I grew up with.”

When she moved to New York and married Tom Blakistone 32 years ago, she stayed home and painted pictures of Winnie-the-Pooh for her children’s nursery. But when her children got older--her daughter was 20 and her son 18 when she hatched the idea of the North Coast Rep--she had a yearning to direct.

But she didn’t have “the credentials,” as she puts it, to be hired at an existing theater. Right from the start, her husband backed her desire to launch her own company.

“I guess I’m really very curious, and these plays reflect my interest in the world. When Tom and I first got married, we joined the Unitarian Church. That philosophy, that universal aspect of life, appeals to me--the drawing of a lot of different kinds of people under one umbrella.”

Olive Blakistone said she particularly related to the story of “The Immigrant.” She is neither Jewish nor Texan and required help from an actor’s Jewish mother and a local rabbi in refining the actors’ accents. Nevertheless, the immigrant experience at the play’s core is close to her heart.

“He went through experiences I went through because I came to this country at 18 years old. I was looked at as an oddity.”

Current success aside, the odyssey of North Coast Rep has not always been smooth.

The theater took a financial gamble in 1988 when it moved from its 126-seat theater space and spent $135,000 building a new one in the same shopping center. That facility is double the size of the original and is better equipped technically.

There have also been nightmares at the box office. A 1986 production of “Educating Rita” put the theater in the red for $18,000, but it was rescued with the very next show, “El Grande de Coca Cola.” In 1989, Edward Albee’s “Tiny Alice” could have been subtitled “The Show That Almost Closed the Theater.”

Blakistone concedes that not everything she picks is a winner artistically. Most recently, Arnold Wesker’s “Love Letters on Blue Paper” was the show that she now ruefully admits read a lot better than it played.

The Blakistones say they’ve been frustrated trying to find African-American actors to produce racially mixed works in the largely white Solana Beach community. Plans to stage Herb Gardner’s “I’m Not Rappaport” and Athol Fugard’s “The Blood Knot” were dropped in 1991 because they couldn’t find actors willing to travel to Solana Beach for the meager stipend.

But thanks to the mega-success of Neil Simon’s “Rumors” last year and the surprise hit, “Greetings!,” which played over the New Year, they have seen a 25% increase in subscribers. Now a subscriber base of 2,500 fills 30% to 40% of each house. Revenues are up 31%, with an overall projected revenue of $395,000 for the fiscal year ending in May.

And while Olive Blakistone will admit a mistake, she also stands up for plays she believes in. When one woman wrote in protesting a sexually charged scene in Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” she responded bluntly.

“I said if she was offended by an award-winning playwright like Terrence McNally, she would be offended (again) in the future and maybe she shouldn’t be a patron of this theater.”

The woman, however, was in a minority. The company has an 80-85% subscriber renewal rate.

And that, Olive Blakistone says, means that she should just continue doing what she is doing. Ten years from now, she said, she would be happy doing just what she is doing now--in the very same space.

“The theater does an educational function for a society, and I like plays that have a statement to make that makes people want to go home and think and maybe reassess their values.”

Mark Harelik’s “The Immigrant” continue through Feb. 14 at North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987 D Lomas Santa Fe Drive, Solana Beach. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday, with matinees Sunday at 2 p.m. $12 to $14. (619) 481-1055.