THEATER : Crafting a Commitment : Actor-director Tony Abatemarco, a transplanted New Yorker, has firmly sunk his roots into theater in Los Angeles. He opens tonight in ‘Four Fathers’ at the Tiffany Theatre

The 1921 building is said to have been a carriage house for the Gallo family. It is airy and stylishly comfortable, garnished with carefully chosen objects, touchable antiques and art hanging on the open-beam white walls. The Mission/Craftsman-style wood couch and chaise have been custom designed, and art books--Balthus, Manet, the Great Masters--adorn each coffee table.

A wood-burning stove sits in the corner of the cozy bedroom, where a cat lies curled up in the middle of the bed’s comforter. Each inviting room radiates warmth, taste and a personality of its own. The front yard has palms and plenty of room for Louie the boxer and Schmank the shaggy blind mutt to romp.

This isn’t just a house in the MacArthur Park area near downtown, it’s a home--that of actor Tony Abatemarco, to be exact. It’s a place that obviously belongs to a man who plans to stay where he is. Abatemarco, who came here from New York 15 years ago, has made a commitment to the often uphill battle of making a career in Los Angeles theater.

Anybody who knows the L.A. stage scene knows Abatemarco. He’s trod the boards at the big houses as well as at many smaller stages across town--not to mention his six feature films and sundry small screen credits. Abatemarco recently appeared at the Mark Taper Forum in “Scenes From an Execution,” and he’s set to open on Aug. 31 in the title role of “La Bete” in the Stages production at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre. And tonight he bows his solo performance, “Four Fathers,” which runs through July 25 at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood, directed by Don Amendolia. (On Thursday, there’s a benefit performance for the Women’s Care Cottage.)

“He’s totally amazing because he’s so fearless and crazy on the one hand, and so technically masterful on the other,” says director David Schweizer. “So you get this extraordinary combination of consummate skill and a demented magical sensibility.

“The greatest contribution I ever made to the local theater scene was inviting Tony to come out here in 1978 to do ‘Kid Twist,’ because he stayed (in L.A.) and the rest is history.”

But Abatemarco isn’t just a much-awarded theater actor. He’s also a writer-director and “instigator” (his term). He directed Julie Harris in William Luce’s “Lucifer’s Child” on Broadway (for which she was nominated for a Tony for best actress), and has also directed at prestigious regional theaters such as the Pasadena Playhouse and respected smaller theaters such as the Odyssey, as well as in a variety of non-traditional spaces.

Abatemarco also founded the Accident Theater Company in 1980 and the Night House and, more recently, made a name for himself as an artist-advocate. Last year, he took on the mighty Taper, when he wrote a public letter criticizing the theater for commissioning a non-L.A. artist, Anna Deavere Smith, to create a theater piece about the L.A. riots. (Smith’s commissioned work, “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992, opens June 13 at the Taper.)

It’s still true that L.A. theater artists--or even former L.A. artists, such as Smith--often can’t get their calls returned from producers here until they make a splash in New York. But neither that sad reality--nor other annoyances, such as the overweening presence of the film/TV industry--has deterred Abatemarco from making a life in art amid the palm trees and freeways.

“It takes sustained commitment to the craft,” he says. “It doesn’t take banner waving. It doesn’t take propagandizing. It takes continuing to maintain standards and doing work in the same place. I’m staying here. I’m not going to New York. I love it here. I am committed to being in the theater here.”

Abatemarco, 41, decided on a life in the theater at age 14. Growing up in Brooklyn and on Long Island--a childhood he celebrates in his autobiographical tribute to his late Italian father, “Four Fathers”--he got bit by the bug of the Great White Way, and headed toward Manhattan whenever he got the chance.

He ended up skipping out on the graduation ceremonies for the advanced acting program at Juilliard in order to get to L.A. in time to perform in a 1978 Mark Taper Forum production of Len Jenkin’s “Kid Twist,” directed by Schweizer. Abatemarco went on to do a series of shows for the Taper, and for producer Peg Yorkin, who was running the Ford Theater back then.

The directing thing just sort of happened. “I had never planned on being a director,” Abatemarco says. “But I started getting ideas for how I could direct--in a ‘Happenings’ kind of way, although they weren’t calling it performance art back then. I had this builder’s mentality that ignited in me when I read Peter Brook’s ‘The Empty Space’--the idea of hammering a stake into the ground and conjuring some kind of event around that stick. That was a fire that lasted for a long time and is still there.”

At the time, Abatemarco was living in an apartment near Western and Melrose avenues. The place had a particularly long living room, so he turned it into a theater space and gathered his friends for a staging of Tom Eyen’s “The White Whore and the Bit Player.” “I had a core group of friends who had migrated out here from New York, Boston and different places,” says Abatemarco. “I arrived into this pocket of people.”

Making theater in L.A. back then seemed as easy as “add water and stir.” “L.A. felt very much like ‘make your own,’ and that was one of the exciting things about it. New York felt like such a regimented and calcified system of creating theater. Leaving that and coming here, it felt like this was a big empty lot, with room to define everything according to your own terms.”

In the 1980s, L.A. theater experienced a period of expansion, in part due to the so-called Equity-Waiver movement, which allowed small theaters to hire union actors without paying union wages. “When I first got here in 1978, the boom hadn’t happened yet. Everything felt a little provincial, a little on the side of library or community theater. So it seemed like a clean slate. I was 26 years old and I had a lot of energy.”

A storefront that became the Accident Theater Company was the site of Abatemarco’s first reviewed productions in 1979-80. A staging of Bertolt Brecht’s “Schweyk in the Second World War” grabbed the attention of L.A. theater honchos, including the late Ted Schmitt of the Cast Theater and Rene and Judith Auberjonois.

After 10 months, the rent suddenly went way up and Abatemarco lost that storefront space. He landed in a 5,000-square-foot loft downtown, near Wall Street, where he stayed for the next four years. During that time, Abatemarco began work on “Brain Hotel,” an a cappella musical that ran for nine months at the Cast and won the first LA Weekly “New Directions in Theater” award, for which the category was created. The piece, which Abatemarco wrote and directed in 1981, was subsequently revived in an Equity production for the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival.

Also during the early loft years, inspiration came to Abatemarco in the form of a film “ ‘My Dinner With Andre’ was a seminal event,” he says. “It galvanized a lot of thinking about seizing the time and doing something that had some impact. I think it did that for a lot of artists everywhere.”

The upshot of that flash of light was the Projects Club, an interdisciplinary alliance of 80 or so artists, whom Abatemarco brought together in 1982 to make new work for the theater. “It was a thought space where people could come and talk about ideas and projects that immediately took off,” says Abatemarco. “For about 10 months, amazing things happened. There were all different kinds of workshops--playwrights, people trying out Grotowski methods. One night, we decided the whole group of us would read ‘The Lower Depths’ and we did. There was no audience. Everybody was part of the commune of doing this.”

If the bohemian idealism of it all sounds too cool to last, it was. “By August (‘82) I was getting tired,” says Abatemarco. “I seem to have a 10-month run at these things, at administrating. I put so much energy into every aspect that I burn myself out.”

Sure enough, though, he was at it again a few years later. In 1983-’84, Abatemarco received a National Endowment for the Arts grant through L.A. Theatre Works. He started out serving as a director in residence for the group, but soon began to put on plays in a vacant toy factory downtown that became known as the Night House.

Downtown was the site of an incipient SoHo-ization around 1984, with artists flocking to the cheap loft space and the idea of a creative district. “The Wallenboyd theater had just opened nearby and we opened the Night House with Mimi Seton’s ‘Wazo Wazo,’ ” says Abatemarco. “There were eight actors, hanging from trapezes in the ceiling, singing like birds. The space was gutted between shows and it was serving its function as a factory of performance.”

Even the Bunker Hill crowd came down to check out the scene. “(The Taper’s) Gordon Davidson came and that’s when I got invited to start a whole series of work at the Taper,” recalls Abatemarco. “Suddenly downtown was becoming this amazing place where all these artists and performance spaces and galleries and everything else were moving in. And as we all know, that was short-lived. Concurrently, my first close friend had gone into the hospital and died of AIDS.”

Abatemarco took off to do some work in New York, leaving the theater in the hands of playwright John Steppling, who staged his “The Shaper” there. That production moved out, and the Night House pretty much folded with it. L.A. Theatre Works, which had been in on the venue from the beginning, no longer felt comfortable downtown.

“I could never figure out how he got all those people to come down to the edge of Skid Row,” says L.A. Theatre Works’ artistic director Susan Albert Loewenberg. “It was a really fertile theater scene. We did 10 pieces with (Abatemarco) that year at the Night House, but once he left, we couldn’t keep it going.”

In 1985, Abatemarco started working for a year at the Taper, effectively as an artist in residence, although his official job designation was as artistic director of the L.A. chapter of Jacques D’Amboise’ National Dance Institute. For that group, supported by the Taper, Abatemarco co-authored “Sir Vival Sweepstakes,” a two-night mainstage production featuring John Ritter and more than 100 kids from the L.A. Unified School District. He also directed “Imagining a Future,” a 40-year commemorative production about the Hiroshima bombing, as well as Len Jenkin’s “The Five of Us” at the Taper, Too.

“What I learned at the Taper is that I’m not an administrator,” says Abatemarco. “I can start things, but the follow-through requires so much endurance that it’s not what I want.”

Not everyone agrees. “He was an absolutely sensational administrator and producer,” says Loewenberg. “What Tony represents is the unflappable and unstoppable useful energy that results in the best of the avant-garde.”

The Taper experience was also positive enough that it cemented Abatemarco’s now 14-year relationship with artistic director Davidson--so much so that it withstood a flap last year, related to the Anna Deavere Smith piece, currently in previews.

In the wake of Smith’s acclaimed solo about the 1991 Crown Heights, Brooklyn unrest--”Fires in the Mirror,” at New York’s Public Theater--the Taper announced that the actress had been commissioned to create a similar work dealing with the L.A. riots. Abatemarco, upon reading of the commission in The Times, wrote an August, 1992, Counterpunch piece for The Times in which he criticized the choice to assign this task to an artist who had not been living here at the time of the riots, especially when many local artists had been and were creating works on the topic.

“True to form, the Taper leads the way in crowning artistic merit born out of New York,” wrote Abatemarco. “Even when the events that spawned the debate took place right here. Even when it was our artistic community that woke up with its sky filled with ashes . . . “

He doesn’t regret what many hailed as a gutsy move, given that the Taper remains nearly the only living-wage game in town. “It felt scary, but my conscience said the Taper can handle this criticism, it will be valuable,” says Abatemarco, who in fact worked at the round house on the hill as recently as its last show. “And I think it has been. I never apologized, because I didn’t think an apology was in order. I never meant it as a criticism of (Smith). If I was commissioned to do something in New York, as I have been, I would leap at the chance. I’d also think twice if I was asked to come in and do research on a problem that was occurring in Brooklyn.”

Instead, Abatemarco and others argue for an end to L.A. producers’ reluctance to fully support artists not validated by East Coast acclaim. “You could make national news by taking the artists of this community and allowing them to do a six-week run on the Taper mainstage,” he says.

The results might be more than just good theater. They might also shore up hope for the future. “It would give these artists a goal to reach for, when the standards of excellence are established here and not brought in from New York. Then people who are coming up would have a reason to stay here.”

For the moment, Abatemarco is focused on bringing “Four Fathers” to fruition. He’s been at work on the piece since his father died last year. But the actor-writer-director, who recently staged Brecht’s “Puntila and Matti” at the Odyssey Theatre, is also increasingly concerned about organizing L.A. theater people.

“We need to talk about the future, now that the bloom is off the rose,” he says. The past couple of years have been extremely devastating. We all know the theater is suffering through a crisis.

“How do you convince young people that this is a worthwhile thing to get into?” asks the veteran theater artist. “I’m not sure. But generationally, I see it as a big responsibility to say, ‘Yeah, it’s tough, but the rewards are fantastic.’ I wouldn’t choose any other way of life. I don’t know how to communicate that to a new generation except by doing good work.”