Theater--From the Ground Up : True community productions are the goal at a do-it-yourself playhouse in View Park.

When actor Gerald Walker decided last year to build a community theater from the ground up, he didn’t look any farther than his own back yard.

“I was standing out here one day,” said Walker, spreading his bulky arms, “and I suddenly envisioned the theater being here, exactly where it is now. It was almost like that scene out of ‘Field of Dreams,’ where a guy heard a voice say, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ I just knew this place had to be.”

One-and-a-half years later, the 55-seat Chesley Playhouse at 5131 Chesley Ave. in View Park stands on what was a basketball court behind Walker’s home.

Walker hopes that his do-it-yourself theater will complement a similar one built 25 years ago by fellow actor Robert Shorte--Frances Williams’ Corner Theatre, which sits minutes from the Chesley Playhouse in the Jefferson Park neighborhood. Though built a generation apart, both were created in the spirit of providing true community theater, places where veteran black actors can commune, new ones can study their craft, and emerging writers can confer on material.

“Within most theater or film organizations, there’s a pecking order,” said Shorte, a New York-trained actor who leads an acting workshop at the Chesley Playhouse. “Here, we’re geared more toward involvement. We decide to do something, and we do it--together.”

Shorte and Walker began turning Walker’s back-yard basketball court into a theater last year with far more good intentions and determination than money. To some friends, the idea seemed preposterous, because Walker’s father runs a board-and-care facility for the developmentally disabled out of the home. Surely, said some, this was no place for a theater.

But Walker and Shorte persisted. Once they launched the project, they wound up with more than enough assistance from friends in the industry who donated everything from carpentry work to seats to stage-light rigs. Often, the two actors said, folks came by simply to lend moral support or pitch in a meal for those hard at work laying foundations and hammering nails.

Even with the support of friends and neighbors, Walker sank about $10,000 of his own money into the project. In spurts and dribbles, the 900-square-foot theater came together over four months last year and opened in January. But even before it was finished, said actress Theresa Rice, performers hungry for the space were already claiming it by holding acting classes and reading plays.

“We were doing things when this place was just a floor,” Rice recalled. “It was so exciting to be part of actually making an idea like this happen. It’s wonderful to be able to come to a place right in the black community where you can be fulfilled. . . . I used to take acting classes in the San Fernando Valley, but not anymore.”

Shorte conducts the twice-weekly classes, which currently train 10 students in the demanding Meisner acting method--an improvisation-based technique that encourages actors to draw heavily on their emotions--and cost $100 a month, low by Hollywood standards.

The theater asks patrons for donations--there are no zoning problems since the theater is nonprofit and no tickets are sold--and relies on word of mouth to publicize its performances.

After a successful premiere last spring of the playhouse’s first production, “The Quality of Mercy,” by David Hall, Shorte and Walker are planning an ambitious season of acting showcases and four short plays that will be staged between January and June with a theater company they are in the process of forming. Shorte said he hopes the play-reading society begun by Rice and actress Julie Serguinia will yield new works, and new actors, who will make Chesley their creative base.

“There’s no doubt in my mind this will come together,” Shorte said. “Al Pacino once said, ‘In order to do something, all you need is a podium and a passion.’ ”

Francis Williams couldn’t agree more.

The most satisfying testament to that passion, she says, came not long ago when she overheard the conservation of two men who had stopped in her driveway near the entrance to the theater.

“One said to the other, ‘What is that?’ ” said Williams, chuckling. “And the other one answered indignantly, ‘Are you kidding? That’s culture!’ ”

A few miles away, at Exposition Boulevard and 5th Avenue, theater-goers for 25 years have enjoyed the culture of the Corner Theatre, at 3692 5th Ave. Founded by Williams, an 88-year-old actress and teacher, its wooden stage, sky-blue walls and neat rows of seats have long provided a venue for theater, blues and jazz performances, storytelling workshops and other art forms.

“We’ve done it all here,” said Williams, an animated woman with a clear, sonorous voice whose sole concession to age is confinement to a wheelchair. “We’ve done everything there is to do in the theater.”

Like the founders of Chesley, Williams is a veteran actor whose circle of close friends once included luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and Jacob Lawrence. Like Walker and Shorte, she used space on her residential property--in this case, she converted a three-car garage--to make way for a theater she saw as being the highest form of community service, one with healing properties for actors whose egos and spirits were badly bruised by Hollywood stereotypes.

“I didn’t like what the industry was doing to my people,” said Williams, seated on the stage of her theater on a recent warm day in a colorful tunic and black Birkenstock sandals. “I figured the only way to make things right was to do it myself.”

And 25 years after setting up the theater with the help of a spirited group of Dorsey High School students, the New Jersey native is still doing it herself. Although she now has the aid of a housekeeper and an assistant who navigates her wheelchair, she personally books all the acts and conducts writing and acting workshops. Williams, who also helped assemble the Asian-American acting troupe East-West Players in the 1950s and started an integrated jazz club on Jefferson Boulevard in the 1940s, said pioneering work in the arts comes naturally to her.

The focus at the Corner Theatre, said Williams, is on new works that challenge the audience, or tried-and-true ones that enrich the cultural milieu of the neighborhood: poetry readings, short and full-length plays, storytelling sessions for children and blues performances. Upcoming events at the theater include a concert by a reggae-flavored gospel group, writing and poetry workshops and a “Blues Stories” reading.

“There’s so much talent I keep discovering,” Williams said. “The arts are so essential. . . . We need to wear our culture like a coat. It’s part of us as people. Without it, we aren’t whole.”