A Theater That Grew from Grass Roots : Culture: Community-minded thespians build a thriving 55-seat playhouse that puts black actors and students in the spotlight.

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.”

A year and a half later, the 55-seat Chesley Playhouse stands on what was a basketball court behind Walker’s home in View Park.

Walker hopes that his do-it-yourself theater, , will complement a similar one that opened nearby 25 years ago--Frances Williams’ Corner Theatre, 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, and emerging writers can confer on material.

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

When Shorte and Walker began turning Walker’s back yard basketball court into a theater, some friends thought the idea preposterous, in part because Walker’s father already runs a board-and-care facility for the developmentally disabled out of the home.

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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 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 a four-month period last year and officially opened in January. But even before it was finished, said actress Theresa Rice, performers hungry for the space were holding acting classes and reading plays there.

“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 Meisner technique, an improvisation-based approach to acting that encourages performers to draw heavily on their emotions. The cost is $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 a season of acting showcases and four short plays that will be staged between January and June. Shorte said he hopes a 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.’ ”

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Francis Williams couldn’t agree more.

The most satisfying testament to that passion, she says, came not long ago when she overheard the conversation of two men who 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 the intersection of Exposition Boulevard and 5th Avenue, theatergoers for 25 years have enjoyed the “culture” of the Corner Theatre. 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.”

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, one she saw offering healing for actors whose egos and spirits had been 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 day in a colorful tunic and black Birkenstock sandals. “I figured the only way to make things right was to do it myself.”

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, mixes new works with the tried-and-true, along with poetry readings, short and full-length plays, storytelling sessions for children and blues performances. Upcoming events at her 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,” she 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.”