Visibility, Stability. Now, the Next Step. : The oldest gay and lesbian theater company in L.A. has had its best year ever--but what now? Artistic Director Robert Schrock has a plan that may surprise some people.

It’s show time in West Hollywood, and half a dozen beefy, clean-cut guys soft-shoe their way across the stage with their pants around their ankles. They sing as they dance--cheek to cheek, so to speak--through “The Ballad of Little Mikey.”

On another evening, it’s gals’ night out in the “Girl Bar” as the regulars tell tales and angle to put the make on the new woman on the scene.

Check back again and there’s a young Latino metamorphosing into an array of immigrant hucksters and others in “Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown.”

The fare may be diverse, but it’s all part of the 1994 season at Los Angeles’ oldest gay and lesbian stage company, the Celebration Theatre. Though it has struggled to find its niche in the past, this year the theater has had a breakthrough season--thanks in no small part to Robert Schrock, artistic director of the past year and a half.

“The Ballad of Little Mikey,” for instance, turned out to have legs--and not just the flashy gams with the half-mast jeans. In fact, in the months since that chorus line first kick-stepped its way across the proscenium, the show has been revised and moved to another venue, the St. Genesius Theatre in West Hollywood, where it recently passed the 800-performance mark.

The Celebration’s mission is “to entertain and enlighten and to combat homophobia, not only in the straight world but also amongst homosexuals,” Schrock says. “We need to present work that lets everybody know that we have a lot to contribute. Audiences come and they see good work and it gives them more respect--if they’re gay, for themselves, and if they’re straight, for gays.”

At the same time, Schrock also stresses what gays and straights have in common: “I want people to say, ‘That’s a great play--it happens to be about gays, but it’s a great play.’ I’m more interested in presenting theater than I am in presenting ‘gay.’ I’m a gay man, but I’m a theater person before I’m a gay person, and that’s my approach.”

Dressed in a salmon-colored polo shirt that complements his blue-gray eyes and blond locks, Schrock has the enthusiasm--and fatigue--of a man who has landed in the right job at the right cultural moment.

“Gay theater is a viable place to be right now,” he says, doing more talking than munching over a chicken Caesar salad in a Sunset Boulevard bistro. “It doesn’t have to be hidden anymore.”

Schrock is referring to the success, in recent years, of such gay-themed Broadway shows as “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Angels in America,” as well as to the movie “Philadelphia,” starring Tom Hanks as a young man dying of AIDS.

These works--as well as the success of the television adaptation of “And the Band Played On”--suggest that there is room for gay stories in the mainstream. “You can do your Highways activism, your ACT UP thing, and that’s immediate,” Schrock says, referring to the Santa Monica performance venue known for presenting a great deal of gay work and the AIDS activist group. “But in the long run, if you present work that has a universal voice and is intelligent, then you’re combatting homophobia in a broader sense.”

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Indeed, Celebration has always been widely regarded as less experimental and confrontational than 5-year-old Highways. Launched by director Charles Rowland in 1982--only a year after Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy” premiered and just as AIDS was first beginning to trickle into the public consciousness--the Celebration Theatre began in a small venue in a run-down part of Silver Lake.

Although the emergence of gay theater in America dates to the late 1960s, the early 1980s were a time when gay plays such as “La Cage aux Folles” (1983) were proliferating in New York. Similarly, gay theaters like the Celebration were being established throughout the country.

Yet if there’s truth to the saying that what matters is “location, location and location,” Celebration had three strikes against it from the get-go. “It was literally ghetto theater in a ghetto,” says actor-activist Michael Kearns of Artists Confronting AIDS. “The self-worth of the theater was affected by where it lived.”

Also during these early years, there were many artistic directors, most of whom served for no more than a year. They could not get comfortable under the aegis of Rowland, who continued to oversee the theater’s activities.

During the mid-1980s, when the Celebration had a few years under its belt, gay theater became increasingly visible on a national level. Two landmark AIDS dramas--Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” and William Hoffman’s “As Is”--bowed in New York in 1985, the same year that actor Rock Hudson died of complications from AIDS. And shortly thereafter, AIDS plays began to proliferate on both coasts.

The Celebration, however, seemed to have one foot stuck in the past.

“Although I totally respected his roots and what he’d done, there was something old-fashioned about Rowland that stunted the growth of the theater,” says Kearns, who was Celebration’s artistic director in 1988--one of the theater’s most provocative years, because of the controversial play “Jerker, or the Helping Hand.”

“Jerker,” written by the late Robert Chesley, portrayed a series of phone-sex encounters between two men and was staged Off Broadway in 1987. Subsequent to the 1988 Celebration staging, the Federal Communications Commission found the script “offensive” when portions were aired on KPFK-FM.

Still, it wasn’t until Rowland died in late 1990 and the theater moved from Silver Lake to its present West Hollywood site that the Celebration really began to come into its own.

Paul Borden first joined the theater as an actor that year.

“For a long time, the theater was a kind of collective,” he says. “A bunch of people got together and made it run, and that’s the only reason it ran.”

Borden, who became executive director and a member of the board of directors in 1991, decided to “professionalize it”--”I tightened up procedures, basic responsibility issues. No one ever got paid before this past year.”

Beginning in the spring of 1992, Borden began to expand the board. He also set in motion a search for an artistic director.

Enter Schrock, a Goodman Theatre-trained former New York actor who has lived in L.A. since 1976. Schrock had worked at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and directed more than two dozen productions in small L.A. houses. He had also logged time as a staff writer on the soap “Rituals” and written original theater works.

Schrock’s foremost task was assembling a season, and even now, he’s still Monday-morning-quarterbacking this year’s success.

The season opener, “The Pink Triangle,” is, for example, a show that Schrock believes may have gotten short shrift. The play, brought to his attention by director Ron Link, portrayed the persecution of gays in Nazi Germany.

“Looking back, I shouldn’t have opened the season with that show,” says Schrock, who is considering reviving the play in a year or so. “It’s a subject that needs to be known, and if the theater had already done a few shows, more people would’ve come to see it.”

“The Pink Triangle” was followed by such works as Mark Savage’s “The Ballad of Little Mikey”--Celebration’s first musical--and Chilean writer Guillermo Reyes’ multi-character solo “Men on the Verge of a His-panic Breakdown,” a Celebration commission performed by Felix A. Pire.

Phyllis Nagy’s “Girl Bar” was the most successful lesbian drama in the nine-play season. The Celebration also broke ground in terms of stretching its own boundaries with the premiere of a gay Asian play called “A Language of Their Own,” which is set to be produced by the Public Theatre in New York in 1995.

All told, it has been a strong season for the ledger too.

“We have been lucky this year in that we have survived solely on ticket sales,” Schrock says. “We have no outside funding whatsoever. That’s miraculous, that we’ve made it totally off the door.”

Yet the Celebration isn’t completely in the black. “We have a bit of a deficit but it’s manageable,” Schrock says. “If my board of directors starts to get aggressive like they’ve said they were going to, we can erase that. There’s a lot of money in the gay community, and we haven’t tapped it.”

Beyond the money woes, Schrock and his board have also been at odds over more substantive matters. At least once, the bone of contention has been what scripts should be produced.

“Lulu,” a play with music adapted from the pre-Expressionist writings of German dramatist Frank Wedekind, was originally set to be produced by the Celebration. The project was dropped, though, when board members and Schrock disagreed about whether to proceed.

Schrock was in favor of staging the work, which follows the exploits of an amoral seductress and draws upon the same source that inspired G. W. Pabst’s 1928 film “Pandora’s Box” and the Alban Berg opera “Lulu,” as well as other theatrical adaptations.

“I thought that it would be a good play to produce because I couldn’t find good lesbian material, but also because it had the historical value of being the first sympathetic lesbian character in modern literature,” he says.

O thers, however, didn’t share his enthusiasm, Schrock says: “Some of our board of directors said it wasn’t gay enough. When that play was first produced, it was banned because it was too gay. So it’s interesting how the times have turned.”

But Borden differs with his artistic director’s recollection of events: “It was never that the board of directors decided to withdraw because it wasn’t ‘queer’ enough. It was the finances more than anything else. The board overextended itself. We would have had to spend another $5,000 (to mount the production).”

Another reason that Schrock was enthusiastic about “Lulu” was that one of his goals is to make Celebration an equally gay and lesbian theater.

“The boys don’t come to the girls’ plays and the girls don’t come to the boys’ plays,” he says. “As much as we are supposedly a very together community, we’re not all one. It’s a totally different market, and it’s hard to reach both.”

It’s not just that a good lesbian script is hard to find but also that the audience isn’t as regular as Schrock would like.

“I’ve been told that the lesbians were the backbone of the theater, that they gave it the most support and that they’re starving for anything to come see that represents them,” he says. “But I haven’t found that to be true. ‘Girl Bar’ did well. But on ‘Lesbian Sea Gulls,’ we’re not doing well at all.”

S till, sometimes you have to make an investment in the future via what Schrock calls a “noble failure” such as “Lesbian Sea Gulls.”

“My original idea for ‘Lesbian Sea Gulls’ was to have well-known, established gay writers write a little 10-minute play,” he says. “But it’s hard for a theater at this level to attract major talent, because we can’t pay them.”

He turned instead to emerging talents.

“It’s an uneven show and I’ll be the first to admit it,” Schrock says. “But I’m proud because I was able to commission six lesbian playwrights and a songwriter to write for the theater. That’s my psychic income.”

Nonetheless, Schrock realizes that he has to tread lightly when it comes to helping female artists and their work.

“Not being a lesbian, it makes it even harder for me to find what they want to see,” he says. “For every 20 male scripts that I get, there’s only one female script, and it probably isn’t good. So that’s why I’m trying to develop more lesbian writers.”

Not everyone thinks he is succeeding.

“I don’t think Bob has a real sensitivity toward women’s issues,” Borden says. “He’s in the process of still learning that.”

Yet Schrock maintains that he’d like to see all kinds of gay separatism go by the wayside.

“They just don’t cross over,” he says of the various factions within the Celebration audience. “The ‘Little Mikey’ crowd didn’t come to see ‘A Language of Their Own.’ ”

Schrock would even like to push the envelope of what is usually considered right for a gay theater.

“I want to get away from doing ghetto plays,” he says. “A Tennessee Williams festival would be appropriate to do in a gay theater. But right now, I don’t think my audience would be quite accepting of that. They really want to see their own issues.”

Particularly with the increasing respect afforded such places as Highways and such groups as Artists Confronting AIDS--both of which present predominantly, although not exclusively, gay work--it will be even more imperative that Schrock keep working to hone Celebration’s own artistic identity.

Borden, though, won’t be around to see what Schrock accomplishes. He has resigned and will be officially leaving his post Sept. 19. “I couldn’t see myself going into another year for $500 a month, plus having a regular job to keep myself alive,” he says.

Then too there are the usual antagonisms and frustrations that plague the boards of many nonprofit arts organizations.

“It’s tough working with an artistic director sometimes and it’s tough working with a board sometimes,” Borden says. “There are some things that I’m not thrilled about. I felt that when I left, they’d have to be responsible.”

S hrock, for his part, is neither burnt-out nor sanguine.

“We’ve had a lot of growing pains,” he says. “It’s been a difficult year in many respects because we’ve created a child that needs to be fed and the organization is now realizing that. Now that it has that visibility, it takes a lot more maintenance. And maintenance equates with money.”

But money isn’t easy for any small theater to come by.

“We have a 63-seat theater with a post down the middle and you can’t let that defeat you,” Schrock says. “You have to think bigger than that. You have to have a much broader vision of what you want to bring to people.”

And that is the kind of optimism mixed with realism that has helped Schrock and the Celebration so far.

“I feel great about it,” he says of the success of his first full season. “It’s a real roller-coaster ride. But as a kid, I didn’t like the merry-go-round. It’s a choice that I have made to ride the roller coaster.”*