Tiny, Off-the-Wall Theater Hangs On for 20 Years : Long Beach: Its plays, most of them original, satirize and provoke thought about political and social issues.

Susan Malmstrom admits that she was nervous the first time she attended a play at the 40-seat storefront Found Theatre, which sits between a sandwich shop and a bridal store on a drab, busy street in downtown Long Beach.

“It’s really a tiny alternative theater and you don’t know what you’ll get into,” she said. “If you leave, you almost have to cross the stage and everyone will notice you.”

But her reticence quickly vanished. Malmstrom loved the production, “Bus Trip to Vegas,” in which a group of bizarre characters journey to the gambling mecca for a few hours to try to strike it rich. Among the passengers were a mother-daughter country duo dubbed The Juggs, a beauty queen and a Barbie doll clone.

“It was absolutely hysterical,” said Malmstrom, who reviews applications for arts grants for the Public Corp. for the Arts in Long Beach. “It made fun of our materialistic culture.”

The production was typical of the wacky, off-the-wall plays that the theater has presented for 20 years. The plays, most of them original, satirize and provoke thought about political and social issues of the day.

The Found is unabashed about being a “message” house, touching on themes ranging from hucksterism and corporate greed to spousal abuse and AIDS. But it’s hardly preaching. Instead, audiences laugh their way to enlightenment.

The Found has lampooned the shoe fetish of former Philippines First Lady Imelda Marcos, even covering the theater walls with shoes for the play. It has poked fun at coupon-clipping, coffee-drinking, soap opera-watching housewives, and parodied telethons and America’s obsession with fast food.

“It’s fun, fresh, low-cost experimental theater that’s not excruciating to sit through,” Malmstrom said.

At the Found, performers rarely sit. They walk, march, roll, stand on chairs, do reverse somersaults, and jump in and out of barrels as they mine a rich vein of vigorous, physical theater. The actors usually play multiple roles requiring quick costume changes.

The audience might see high drama one moment and something resembling an irreverent “Saturday Night Live” skit the next.

“We’re either subtle or right out there, in your face,” said Joyce Hackett, a Found actress who first came to the theater 18 years ago.

In the competitive and fragile world of live theater, where even major companies can falter, the Found has endured on a shoestring budget and modest ticket prices.

Observers attribute the theater’s success to the tenacity of the two women who lead it: Cynthia Galles, 42, who started the Found in 1974, and literary director Virginia DeMoss, 46, who signed on a year later. Galles and DeMoss “keep it going,” said Dorothea MacNeil, who has been attending Found plays almost since the theater opened.

But Galles insists that a core group of devoted “foundlings,” as company members are called, deserve the credit. They perform without pay, rehearsing three hours a night, five nights a week for several weeks before a play opens. They paint walls, make costumes and handle lighting and sound. When the theater was created, they built the stage and even searched for used theater seats.

“We were fortunate to have wonderful, generous, talented people willing to do everything,” Galles said. “People care about this theater.”

The reliance on volunteers allows the Found to stage five plays a year on a $15,000 budget earmarked mostly for rent and utilities. The Found’s choice of material has also permitted it to exist on a pittance. Original plays and public domain classics such as Shakespeare don’t require royalties.

The box office, which charges $10 admission for most plays, covers a large chunk of the costs. The theater also conducts fund-raisers and receives donations and grants. During the last two years, the Public Corp. for the Arts has given the Found a total of $6,875, according to Malmstrom.

The theater has no advertising budget, relying on word of mouth and press releases of upcoming performances to draw audiences.

Galles acknowledges that it has been a struggle to keep the Found afloat over the years. “We’ve never been off the edge,” she said.

The theater closed for a few months at one point to search for a new location after the rent was increased. And at some plays, the actors have outnumbered the audience.

MacNeil recalls one night when she was the only one in the audience. “I said, ‘Cynthia, you don’t have to put the play on,’ ” MacNeil recalled. “And she said, ‘We play even if we have only one person.’ ”

Marking its 20th anniversary, the theater is staging “Hot Flash Backs,” a collection of scenes from more than 20 plays that have been performed at the Found since it opened its doors. In the show, which wraps up at 8:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Galles, DeMoss and Hackett juggle 40 different roles with speedy costume changes and quick changes of character and mood.

The show features another Found trademark: a combination of live performances and video scenes projected on a wall behind the stage. In some instances, plays incorporate video and live action at the same time, with actors on the video exchanging lines with performers on stage.

About 80% of the Found’s plays are original. Even when established works are produced, they’re adapted to such an extent that even their authors might have trouble recognizing them. In “Cinderella,” for example, the health-conscious heroine persuaded the prince to finance her health food restaurant.

Sometimes, the entire theater becomes a part of the play. For the three-part “Beyond the Valley of the Flight Attendants,” in which the high-altitude servers took revenge on surly passengers by murdering them, the theater was transformed into an airplane. Members of the audience became passengers, with the attendants serving them refreshments.

On occasion, audience participation has gotten out of hand. During one performance of the housewife epic “Broads,” a man in the audience walked on the stage, took an ashtray from a table, walked back to his seat and lit a cigarette. One of the actors casually sauntered over and retrieved it as if that were part of the action.

Galles launched the theater at the suggestion of a college professor at UC Irvine. “Cynthia was a student of mine,” said the professor, Ashley Carr, who now teaches theater arts at Cal State Long Beach. “We were doing experimental pieces. I told her to set up her own theater.”

Galles and other UC Irvine theater arts graduates staged the first play in a church. They gave the theater its current name after they “found” their own space, a former Laundromat at 7th Street and Orange Avenue.

After the rent was raised a few years later, they moved the theater to its current site, a former printing shop, at 251 E. 7th St., just west of Long Beach Boulevard.

While many “foundlings” have been trained actors, others have gotten involved after seeing a few shows.

DeMoss started out attending Found plays. Her knowledge of theater was limited to studying classic plays as an English major in college, but in a few months, she found herself working backstage, then performing. She wrote her first Found play, a long monologue about a woman in a retirement home looking forward to a Liberace concert.

“It was exciting to see what I’d written (being performed) on stage,” DeMoss said. The Found quickly “became a large part of my life.”

DeMoss and others are quick to point out, however, that the theater is not a career.

“You have to have your day job to do your acting,” said Hackett, a hospital admissions officer who has acted at community colleges, sung with a jazz ensemble and is a member of Bard in the Yard, which performs summer Shakespeare on the Queen Mary.

DeMoss is a free-lance editor and writer for trade publications.

Galles works as a graphic artist and has some financial independence through her family, thus allowing her to focus on the Found.

She writes the bulk of the plays, although they are polished during rehearsal, with performers contributing dialogue and ideas for stage action. Galles also directs the productions and often performs.

While Galles would like the Found to play to full houses all the time and enjoy more financial security, she said moving to a larger facility would inhibit what the foundlings do best. “The kind of work we do is geared for a facility that’s small,” she said. “The intensity of the experience we give people would go down.”

Other storefront theaters have operated in Long Beach, but the Found is the sole survivor, observers say. The Out Theatre, dedicated to plays with gay and lesbian themes, is gone. The Uprising, a coffeehouse theater, closed.

John Traub, the Out’s founder, said he closed its in 1991 after five years because he “ran out of energy.” The Uprising, which staged 13 original plays a year, operated from 1986-88 before closing because of financial difficulties, according to Carr, its co-director.

Both Carr and Traub praise the Found’s productions.

Traub said the theater’s work is “very intelligent, entertainment that is thought provoking.”

Carr said the plays are “fun and dynamic. . . . There’s an audience for them or they wouldn’t have survived for 20 years.”

But observers say that without the perseverance and dedication of Galles and DeMoss, the Found would have met the same fate as the other storefront theaters that folded.

And if the Found were to vanish, so would a key outlet for original plays, they add.

“Larger theaters are not able to do this kind of original work,” said Nanci Andersen, who has been with the Found for nine years as an actress and lighting technician.

Added Malmstrom: “They’re the only smaller organization performing the kind of original material they come up with. There’s no more theater like (the Found) in Long Beach.”