Dean of County Theater Gives It Body and Soul

Sometimes Michael Angel Maynez’s devotion to the theater goes against better judgment.

Eleven days before the debut of his most recent production, the founder of Ventura’s Plaza Players theater group checked into a hospital for a prostate operation.

But worried that actors might try to postpone the premiere of Paul Rudnick’s comedy “I Hate Hamlet,” Maynez, 71, kept his hospital stay a secret.

“I just didn’t let the cast know,” said Maynez, the Plaza Players’ artistic director and a common sight in downtown Ventura with his white beard, shaved head and searing green eyes. “I kept on asking the doctor, ‘When am I going to make it out of here because I have a rehearsal?’ ”

Now recovered, Maynez is leading the Plaza Players into its 48th season, making the group the oldest theater company in Ventura County.

The Plaza Players’ longevity has surprised local theater observers, who began writing the group’s obituary last July.

At the time, citing problems such as paying the rent and competing with loud music from nearby buildings, the company abandoned a prime downtown location at the Livery on North Palm Street. But the group resurfaced several months later--and just several blocks away--at the Senior Recreation Center with the Rudnick piece.

“It looked like we weren’t going to have a ’96 season,” said Maynez during a recent interview in his antique-filled living room overlooking the waterfront Ventura Promenade. “Then I said, ‘What difference does it make where I do the plays? As long as I have a venue, the audience will come.’ ”

Sure enough, Maynez and the Plaza Players have hopped from community centers to Elks Lodges to auditoriums for nearly 50 years, bringing new and sometimes daring theater to Ventura County.

“He is basically an institution in Ventura County as far as the arts go,” said Hugh McManigal, a 33-year-old local actor who has worked with Maynez on and off for eight years. “For many years he has set the standards for quality theater in the area, with the types of theater he brings and the risks he takes with the choices of his work.”

Although Maynez has put on scores of classics such as “My Fair Lady” and “The Sound of Music,” he has long been known for producing controversial plays or pieces with strong sexual overtones, including “Bent” and “Women Behind Bars.”

“Michael tends to play to the sexual tones of a piece,” McManigal said. “Other people would shy away from those parts that a writer has put there for a purpose.”

Even Maynez’s answering machine welcomes callers to “the wickedly wonderful world of Plaza Players, where you can be intimately involved or slightly detached, but never indifferent.”

Maynez, whose face often breaks into an impish smile, admits to a penchant for doing pieces that he calls “wicked theater.”

“At the time that I did them, they shocked the community,” Maynez said, naming plays by Tennessee Williams and other playwrights. “You can imagine 40 years ago ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ in Oxnard.”

But Maynez said he shakes up audiences not to shock, but to force them to think in new ways.

One patron, enraged by a performance of the play “Bent” dealing with the Nazis’ treatment of homosexuals, criticized Maynez during intermission for putting the play on in Ventura. But several weeks later, he told Maynez the piece had forced him to read up on the subject, giving him a better understanding of history.

“Theater can change people’s lives,” said Maynez with a triumphant pat on his knee.

Many local actors praise Maynez for giving them their first break and for teaching them the craft. But while many actors say he can be a brilliant director, many also say Maynez can be too tough on cast members, driving some away from the theater for good.

“Even though he is a bully director, he bullied me until I saw my potential,” said Leila Perlmutter, a 48-year-old actress from Port Hueneme who performed with the Plaza Players for 33 years. “He taught me how to be an actress, how to be a real person.”

But Perlmutter left the Plaza Players in 1992--after meeting her husband in the company--because she said Maynez had become too difficult to work with.

“I don’t know what happened to him over the years. I won’t ever go back,” she said.

“He throws shoes at actors when he is upset with them,” said John Larsen, a 38-year-old entertainment writer who worked as the Plaza Players’ marketing director in the early 1990s. “That was the main complaint of actors. He has done some really great work. But he is just a prima donna type of person.”

Maynez admits he can be demanding of actors. “I like commitment. I hate people who are tardy and I hate people who come unprepared and think they are going to learn lines on my own time.”

Some actors say that despite Maynez’s demanding style, he always treats his cast with respect.

“He is larger than life, but he is not arrogant,” said Leslie Vitanza, a 28-year-old Ventura actress who played a real estate agent in the Rudnick piece. “While the production is his baby, he is very actor-oriented. With a lot of other directors, their ego is on the line and they don’t care about what the actors think.”

Born in 1924 to a Mexican immigrant family in El Paso, Texas, Maynez grew up speaking Spanish at home with his parents, two brothers and one sister.

It wasn’t until he was 12, when the Maynez family moved to Pasadena, that he first discovered the arts in school--poetry, painting classes, field trips to the theater and museums.

“I thought, ‘This is school?’ ” Maynez said. “I loved it.”

The Maynez family moved again three years later--this time to Oxnard, where his parents opened a Mexican restaurant at 6th and Meta streets.

Maynez said he had good high school teachers, including one who helped him reduce his accent by teaching him to read poetry. But it was a backstage visit to CBS Radio studios in Los Angeles that sealed his interest in the theater.

There, he witnessed sound technicians pounding coconut halves on the floor to mimic the sound of horses’ hooves. “All of a sudden, the incredible gossamer of the imagination was shredded to meat,” Maynez said. “All of a sudden, I realized it was all in my mind.”

Maynez acted in a few minor roles in high school productions, but World War II delayed his career in the theater. Maynez was drafted after graduation in 1942 and shipped out to Italy, where he joined a ski trooper unit.

“I didn’t even know how to ski,” Maynez said. “But I learned.”

Despite his newfound skill, Maynez narrowly escaped death by an enemy bullet.

“I was shot in my head, which accounts for why I love the theater,” Maynez said, displaying the faded Army-green helmet where the bullet blew a golf-ball size hole but just grazed his skull.

While on leave, Maynez met Victoria, a pianist who was hired to entertain the Allied troops in Bologna, Italy. The two eventually became lovers and had a son, Mirko.

Although Maynez and Victoria stayed together for less than a year, Maynez travels to Europe often and visits his son, now 49 and an engineer living near Naples.

“He has never come to the U.S.,” said Maynez, who has never married. “But we have a very good relationship.”

At the end of the war, Maynez returned to Southern California in 1945 and enrolled at the Ben Bard School of Drama in Los Angeles.

After three years of learning to act, direct and write scripts, Maynez returned to Oxnard to help his parents build a home.

But soon he again felt the theater’s pull and enrolled in night classes in drama at Oxnard High School, where students encouraged him to lead their first attempt at producing a play.

“The students started hounding me and saying, ‘Why don’t you start a little group?’ ” Maynez said. “One day I just showed up with a bunch of plays and said, ‘Here it is.’ ”

The group put on “The Philadelphia Story” and the Plaza Players were born.

While still directing, Maynez took a job in a supply office at the Port Hueneme Navy base, where he worked for 10 years. But in 1961, he realized he could no longer hold a full-time job and also do theater.

When he told his supervisors that he planned to quit, they urged him to just take a leave of absence.

“I said, ‘No, I want to burn my bridges so I don’t have any recourse but to go forward with theater,’ ” Maynez said.

Maynez has gone forward ever since.

By his own count, he now has at least 257 plays under his belt as a director.

On a recent weeknight, Maynez and the cast of “I Hate Hamlet” filed into the community room of Maynez’s apartment complex for a run-through of the play.

With its beige walls and pastel carpet, the room looked more like a motel lobby than a funky theater space.

“He’ll rehearse anywhere,” said McManigal, who was preparing for his role as a fast-talking, nouveau riche television producer.

Some actors grumbled that the triangular-shaped space was less than ideal for rehearsals. And a neighbor came out on her balcony above the community room to gripe about the noise.

But Maynez, who has held many rehearsals in his apartment itself, called the community room a big improvement. The director held back on his critique for most of the 2 1/2-hour run-through and instead chuckled at lines in the script. “Only if the actors get really far away from the concept do I interfere,” said Maynez, resting his clasped hands on his round belly.

Maynez, who had surgery in 1991 after suffering from an anginal attack, has no plans to stop directing. Although he has not selected his next production, Maynez said he is closing in on a play about a German psychiatrist.

“As long as there is some breath of life in me, I want to do theater,” Maynez said. “I don’t know what else to do. Sell furniture?”