Theater Sale Has Kitchen Cookin’

Petrie Robie’s mother, Frieda Berkoff, commissioned the building of the Coronet Theatre in 1947, and it remained in family hands for nearly 50 years. Robie decided recently that she wanted to sell it, but she was picky about the buyer.

“I wouldn’t have sold it to anyone who wouldn’t turn a princess into a queen,” Robie said. She conducted a private sale, approaching “at the most” about 10 potential buyers.

Last week it was announced that the building has been sold to Dee Gee Entertainment Group and will be used rent-free by the Playwrights’ Kitchen Ensemble. Robie says the 272-seat theater and adjoining properties are in good hands: “They fit the building, and the building fits them.”

For Los Angeles theatergoers, the sale means that the Coronet--most recently used for small commercial shows booked in from elsewhere--may again generate new productions.

That’s the intent of both Dee Gee--a film/TV company run by L.A.-based Deborah Del Prete and Chicago-based Gigi Pritzker--and PKE, which began using the theater for readings last Monday. PKE hopes to mount a subscription season of fully produced new plays within a year or so, assuming the money is raised.

The theater company was born in 1989 as PKE, but at that time the initials stood for Patchett Kaufman Entertainment, not Playwrights’ Kitchen Ensemble. It was initially funded by $100,000 from TV producers Tom Patchett and Ken Kaufman, who were backing “Wonder Years” star Dan Lauria’s plan to produce four new plays that might be adaptable to television or film, at rented 99-seat venues.

PKE soon downscaled to play readings instead of full productions--and as a result it was able to process more scripts. With celebrities frequently doing the reading, PKE ran a popular series at several venues, most recently the Canon in Beverly Hills (48 readings last year). Several plays moved to full productions elsewhere, including “The Crimson Thread,” “Sisters” and “In the Moonlight, Eddie” at Pasadena Playhouse and “Old Business” and “Ad Wars” at 99-seaters.

Lauria remains PKE’s artistic director but shares some duties with actor Richard Zavaglia, while “Old Business” writer-director Joe Cacaci and director Ted Weiant run the administrative side. The company acquired nonprofit status last year and began attracting more substantial money from new donors, such as Showtime ($30,000) and the Steve Tisch Foundation ($25,000).

The Dee Gee duo of Del Prete and Pritzker were drawn onto the PKE board through an introduction by actress Doris Roberts, who had participated in PKE readings. Del Prete and Pritzker started their company 11 years ago in New York. They said they’ve made money almost from the start, producing commercials, industrial films, music videos, documentaries and, more recently, the feature films “Simple Justice” and “Phantom of the Opera” (not based on the musical) and TV movies.

Pritzker’s family is one of America’s wealthiest, a clan most often associated with Hyatt Hotels; her father Jay is the president of the Hyatt Foundation, which endows the prestigious Pritzker Prize for Architecture. She acknowledged that about half of the $2 million that Dee Gee is paying for the Coronet is “Pritzker money”--but the theater is a project of Dee Gee, not the Pritzker family. Dee Gee began with “Scotch tape, smoke and mirrors,” Pritzker said, and Pritzker investments and Hyatt commercials came later--after the company was already established.

Dee Gee will use offices in the Coronet complex as its L.A. headquarters. Del Prete and Pritzker loved the Coronet from the moment they saw it last spring: “We could be happily ever after here.”

Robie had offered the most recent Coronet leaseholder, producer Jim Freydberg (whose “Big” just lost big money on Broadway), the chance to buy the complex. But he concluded that “for a commercial producer to pay anything over $1 million for it made no sense,” he said. “If it sold at $1.3 million, it would have doubled our costs” [over his leaseholder expenses]. He also wasn’t interested in the building’s non-theater parts.

“I felt the only way it could sell was if someone who was very well off could use it to support a nonprofit theater,” Freydberg said. “So it turns out they made exactly the right deal.”

One big problem is parking, but PKE board members are searching for nearby property that could become a parking structure. Plans to build a 99-seat theater elsewhere on the premises and a restaurant called, yes, Playwrights’ Kitchen may hinge on the resolution of that problem.

In the meantime, PKE is launching a $2-million fund-raising campaign, talking about annual stipends for as many as 10 writers, and hatching plans for as many as five plays in its first season.

Despite PKE’s connections with TV and film companies, everyone swears that its first mission is to create plays, not to be “a farm team” for the TV/movie industry, in Pritzker’s words.

Lauria put it bluntly, when asked if writers who are developed by PKE might forget about the theater after TV or film success:

“If they do, I’ll kill ‘em.”