A Theater of One’s Own

Richard Kaye sure did teach Steven Spielberg a lesson.

It was almost three years ago, back when Kaye was mulling over a lease for the Silver Lake storefront that is now the theater space called Glaxa Studios. He had trepidations: He’d never run any business, let alone a theater.

But on one of his many trips to City Hall to check permits and zoning, Kaye saw another name on the building’s file request form: Steven Spielberg.

“I got really panicked,” Kaye said. “I thought there’s somebody going down to Rosen Realty right now with a briefcase full of money to take this space.” He sprinted three blocks to the realty office, burst in and demanded to sign the lease. “For a few days I felt really high that I had wrestled Glaxa away from Steven Spielberg.”

At City Hall later, Kaye smugly asked the clerk if Spielberg had made the inquiry himself or just sent a lackey.

The woman laughed. Oh, she said, if people forget to write in their names, we fill in the blanks with any old name.

Oh well. He’d signed the lease and written the check. And since then he’s made the best of it, without any help from Spielberg.

Glaxa--which is composed of two 70-seat theaters flanking a small cafe--has emerged as Silver Lake’s prominent venue for experimental theater and performance art, sort of the Eastside’s answer to Highways. Kaye, 45, a believer in the Jewish Prophetic tradition, said the name stands for: God’s Love And eXcellent Adventure. Jewish prophets, he explained, were occasionally humbled by God and had to petition the Lord for guidance. “I thought that since I was brought to my knees anyway, I might as well ask for help.”

Help, it seems, has arrived in the form of activity. Lots of it. The two theaters--dubbed Studio A and Studio K--are abuzz with rehearsals or performances nearly every night. Preparing to open this Friday is “Murdered Sleep: A Meditation on Macbeth,” written and directed by John Steppling, Wesley Walker and Guy Zimmerman of the writing group Empire Red Lip, a piece Kaye scheduled based on the strength of the group’s earlier “The Conquest of the New World.” Opening Thursday in Studio K is “Ninshaba,” a fantasy play based on a Middle Eastern myth and told in a poetic language invented by writer-director Stephen Legawiec.

All the two have in common, it seems, is that they appeal to Kaye’s instincts. “I was enchanted by it,” he said of “Ninshaba,” which he agreed to stage after hearing the story from the writer and lead actress. “I wanted it because I knew it was highly unusual. I could tell, this guy has major brains.”

Glaxa also has evolved, in part, as a neighborhood affair. Silver Lake is home to many writers, musicians, artists and actors, and Kaye is committed to them as audience members and as performers. Locals like writer-performer Kevin Hincker, performance artists Carol Cetrone and Lauren Campedelli have used Glaxa, and Kaye also opens the place up to Silver Lake bands like the Negro Problem and Solid Eye. “It’s important that the place keep it’s feet in the people who are living here and have a cultural life,” he said. Glaxa’s also got some carry-over from the building’s former tenant, Olio, a bare-bones performance space that peaked in the early ‘80s but was only sporadically active by 1990.

Underground theater denizen Robert Prior, for example, who had performed at Olio years before, stumbled into the just-remodeled Glaxa in 1994 to see what had become of his old haunt. A few months later, he founded the Fabulous Monsters Performance Group, which set the tone for Glaxa with its first play: a transvestite version of Jean Genet’s “The Maids.” Glaxa has continued to be the Fabulous Monsters’ home through half a dozen shows so far, including “Blood Red Rabbit.”

But Glaxa doesn’t just draw from Silver Lake’s soul--it gives something back. “Silver Lake was devastated by AIDS, and a lot of things closed,” Prior said. “In the early ‘90s, it was turning into a ghost town. It got kind of bleak. And Glaxa seemed like it was part of taking the territory back.”

Glaxa also is heir apparent to the avant-garde legacy of the Pipeline and Wallenboyd, said Alex Wright, who co-founded both of those downtown theaters in the mid-’80s. Performers in the downtown scene who retreated from theater in the early ‘90s have resurfaced at Glaxa--including Wright, who will direct the Jacobean revenge play “The White Devil” in April.

Kaye explained Glaxa’s magnetism this way: “I think it’s that you can easily do a show here without being asked to wait and raise money and go before a committee.” He is the panel of one who decides what goes. He offers free rehearsal space and charges only $150 a performance--about half the price of most Hollywood stages--plus a percentage of ticket sales. Shows he really believes in, he produces himself.

“I really need to keep it busy,” he said. “For survival, I pick the best of what I find.”

And Kaye doesn’t just book plays, he issues challenges. He got actor-performance artist Kedric Robin Wolfe to come out of self-imposed exile in Topanga to do three shows in repertory. He convinced Bob Devin Jones, a Silver Lake neighbor who directs theater all over the country, to do a solo piece based on the writings of James Baldwin.

Sitting behind a wooden 1940s desk, illuminated by a matching-era lamp, the wear of the last few years showed a little in the reddened edges of Kaye’s blue eyes.

Kaye has been relentlessly driven to keep Glaxa going, Prior said. “He really cares about what’s in the theater. He watches things and pays attention, and is genuinely enthusiastic about things he likes. And that’s nice. A lot of times an artist can feel like a boarder.”

Kaye is, in fact, a boarder himself. He lives in a loft in a storage area behind and above the theaters. Good thing, too, or he might never go home. For the first 18 months, his living quarters were a windowless room accessible only by a ladder and trap door. When he opened the second theater, he got a proper staircase, an office and installed skylights. When he finally got daylight in his bedroom, he said, he sat on his bed and wept, it felt that profound.

An Air Force brat, Kaye grew up in Morocco and Japan before landing in Florida in his teens. He wound up earning a master’s degree in social work at Berkeley in the late ‘70s before returning to his lifelong love, acting. With little planning, he hopped a plane to Los Angeles and rented a cheap hotel room in Hollywood.

Kaye was 5 feet, 4 inches of unflappable eagerness--the kind of guy who would leap the fence at Paramount to go see the studio chief. (“You can get away with that when you’re 25,” Kaye quipped. “When you’re 35 or 40, it gets pathetic.”) His chutzpah landed him in the office of John Cassavetes, who, Kaye said, saw right through his bravado but offered him a job anyway.

Off and on for 10 years, Kaye did everything from directing dialogue to set photography for Cassavetes, who in turn pushed Kaye into writing. “He knew that you were powerless in this business if you were at the mercy of other people’s creations,” Kaye said. Finally, when the writer-director fell ill, he turned to Kaye--not necessarily the obvious choice--to be the producer for what was his last stage play, “A Woman of Mystery.”

But after Cassavetes’ death in 1989, Kaye found he was another Hollywood refugee with a few optioned scripts and no career. He fell back on his master’s degree in social work. For three years he counseled terminal cancer and AIDS patients and their families for a hospice in Calabasas. That’s what he was doing when someone told him that the Olio theater was vacant. It seemed fated, Kaye said. “For once in my life, I had a few bucks set aside.”

It’s tough, however, making money in 99-seat-plan theater. Kaye is trying to develop a larger theater and film production center downtown, and is thinking of making his theater production company nonprofit. “I’d like to be able to put more into the show than we can always make back,” he said. “The nonprofit would let Glaxa produce new and strange and sometimes daring stuff without constantly facing the gangplank.”

*

GLAXA STUDIOS, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake. (213) 663-5295. Studio A: “Murdered Sleep: A Meditation on Macbeth.” Friday through March 23. Fridays to Sundays, 8 p.m. $12. (213) 666-6130. Studio K: “Ninshaba.” Thursday through March 23. Thursdays to Sundays, 8 p.m. $12. (213) 466-1767.