El Portal Schedules ‘Surprises’

With a surprisingly fresh series of plays waiting in the wings, El Portal Center for the Arts is preparing to burst into the ranks of L.A.’s mid-sized theaters.

El Portal is a former movie palace on Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood that’s being transformed from earthquake debris into a new 390-seat theater plus two smaller spaces, thanks to $5.8 million in federal recovery money. El Portal Center for the Arts is the umbrella organization that will program the facility and offer subscription seasons.

Actors Alley, the longtime San Fernando Valley theater company that spearheaded the transformation of El Portal and has already produced a number of shows in the smallest of its three spaces, will be the building’s resident company--with its membership divided into three categories that delineate who can audition for shows in all three theaters, in just the two smaller spaces or in just the smallest. It also will offer educational and outreach programs.

The ties between Actors Alley and the center are close. El Portal artistic director Jeremiah Morris and president Robert Caine held similar positions at Actors Alley. But other actors are also eligible to audition for El Portal shows, and the spaces will probably be used for co-productions with other companies or rentals, too.

The move from a sub-100-seat venue to a mid-sized theater--from the token actors’ fees of Actors Equity’s 99 Seat Theater Plan to a real Equity contract that comes close to paying actors a living wage--is the most coveted but also the most perilous rite of passage in L.A. theater. It would surprise no one if El Portal used its larger space for relatively safe programming, assuming it would attract bigger audiences, while keeping less familiar titles in the small spaces--a strategy that International City Theatre in Long Beach has generally followed.

Think again. El Portal is planning to stage generally unfamiliar titles in the 390-seat space. They’re not completely untested, however.

Opening the center will be Joe DiPietro’s “Over the River and Through the Woods” (Jan. 14-Feb. 6), with Joe Campanella. This off-Broadway comedy about an Italian family is by the author of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change.” (Pasadena Playhouse has scheduled another DiPietro comedy, “The Kiss at City Hall,” to open the same weekend.)

“Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.” (March 17-April 9), by Ronald Stevens and Jaye Stewart, is another off-Broadway transfer, set in 1931 on the black vaudeville circuit.

Hal Linden is slated to star in the series’ one old play, Ferenc Molnar’s “The Play’s the Thing,” adapted by P.G. Wodehouse (May 12-June 4).

The first season is scheduled to conclude with perhaps its cheekiest offering, Ben Elton’s “Popcorn” (Sept. 8-Oct. 1, 2000), which won a 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for best comedy in London. It’s set in Beverly Hills, as an Oscar-winning director of violent films confronts a real-life hostage crisis. As of now, El Portal hopes to present the play’s American premiere.

Meanwhile, in the 99-seat Circle Theatre, a parallel season will offer a reprise of a former Actors Alley hit, “The Puppetmaster of Lodz”; Charles Higham’s new mystery-comedy, “Murder by Moonlight”; “The Three Sisters”; and “La Ronde 2000,” a new version of another previous Actors Alley production, by Peter Lefcourt.

The company has about $700,000, privately raised, to pay for the first season, said Caine. Details of an Equity contract haven’t been negotiated yet, but Caine said that the contracts under consideration do not differ significantly in their potential costs.

The organization’s new executive director, Geoffrey Shlaes, has experience with a similar facility--for the last five years he ran the 194-seat Forty-Seventh Street Theatre in New York, which houses the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre and is also used for other productions, including “Rollin’ on the T.O.B.A.” Shlaes grew up in Beverly Hills before receiving degrees from Princeton and the Goodman School of Drama.

The Actors’ Alley team sounds confident that the San Fernando Valley can support a mid-sized company, citing the number of Valley subscribers to theaters that are farther away. “I know there’s an audience in the Valley. If I fail to reach it, I’ll take the blame,” Morris said.

“Part of our job is to stay a step ahead of the audience and give them surprises,” Shlaes said, explaining the lack of familiar fare. “Our subscription brochure,” available around the end of June, “will be a survey. We’ll find out quickly if they respond.”