New Writers’ Venue Enters Santa Ana Arts Scene

Another link in downtown Santa Ana’s evolution toward becoming the county’s hub for grass-roots arts and bohemian night life could be in place by September: a 50-seat theater devoted solely to new plays, with a special focus on local writers.

The board of the New Voices Playwrights Workshop voted unanimously last week to start its own theater in a now-vacant row of storefronts at Broadway and 3rd Street in the Artists Village district.

Christopher Trela, the New Voices artistic director, said remodeling could begin by mid-April, dividing the space into theater, lobby and backstage areas, pending final negotiations on a lease.

New Voices, a circle of about 15 local writers, meets and stages shows at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse. A venue of its own would free the group to present a full season of plays and public readings without having to work around another theater’s schedule and set designs.

New Voices’ board had considered opening a new theater about a year ago, Trela said. It concluded that the group wasn’t financially ready. Nor was it sold on the Artists Village.

“Downtown Santa Ana has always had that stigma, but that’s changing as people go down there” and see the growth in night life and arts activity, Trela said.

No theater in Orange County has survived staging nothing but new work by unknown playwrights. The Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills tried it last year, its first season, but drew an average of about 15 people per performance. The Chance has brought familiar pieces into the mix this year in hopes of building its audience.

Trela says New Voices is different because it has had a nearly three-year head start in cultivating fans for its members’ plays via readings and productions in theaters where it has had guest privileges.

The group also places its faith in the idea that downtown Santa Ana will soon blossom as a busy hub for arts and dining.

The New Voices Playwrights Theater, as it will be called barring a large enough donation to earn naming rights, would be the fourth small theater within the Artists Village, which runs roughly from 1st to 4th streets between Broadway and Sycamore Street. It joins Alternative Repertory Theatre, the Rude Guerrilla Theatre Company’s Empire Theater and the Hunger Artists Theatre.

The Orange County Crazies comedy troupe is planning a May 19 opening for a fifth small theater, the DePietro Performance Center, a few blocks away, at 809 N. Main St.

Other expected new arrivals in the area this fall include Memphis at the Santora, an offshoot of the successful Memphis Cafe Southern-style restaurant in Costa Mesa, and the Orange County High School of the Arts, which will occupy a high-rise campus in a former bank building on Main Street.

“You’ve got a destination point now,” said Trela, who works nearby as public relations and marketing manager for the Discovery Science Center. “People can go have dinner, look at an art gallery, come to see the show and have coffee after.”

Nevertheless, he said, New Voices is being conservative in its planning. The group wants a first lease of only one or two years, with options after that.

“We want to be as optimistic as possible yet at the same time not be stuck in a three- to five-year lease if after a year and a half it’s not working,” Trela said.

New Voices estimates that it will spend $20,000 to open the theater. Trela said the group has about $8,000 on hand and aims to raise the rest with dinners, auctions and direct solicitation of arts patrons. Once open, the theater will have an estimated annual operating budget of about $40,000.

New Voices aims to offer a first season of eight or nine new productions--some of them full-length plays, others evenings of one-act or 10-minute plays. Nightcap productions after the main show are likely as well. Trela envisions the theater being active every night with rehearsals, productions, readings or meetings of the playwrights’ circle, in which members discuss each other’s writing in hopes of refining their plays.

New Voices’ member playwrights have enough plays of their own in shape to fill a first season themselves, Trela said. But the theater will have an open-door policy, inviting new work from any source, including Orange County’s other grass-roots playwrights circle, the Orange County Playwrights Alliance. Since last summer New Voices has solicited plays from outside, winnowing some 40 submissions to a handful that could be contenders for slots in the new theater’s opening season.

Actors, playwrights and technicians will be paid a small stipend that amounts to “gas money,” Trela said.

“Even if it’s a small amount, we want to at least show the people who work with us that we appreciate what they’re doing,” he said.

“This is very exciting for us,” Trela said. “Now we’ve really got our work cut out.”

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New Voices information: (949) 225-4125.

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Live Theater in Santa Ana

Santa Ana’s Artists Village will add a new theater focusing on local writers.

Existing theaters in Artists Village:

1. Hunger Arts Theatre

2. Empire Theatre

3. Alternative Repertory Theatre