Late-Night Curtain Falls

By MIKE BOEHM

Dec. 30, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Scratch seeing a play from your list of late-night entertainment options in Orange County.

The Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills has abandoned its “Midnight Madness” shows, and Stages in Fullerton, the other small, grass-roots theater that has put on after-hours plays, has none planned in the coming months.

Both companies had programmed doubleheaders on weekend nights. An 8 p.m. main attraction would be followed by a second play, with separate admission, starting at 10:30 or so and running until about midnight. But the night owls haven’t been coming.

“For all the effort put in, it was really hard to get an audience out that late,” said Oanh Nguyen, executive producer of the Chance. Dubbing the series “Midnight Madness” wasn’t such a hot idea, either, he said: “It made people think it started at midnight and went on, till whenever.”

The Chance will continue opening the theater occasionally for late-night shows by outside comedy groups who do sketches and improvisations. “Those worked really well in the late slots,” Nguyen said.

The concept of the theatrical doubleheader remains integral at the Chance. It’s just that the secondary show that used to run after the main attraction will now flip into a 5 p.m. slot. On Saturdays it will precede the prime-time play; Sundays it will run after the 2 p.m. matinee. The Chance’s 2001 season will feature seven “Main Stage” shows--five of them established works--and seven “Evolving Stage” plays, all but one a new or unheralded play.

Concentrating on Prime Time

At Stages, producing artistic director Brian Kojac says he is concentrating on his prime-time shows for the first half of 2001, although he remains open to doing late shows if something interesting comes along.

The late shows serve as sort of a farm system for the theater’s main productions; Kojac doesn’t expect them to draw more than 10 to 20 people, typically the actors’ friends and family. But he does want the late shows to break even.

“As long as we’re able to pay the bills, it’s justified as a workout for the actors, directors and writers involved. Hopefully, they get stronger and better and we channel them into our prime-time projects.”

The primary mission at both Stages, founded in 1993, and the Chance, which opened in 1999, is to develop new plays. That’s always a hard sell, and each theater finds itself about $25,000 in debt. Kojac at Stages and the Chance’s Nguyen and artistic director Erika Ceporius took on personal debt via bank loan or credit card to get their respective spaces built in 1999. Kojac says he owes an additional $7,000 to family members who lent him money to start the original Stages in an Anaheim warehouse district.

Stages and the Chance both are black boxes occupying suites in commercial strips. Each seats about 50 people in steeply sloped “stadium-style” rows that afford good sight lines.

Stages currently features two new plays running in repertory, “Nipping at Your Nose,” William Mittler’s account of a family of brothers suffering from acute Peter Pan syndrome and the increasingly impatient women in their lives, and “Roma’s House,” Artie O’Daly’s “Rent”-like rock musical about struggling twentysomethings uneasily sharing a house. After they end, Kojac plans to focus for a few months on single shows with longer runs and more concentrated promotion aimed at building an audience.

“The Elephant Man,” Bernard Pomerance’s popular play (which became a hit film), “Going to Greenland” by local writer Joel Beers, and “Headcheese--The Musical,” the eighth in a popular annual series of company-generated evenings of raunchy sketch humor, will carry Stages into mid-May.

The Chance, which enjoyed success with two Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in 2000, will open its 2001 season with “The Pirates of Penzance.” Other popular, proven titles--”Steel Magnolias,” “Pippin,” “Little Women,” “Our Town”--are calculated to help float the new works and pay down the theater’s debt.

The parallel courses of Stages and the Chance will intersect this season: Amanda DeMaio, a Stages company member who has directed seven shows at the theater, will lend her expertise to the Chance as director of “Steel Magnolias” and of her own play, “Unrelenting Relaxation,” an account of five women forced into sexual slavery during World War II as “comfort women” for the Japanese military. “Relaxation” was first produced by Stages several years ago.

No Longer the New Kid

Nguyen points to DeMaio and other experienced directors lined up for 2001 as validation that the Chance is starting to establish itself after a couple of probationary seasons as the new theater on the block.

Kojac sees no problem in DeMaio or other Stages members seizing opportunities elsewhere.

“They’ll only get better through [those] experiences and they’ll probably appreciate what they have here. I want these other small theaters to succeed, because they’re building an audience for theater [in general]. If they take some of our stronger talent and it helps them, I’m all for that.”

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Stages Schedule

“Nipping at Your Nose” by William Mittler, through Jan. 13.

“Roma’s House” by Artie O’Daly, through Jan. 21.

“The Elephant Man” by Bernard Pomerance, Feb. 2-March 3.

“Going to Greenland” by Joel Beers, March 9-April 7

“Headcheese--the Musical,” April 13-May 12.

Other shows to be announced.

Information: (714) 525-4484.

Chance Theater Schedule

Main Stage

“The Pirates of Penzance” by Gilbert and Sullivan, Jan. 12-Feb. 18.