Putting Growth at Center Stage

“The Difficult We Do Immediately. The Impossible Takes a Little Longer.”

This motto is posted front and center on a placard atop Shashin Desai’s desk. It more or less dares visitors to come up with daunting challenges for Desai to tackle.

Let’s see now . . . how about defying your wealthy father in your choices of career and bride and moving halfway around the world to create a new life? Nope, Desai already did all that. He left a cushy environment in India, married outside his caste and became one of the Southland’s most prominent small-theater producers.

OK then, here’s what many people have long viewed as a true mission impossible: Create an ongoing professional theater company in the 862-seat Center Theater of the Long Beach Performing Arts Center.

Desai has been on that particular case for more than a decade, but his campaign will reach a critical point this week, with the opening Friday of his revival of Michael Frayn’s farce “Noises Off.”

For the first time, Desai will use 349 of the Center Theater’s seats, almost double the capacity of his previous shows there. Also for the first time, the Center is serving as the only home of Desai’s company, International City Theatre, which began 15 years ago in a 99-seat space at Long Beach City College and continued operating there through last year.

The Center Theater, behind the larger and more frequently used Terrace Theater, was originally supposed to be Long Beach’s version of the Mark Taper Forum--with a similar configuration but a much more spacious backstage and lobby. Over the decades, however, “it has been greatly underutilized,” in the words of Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill.

The venue opened in 1978. Two producers were brought in who tried--and failed--to make a go of it, in successive 1978 and 1979 seasons with big-name stars. More recently, Long Beach Opera used it, but only for two or three weekends a year, and the company left in 1996. A couple of organizations that presented musicals in the Terrace Theater also made sporadic stabs at bringing the smaller sister space to life, but nothing stuck.

In 1990, Desai made his first attempt to launch a resident company at the Center Theater. The effort--known as Long Beach Repertory Theatre--failed before the first show opened. Its financial backer, the Regional Arts Foundation, “pulled the rug out,” Desai said. Foundation officials cited inadequate responses to initial mailings and fund-raising.

After that fiasco, Desai made two vows to himself: to avoid depending on another organization and to speak to at least one new person each day who might help him create a company in the Center Theater. Beginning in 1996--when he gave one of his earlier productions, “Tapestry,” a test run in the Center Theater--he gradually began introducing his International City Theatre audiences to the new space.

By 1999, Desai had built the International City Theatre season to the point where it included four shows in the Center Theater and four in the ICT’s 99-seat home base. But he was using only 190 of the seats at the Center Theater, and his company’s total budget was $598,000.

This year, he will present five shows at the Center, using 349 seats, which entails much greater costs. His budget this year: $1 million.

Although the city of Long Beach has declared ICT to be the resident company at the city-owned Center Theater, and the city’s arts agency has upped its grant to ICT from $23,000 last year to $52,000 this year, the company still has to pay rent--a condition that Desai hopes will change in the coming year. Meanwhile, he left his longtime teaching job at Long Beach City College last year, so his safe academic haven is gone.

The expansion of ICT is a risky proposition, but then Desai is a risk taker from way back.

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Born in Bombay about six decades ago, Desai was 15 when his father forbade him to participate in school plays. The textiles manufacturer was concerned that his oldest son, who was supposed to take over the family business when he grew up, was becoming too interested in the theater. Young Shashin responded by climbing down from his balcony to attend rehearsals surreptitiously.

Eventually Shashin’s father relented enough to send his son, while still a teenager, to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London--as long as Shashin told his friends back home that he was studying radio engineering. While in London, Desai met USC theater professor James Butler, who urged him to come to the university but suggested that he get his bachelor’s degree first. Desai returned to India for a year and obtained his degree in literature at Gujarat University. Then he was off to L.A., where he received a somewhat surreal welcome.

While supporting his graduate studies with a job as a janitor at USC, Desai was working one day when he was approached by representatives from a local TV show, “It Could Be You.” Probably through the offices of Butler, they had heard Desai’s sad tale of his girlfriend back home, whom he wanted to marry, much to the disapproval of his father. The TV show arranged for her to fly to America and wed Desai--as long as he would pretend to be surprised when she emerged from behind the curtain.

“It was my acting debut,” Desai recalled with a laugh. The wedding took place in a Christian ceremony before 200 guests he hardly knew--he had been in America only five months. But he didn’t care about the details; he was happy to be married. His father, meanwhile, responded by removing all pictures of Shashin from the house.

After five years at USC, Shashin had earned two master’s degrees, in film and theater directing, and he and his wife were parents of a young daughter. He worked briefly at MGM, on the film “How the West Was Won.” But “I had other aspirations than to run errands,” he said.

Although he was thrilled by America, Desai was restless. After a stint as a counselor for international students at USC, he and his young family took off for 18 months to see the world. They finally landed back home in India, where Desai, now reconciled with his father, started teaching directing at the National Institute of Film. The job lasted only one day. Dispirited by a colleague’s remark that he would probably still be doing the same work in five years, Desai returned to USC as a counselor and a teacher of acting in the theater department.

In the mid-’60s, Desai received a job offer from Long Beach City College. A superior at USC promptly informed Desai that LBCC was “an academic Siberia in a town where the other half of the population is fish.” But the community college would give Desai the opportunity to teach both theater and film instead of making him choose one or the other. So he made the move, becoming a full-timer there in 1967 and remaining until he retired last year.

At Long Beach, with ICT, Desai created what he believes was the first professional company in residence at a community college. Mayor O’Neill, who was previously an LBCC administrator, recalled that Desai was “a hard person to say no to.”

At first the company attracted attention for its work with new plays, opening in 1985 with one of the first plays about AIDS to be presented in the area. As the company grew and Desai’s ambitions turned toward the Center Theater, however, his programming became less adventurous. “I didn’t want to be crucified right away,” he said. “It was safer to do plays that might be familiar but hadn’t been done in this area for a while.”

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This season, however, offers two West Coast premieres--the Rodgers & Hart revue “Beguiled Again,” and “Bed and Sofa,” a small musical inspired by a Russian silent film--as well as a play about political corruption, “The Deal,” that has been seen only in small theaters around L.A. Joining these are two more familiar plays, “Noises Off” and “Loot.”

Desai’s first marriage dissolved in 1978, and he is now married to ICT’s general manager, caryn morse desai (no, she doesn’t use capital letters in her name). They first met when she was his student, but the romance didn’t take off until years later, Desai said.

The mom-and-pop operation is hiring more staff, and it doesn’t plan to stop at 349 seats. Desai’s eventual goal is to use 733 seats of his company’s new home--everything except the far sides--by 2004, and to add a new play festival modeled after the famous Humana Festival at Louisville.

Desai said he has attended every performance his company offered since it began, unless he was out of town. “The key element is that the audience knows the person they’re writing their check to,” he said. “It’s important to get their trust. And then to say: ‘I want to take you to these new experiences. Hold my hand.’ ”

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“NOISES OFF,” Center Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Dates: Opens Friday. Plays Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends March 5. Prices: $25 to $35; opening night, $40; with opening reception, $60. Phone: (562) 436-4610.