Benefiting From Urban Renewal

While the Alternative Repertory Theatre copes with a financial crisis its leaders attribute partly to playgoers’ fears of downtown Santa Ana, two of its theatrical neighbors report attendance gains, and a third is betting $340,000 on the area’s future as an arts mecca.

In another boost for downtown’s Artists Village concept, the owners of Memphis Cafe, a popular Southern-style restaurant in Costa Mesa, plan to establish a second, much larger restaurant in the district later this year.

Dave Barton, artistic director of the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, which operates at the 50-seat Empire Theater across the street from ART, says its most recent production, “My Married Friends,” sold out a quarter of its performances and drew at least a half-filled house at its other shows. That follows Rude Guerrilla’s big success last fall with the West Coast premiere of “Corpus Christi,” a controversial play that imagined Jesus and his disciples as sexually active gay men.

“I am uncomfortable chalking up a theater’s lack of attendance to the fact it is in Santa Ana,” Barton said. “We have had no problem attracting people. None.”

Judy J. Marler, managing director of the 40-seat Hunger Artists Theatre Company, said attendance ran 20 to 25 per night for its recent production of “Of Mice and Women,” an all-female version of the John Steinbeck classic. That’s up from an average of 15 to 20 last year, she said.

Rude Guerrilla and the 2-year-old Hunger Artists skew toward a somewhat younger audience than ART, keep production costs much lower and price their tickets at $10 to $12, half of ART’s cost.

Downtown’s other theater company, the Orange County Crazies, hopes to open its new theater on Main Street in April, says Cherie Kerr, the comedy troupe’s founder. Kerr recently invested $340,000 from a Small Business Administration-backed loan to buy a building a few blocks north of the other theaters, which will house the Crazies and an assortment of musical performances.

The Crazies were the first theater group to move downtown, renting quarters from the Pacific Symphony in 1993.

“I think it was kind of scary at first for people to come here,” Kerr said. The Crazies responded by posting a security guard for their first two seasons downtown. Kerr said it became obvious none was needed.

Operators at all four theaters say crime has been negligible, confined to rare attempted car break-ins or hubcap thefts.

Santa Ana Police Lt. Dave Petko, district commander for the area that includes downtown, said the Artists Village sector is radically transformed from the early 1990s, when arrests for vagrancy, fighting and drunkenness were commonplace.

“The downtown detail spends a lot of time there. We wanted to make sure we improved the perception of that neighborhood,” Petko said. “The whole demographic has changed.” Petko said that crime in the Artists Village, bounded on the south and north by 1st and 4th streets, and on the west and east by Broadway and Main Street, has been confined to rare street thefts, with no violent crimes.

Mike McGee, project administrator for the Grand Central Art Center, home to art galleries, Cal State Fullerton’s graduate art program and ART, says that more than 34,000 people have visited the building in the year since it opened.

“I think there’s still a lingering stigma, but it’s eroding pretty quickly,” McGee said of the stereotype of downtown Santa Ana as a rotten core of urban decay. “The change is staggering. Five or six years ago when we came down here to start this project, you were stepping over people on the street and there were guys doing drug deals on the corner. If you go through the laundry list of [good] things that have happened in the past year, it’s amazing.”

The Orange County High School of the Arts figures to be the biggest new arrival, housing as many as 1,050 students when it opens in September in a former bank building on Main Street. Around the same time, Memphis expects to open in Santa Ana, said co-owner Dan Bradley.

Tentatively dubbed Memphis at the Santora, after its home--the Santora Building at Broadway and 2nd Street--the restaurant is still being designed and will probably take five or six months to open. With a bigger kitchen and as many as 150 seats, the 3000-square-foot restaurant seeks to feed the government and business crowd by day and the theatergoers and boulevardiers by night.

“With the forward thinking and commitment of the city officials who are promoting the area, we feel it has a strong chance of success,” Bradley said. “It’s just a beautiful building. We’re not willing to go into what’s available to us [elsewhere], which is mainly strip centers. This is a unique urban location you just can’t get [elsewhere] in Orange County.”