Another Act Awaits in Tale of Historic Hillside Theater

Almost 20 years have passed since actors last took to the stage of the Padua Hills Theatre, and a set from the last performance is still there--fake palm trees bordering a vine-covered hut.

“It is like they ran away from the play and left it like this,” said Sheryl Smoot, a caterer who handles an average of 100 weddings that take place each year in the theater complex.

Now Claremont is looking for ways to dust the cobwebs from the historic theater and revive it as a cultural and community center.

The complex of small Spanish colonial buildings, with plastered walls and tiled roofs, was completed in 1930 at the base of the 10,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains.

The setting and the threat that the foothills would be developed were the incentive for 27 residents at the time to pool their resources and buy 2,200 acres of hillside property. They were members of the Claremont Community Players who decided to build an art center. Herman and Bess Garner built a theater, hiring the Pasadena firm of Marston, Van Pelt and Maybury.

The Depression quickly sapped the theater of its audience, and it could no longer stage professional productions. So Bess Garner began recruiting the Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants who worked in the dining room and kitchen to take a turn on stage for small plays and musical theater, said Ginger Elliott, a historian and executive director of Claremont Heritage.

From those productions were born the Mexican Players. Lorenzo Abundiz, a retired firefighter whose mother was one of the players, recently visited the complex, which attracts legions of visitors to see the nooks and crannies where performers played, acted and sang between 1932 and 1974.

“I ate so many tacos out of that oven,” Abundiz said, pointing to a brick oven in the raked courtyard.

“The nuance of the theater is that it is a clear example of an early attempt to bring Mexican American culture and Mexican culture [to] Southern California in a very visible way,” said Dick Guthrie, Claremont’s human services director.

The theater and 1,200 acres of undeveloped hillside became the city’s in 1998.

A two-year study led to a blueprint for reviving the Padua Hills Theatre. On it are plans for a museum to house the work of some of California’s mid- and late-century arts luminaries who lived on the same hill.

Millard Sheets, whose mosaic collages adorn bank buildings, lived here. Potter Harrison McIntosh and watercolorist and oil painter Milford Zornes still do.

Gone are some of the studios in the complex where artists worked. The wooden structures didn’t survive the decades they were idle.

The theater is still there, its curtain a hand-painted map of Mexico. It is an example of how difficult restoring the entire complex will be; the paint contains asbestos and it will take an expensive coating process to seal it.

For now, the city is trying to make pieces of the complex accessible to wheelchairs without detracting from its feel. The auditorium needs to be rewired, so visitors will be able to see the hand-painted hallways down which players used to run between the kitchen and the stage.

Also, the pergola that greets visitors needs a retrofit to withstand earthquakes.

Claremont is looking for volunteers for a committee that will help the city with the blueprint. It is a plan that needs to generate money as well as preserve the area’s artistic and theatrical heritage.

In the late 1970s, the complex was briefly home to the Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop and Festival, with such participants as Sam Shepard, John Steppling and its founder, Murray Mednick. Mednick’s “Joe and Betty” will open Friday at 2100 Square Feet in Los Angeles in a relocated Padua Playwrights festival.