Search-and-Rescue Roles

Chris DeCarlo winces at the idea of commercializing his art.

“I don’t want to commodify what we’re doing,” he said. “It’s like having a wonderful date with someone and then exploiting all the great moments, putting them out there for everyone to see.”

Yet that’s the position in which he finds himself lately, along with his wife and professional partner, Evelyn Rudie. They’re the pop and the mom of the L.A. area’s longest-running mom-and-pop theater company, Santa Monica Playhouse, which is fighting for its life. DeCarlo has to make a public case that his theater is worth rescuing.

DeCarlo and Rudie have run the 40-year-old playhouse and its educational workshops for 29 years. When they began, downtown Santa Monica was relatively sleepy. Today, their two adjacent venues, of 88 and 70 seats, are a block east of Third Street Promenade--now a high-rent commercial district.

If the playhouse can’t come up with enough money to buy a 49% interest in its building by July 31, 2003, rising rent will make it impossible for the company to stay there, say DeCarlo and Rudie. And if they don’t stay there, they predict that their chances of moving elsewhere are slim.

The goal of the campaign is $500,000--which includes some money for restoration, in addition to an estimated down payment of $400,000 (the exact purchase price has yet to be negotiated, depending on market conditions at sale time).

The company has an agreement with landlord Jules Kievitz, who said he is not offering part-ownership of the building to anyone else, and that eventually the deal may expand to full ownership for the theater company. However, he did require the playhouse to raise the first $100,000 toward the sale by the end of last month--or else the deal was off and higher rents would follow. That goal was reached two days ahead of schedule.

The Santa Monica City Council authorized a “double-matching” grant of $75,000. But that money isn’t available until the playhouse raises $150,000 (double the grant amount)--and the $150,000 has to be an additional sum beyond the $70,000 that had been raised when the council voted June 18 to help.

Even though the city money isn’t available yet, DeCarlo and Rudie hope it will serve as an official endorsement that will help them obtain other funding.

That city approval is primarily because of the playhouse’s educational programs, which include classes and workshops in acting and backstage crafts for participants ranging from preschoolers to adults, plus a touring Young Professionals’ Company that visits schools.

City Councilman and Mayor Pro Tempore Kevin McKeown, who is the council’s arts specialist, said the playhouse’s campaign for the city money consisted mostly of e-mails from students, their parents and alumni of the playhouse workshops.

“The playhouse is one of our cultural centers and is particularly important to the children of our community,” said McKeown, who has never attended a show at the playhouse. “The City Council has, for the last three years, made education its top priority.”

Maria Luisa de Herrera, manager of the city’s cultural affairs division, noted that the playhouse had earlier received several small grants for its educational programs and is in the third year of a three-year organizational support grant, not related to education, that has brought the playhouse $6,500 a year. She said she had attended a couple of playhouse shows.

The playhouse has produced a number of long-running hits over the years, many of which focused on beloved Jewish cultural figures such as Yiddish-language writer Sholom Aleichem (“Author! Author!”) and Yiddish theater actress Molly Picon (“Picon Pie”). The light domestic comedies of Jerry Mayer also enjoyed long runs in recent years, especially “Aspirin and Elephants” and “Almost Perfect.” While hardly the darlings of the critics, such productions have found loyal audiences who come from all over L.A., DeCarlo said--only about 30% of the playhouse mailing list consists of Westside addresses.

They also tend to draw relatively old audiences, so the playhouse often seems occupied by youngsters attending classes during weekend days, late afternoons and school breaks, and seniors attending shows on weekend evenings.

Educational programs provided more of the playhouse’s total revenue (44%) than the box office (32%) in the 2000-01 fiscal year (the last for which figures are available). Rentals to other producers furnished another 20%. Donations accounted for 4% of the budget--an extremely low portion, in comparison with the budgets of most long-established nonprofits.

DeCarlo hopes and expects the proportion of donated funds to rise if the playhouse is successful at obtaining part-ownership of its building; he said funders balk at donating money for high rents.

It’s not the most opportune time for a capital campaign, however. After Sept. 11, the playhouse virtually shut down for a month. When a previously popular show, “Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Grandmother,” finally reopened, it did poorly and soon closed.

Workshop enrollments and rentals to other producers have also fallen by about 30% from last year’s levels. The playhouse’s overall operating budget has dropped from more than $500,000 in the previous year to about $350,000. DeCarlo cites the economy and decreased tourism in Santa Monica as factors.

DeCarlo, 55, spent most of his formative years in Santa Monica, and first produced a show at the playhouse in 1965, when he was 18, transferring it there after an initial run in the Melrose district. It was not a success. But DeCarlo began attending classes at the playhouse, which was then run by Ted Roter, and appearing in productions there--including one long-forgotten play (“Closet Casanova”) in which he appeared in the nude. His studies were interrupted by the draft in 1967, and he was sent to Vietnam.

Before Vietnam, DeCarlo had many of the usual Hollywood ambitions, “but that trauma took me out of the idea that I wanted to be a Hollywood star,” he said. “It gave me the idea that I wanted to use theater to help others discover their own humanity.”

After he returned, he met Rudie at a Monday-evening workshop at the playhouse. The granddaughter of Rudolf Bernauer, who co-wrote the librettos for the Viennese operettas that were turned into “The Chocolate Soldier” and “Maytime,” and the daughter of Emery Bernauer, who wrote revues during World War II, Rudie--although two years younger than DeCarlo--had already experienced her share of Hollywood. She had been selected at age 6 to play the role of Eloise in a live “Playhouse 90” special, for which she received an Emmy nomination. She then spent much of her youth in TV guest appearances and movies.

The couple married in 1970 and took over the playhouse three years later, where they now estimate that they have each appeared on stage for more than 6,000 performances. For the first 11 years, they worked solely with members of their own company, and any new plays presented at the playhouse were written by company members. In 1984, however, they began opening the facilities to rentals and co-productions, beginning with the successful U.S. premiere of the Australian play “The Coming of Stork.”

Until 1996, the playhouse consisted only of one auditorium, which in a 1980 renovation grew from 76 to 88 seats. As part of that project, a second floor was added to the building, providing more space for offices, storage and classes. In 1996, what is called the Other Space was carved out of the building, designed with a more steeply raked audience area and a higher ceiling, in contrast to the almost living room-like ambience of the larger space.

The only other theater company near Third Street Promenade, City Garage, is very different in philosophy, usually presenting new and thorny European dramas. Asked to characterize Santa Monica Playhouse’s programming, City Garage managing director Charles Duncombe called it “very mainstream.” Andrew Barrett-Weiss of the Powerhouse, another sub-100-seat company in Santa Monica, called the playhouse “AM radio--they serve a need for good old-fashioned entertainment.”

Both of the theater leaders applauded the playhouse’s ability to obtain city funds. City Garage received a $1,500 grant from the city, but was rejected for further city funding twice and finally stopped applying, Duncombe said. He said he wishes city funders “also thought alternative work was interesting, but I recognize that from a political point of view, government money is supposed to reflect the broader taste of the citizenry.”

In response, DeCarlo acknowledged that the playhouse is more mainstream than other Santa Monica theaters, “but compared to commercial theaters, we’re on the fringe”--especially in terms of staging styles. In terms of content, he said, “We want to be entertaining, because we want access to the people who need to hear what we’re saying.” He’s afraid that shock value often intrudes on accessibility, but added, “What I think is accessible may seem tame and square to somebody else.”

DeCarlo said the company has determined not “to run shows to death, which sometimes meant that audiences burned out” in the earlier years, and to look for more varied plays and perspectives.

Don’t count on the couple to look for a new space, however, if they should lose their old one. “We’d be starting from zero,” DeCarlo said. He and Rudie are clearly enamored of the intimacy of the playhouse, which DeCarlo called their “caldron.”

“If it’s not on a human scale,” he said, “I don’t want to do it.”

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Don Shirley is a Times staff writer.