It takes two to wangle

Two years ago, the breaks were beating the boys of Grove Theater Center, where even in less embattled times it often has fallen to just the two of them -- founding directors Kevin Cochran and Charles Johanson -- to do everything, up to and including moving the scenery and selling coffee and cookies during intermission.

Cochran is the artistic director, a quiet, trim-bearded Yale graduate who directs most of the shows. Despite his small build, he’s the one who tends to pull solo duty lugging set pieces between acts. Executive director Johanson, a deep-voiced schmoozer who likes going to raves, is more apt to meet and greet the Grove’s small but loyal public.

In 1994, they took over city-owned indoor and outdoor theaters in Garden Grove, dreaming of a future as Orange County’s third regional stage company -- a smaller sibling to South Coast Repertory and the Laguna Playhouse. But by 2002 the dream was in jeopardy. Attendance often was meager, and the city administration was threatening eviction.

Cochran sat alone after a rehearsal, watching a videotape of a Kennedy Center Honors broadcast. He has forgotten who was being feted and what was said, but, besieged as he felt, he found inspiration in it. He grabbed a ladder, picked up a can of red spray paint, climbed about 15 feet and in big letters wrote “Art Is Good” above the gaping doorway leading from the wings to the stage.

Soon Johanson was in a Long Beach tattoo parlor having this new theatrical equivalent of “Win one for the Gipper” drilled into his chest, next to the green “GTC” logo already emblazoned there.

“You go through a lot of muck doing this stuff,” Cochran softly avows. “It’s just a clear statement that, ‘OK, this is worth doing.’ ”

Last year, by a 3-2 City Council vote, the theater company won its long fight with City Hall. Instead of the boot, Cochran and Johanson received a new three-year contract that they say positions them to build their dream after nearly a decade of struggling just to survive.

The contract rids them of several responsibilities they saw as distractions, including programming for the 550-seat outdoor amphitheater. It allows them to make their stand on their chosen turf -- the Gem Theater, a restored 1930s movie house with emerald walls and 172 olive-green velveteen seats. GTC also runs a 98-seat city-owned theater in Burbank.

Now, after showing a genius for subsistence, the GTC boys must prove that they can sow prosperity. An important new business ally is helping. When their troubles with City Hall grew intense, they consulted David Seigle, a retired high-tech executive who has been enjoying GTC shows for years. Now he is on the theater’s board and hopes to persuade other affluent patrons to embrace Grove Theater Center. The challenge, Seigle says, is to break “almost a vicious circle” in which the company scrambles continually just to mount its shows, never building the resources to promote them properly.Average paid attendance in Garden Grove the past two seasons has been 51 per performance, according to reports to the city.

GTC seldom has had the money for such showbiz staples as telemarketing and a paid publicist. Somebody to lug the scenery and sell the tickets and refreshments would also be nice; the company relies on volunteers -- and on Cochran’s and Johanson’s sweat when the volunteers sometimes don’t show.

Right now it’s just themas they sit on the aft deck of the Orion, the 36-year-old cabin cruiser inhabited by Cochran and his cocker spaniel, Zac.

The vessel, which has an engine that needs overhauling and rarely leaves its Long Beach dock, is part of the live-cheap philosophy that the Grove leaders have followed, by necessity but without complaint. Cochran, 44, doesn’t mind using the marina’s public bathroom and shower. Johanson, 38, is happy living with his German shepherd, Argos, above vacant storefronts in Long Beach.

“We’ve both adjusted our lives to where we don’t need a lot of money,” Johanson says. The health plan they’ve always made sure to maintain proved crucial in 2002, when he had a cancerous kidney removed.

Cochran and Johanson have struggled together over nearly 20 years on both coasts. From 1985 to 1989, they operated a small stage company in New Haven, Conn. When it closed, Johanson came west to manage theaters, including GroveShakespeare, which inhabited the Gem and the nearby Festival Amphitheater before folding in 1993.

Cochran, who had developed a specialty as a consultant to cash-strapped theaters that needed to cut their budgets, was called in during GroveShakespeare’s death throes. On its ashes, the partners resolved to build a new company.

Eclectic slate

One of their tenets is professionalism. GTC hires at least some actors at union wages for each production at the Gem -- although at the smaller GTC Burbank the common practice prevails of paying nominal wages for performances in theaters with fewer than 100 seats.

The other guiding principal is eclecticism. GTC seasons typically have included proven crowd-pleasers, such as “The Odd Couple” and “Lend Me a Tenor,” but classics and edgy plays also have a place. Elmer Rice’s “The Adding Machine,” an unorthodox 1923 drama, was both a critical and box-office success in 1998. “The Beckett Project,” an evening of Samuel Beckett’s austere and enigmatic short plays, won plaudits in 2000; another production of Beckett shorts, including “Krapp’s Last Tape,” will be staged in May. New works sometimes figure in the Grove’s mix, among them a world premiere in July to be culled from solicited submissions.

Each season includes a Shakespeare play -- among them such Cochran-directed innovations as the lesbian Princess Hamlet portrayed in 2000 by Jane Macfie and last year’s “Othello,” in which not just Othello but Iago were played by African Americans. Cochran says he is no renegade; he just believed that Macfie, a GTC regular, commanded Shakespeare’s language better than any actor he could have hired. And when the “Othello” auditions turned up Dante Walker and Joshua Wolf Coleman, black actors he found exceptional, he couldn’t see denying a job to either.

Cochran and Johanson are convinced they can remain eclectic and still grow. David Allen Jones, who has appeared in many GTC productions since 1995, marvels at how they have gotten this far with so little help: “You wonder how they keep any sanity at all.”

But they don’t get riled, Jones says, even under pressures that, in many less-harried theater leaders, might set off explosions.

When things aren’t going well, Macfie says, “they don’t take it out on anybody, but I know them well enough to see when it’s frustrating. Kevin will tend to get quiet. Charles will tease and get flippant.”

One issue facing the GTC leadership is whether to stick to what’s already on its plate or expand into Oceanside in northern San Diego County. City officials there want GTC to run another 1930s-vintage former movie house. Cochran and Johanson see themselves as beer and Domino’s pizza guys -- that’s what they serve at opening- and closing-night celebrations -- but they’ve taken to attending fancier meals and even a croquet party as Seigle introduces them to potential supporters well placed in Orange County society. Last weekend, the first major fundraiser in GTC’s history netted $6,500 toward a 2004 budget of about $250,000. Within five or 10 years, they hope, that budget can grow tenfold.

Such a transformation won’t be easy, says Martin Benson, the South Coast Repertory artistic director who with partner David Emmes built SCR from a scuffling itinerant troupe into a national force in regional theater. Benson thinks that Orange County, with its nearly 3 million residents, is big enough to support a third regional company. But he says making it happen in a 172-seat house will be difficult. South Coast Rep always struggled to meet costs in its 161-seat Second Stage theater, Benson says -- one reason why it replaced it two seasons ago with a new one twice as big.

As the sun sets behind Cochran’s cabin cruiser, he and Johanson mull the notion that burnout could stop them before their dream can take shape. They say they will give themselves at least the three years of their contract to run the Gem before deciding whether it’s a dream with possibilities, or just an illusion.

“We feel the momentum has really started,” Johanson says. “It will be exponential if people who have the resources to make it happen start to come forward.”

“The question we always ask ourselves,” Cochran says, “is, are we close to the top of the hill and picking up speed, or are we just hitting against a brick wall?”

Given their struggles, it takes some faith to keep thinking positively.

“That’s why I have ‘Art Is Good’ on my chest,” Johanson says. “Some people pray, some people have their meditations or whatever. I look at it in the morning when I brush my teeth.”