Theater in Tune With Success

SOLANA BEACH —  A story by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “More Stately Mansions,” describes a woman whose image of how she wished her home to look was so strong that when she showed guests around her house, she would walk gingerly around her imaginary tables so that she wouldn’t bark her shins.

There was an element of that story in the tour of North Coast Repertory Theatre’s new home by the theater’s founder and artistic director, Olive Blackistone, last Monday, four days before the San Diego premiere of “Salt-Water Moon” marked its opening night.

“There will be some beautiful carpets,” Blackistone said, pointing to the concrete floor at the entrance that was littered with splintered strips of unstained wood. “This lobby is going to have beautiful wall coverings,” she went on, pointing to the gray, plaster-spotted walls. Then, moving to the stage area, where workmen were laying down a maroon-colored carpet, she waved her arm to indicate where the 194 seats that were supposed to arrive from Mexico City last Friday would be. “The seats will be a deep red. He (interior designer Bernard Harland) pushed me into a monochromatic direction.”

Like Vonnegut’s heroine, Blackistone did not seem to see the enormity of what hadn’t been done. She was too busy trying to focus the visitor’s imagination on the beauty of what was going to be. Yes, but how could she keep so calm? What would happen if the seats didn’t come?

“What would it help for me to jump up and down? What you see may be what you get (on opening night),” she said, shrugging her shoulders and giving a little smile. “Laughing is better than crying.”

The seats, which Blackistone and her team of volunteers and hired help were waiting for, arrived 4 a.m. the day before opening night. They were not installed until 7 p.m. that evening. On Friday, her crew was still wondering if it would be able to finish putting up the lobby wall coverings in time.

But one thing was clear. With the placement of the chairs which, in essence, completed the work on the main theater space, Blackistone had gotten through another crisis. And she had done it with the level, relaxed head that has moved the 5 1/2-year-old North Coast Repertory Theatre from its humble beginnings as a community theater in a Solana Beach shopping mall to a critically well-received theater, now nearly double in size.

Blackistone’s earliest commitment to the theater dates back to her childhood.

“I’m from Ireland and my dad was in the British army. When I was about five they (the soldiers) taught me Irish dancing. I loved the applause. I think that’s what got me hooked into the theater.”

Forty-six years after that initial jig, a walk with her husband, Tom Blackistone, through the Lomas Santa Fe Plaza led to the idea for the North Coast Repertory Theatre.

“We were walking through this plaza one day--and it happens to be two minutes from our house--and I said to Tom, ‘Wouldn’t this be a wonderful place for a theater?’ ”

The now bustling plaza had many open spaces back in 1982. Her husband wrote a business plan for a proposed theater, and when the Blackistones returned from a cruise to the Bahamas, they got word that the proposal was approved by the plaza management.

“I think that was the last peaceful day I had,” Tom Blackistone said with a rueful smile.

The couple pulled together $13,000 to fashion a 124-seat theater in a space 28 by 70 feet, and Tom Blackistone retired from his job as a free-lance management consultant to become the theater’s business manager. They opened their first season cautiously on May 21, 1982, with a proven Neil Simon hit, “Chapter II.” The following year marked their first San Diego premiere, “The Woolgatherer” by William Mastrosimone, and the first granting of honorariums to their previously unpaid actors--the first step toward their current goal of being taken seriously as a regional theater.

It was not until their production of Stephen Metcalfe’s “Strange Snow” in early 1985, however, that the San Diego theater critics turned out to see if, as rumor had it, serious theater was in fact being done in North County.

The consensus was positive. Olive Blackistone, who chooses all the plays and directs about half of them, followed that show with the San Diego premieres of Romulus Linney’s “Childe Byron,” Ted Kempinski’s “Duet for One” and Michael Frayn’s “Alphabetical Order.” Her last production of 1985, “Billy Bishop Goes to War,” which she directed, won the San Diego Critics Circle best actor award for Doug Roberts, who edged out all the nominees from all the professional theaters in town.

It was an amazing leap for a little theater, but there were still bumps ahead. In 1986, another San Diego premiere, “Educating Rita” (four out of six premieres for that year) was so unpopular that the Blackistones had to pour an extra $5,000 into their theater to keep it going. That, they agreed, was the lowest point in the North Coast’s short history. But they soon bounced back with the popular “El Grande de Coca-Cola” and continued to take chances. Not, Olive Blackistone stressed, because she wanted to do premieres, but because she wanted to do plays she believed in.

“I pick a play because if I feel in my gut it’s good, I want to do it. The theater does an educational function for a society, and I like plays that have a statement to make that makes people want to go home and think and maybe reassess their values.”

Last year, that philosophy notwithstanding, five out of the seven shows Olive Blackistone selected for North Coast’s list were San Diego premieres; the last, “First Night,” an extended hit for the theater, was a West Coast premiere as well. And by the end of that year, the Blackistones finally managed to pay themselves back from theater revenues for three-quarters of their initial $13,00 investment that they had earmarked as “loan.”

The show’s acclaim couldn’t have come at a better time for a theater that depends on ticket sales for most of its revenues. Lomas Santa Fe Plaza management wanted the theater to relocate to the plaza’s southeast corner and, to do it the way the theater wanted--which meant occupying two spaces by knocking out a wall--the theater needed financial support. An audience base that increased three-fold last year helped.

The Blackistones attribute their theater’s success to hard work, good reviews and volunteers.

“In the early years it was our job just to make it known that we existed,” Olive Blackistone recalled. “It was difficult to attract the caliber of actors, so usually I’d be on the phone calling and calling to see if I could get the right person.”

The theater’s increased respect from the theatrical community and the exploding growth of the San Diego theater community in the last five years changed that, she noted.

But it is the solid corps of volunteers that Olive Blackistone called “the secret of the theater’s success.” She likes to tell stories of Tom Osborne, a physicist who works on fusion power who hangs lights in the audience area. Or Gary Holt, the business manager of the La Jolla Playhouse and one of the stars of “Billy Bishop Goes to War,” who, Blackistone said, told her that “anytime Olive asks me to do something I’ll do it because I feel this is my theater home.”

Certainly the North Coast Repertory Theatre is Olive Blackistone’s theater home--one she intends living in and expanding on for a long time to come.

“On our 10th anniversary, I think we’ll be in the same space, but I hope we can make that jump to professionalism and can work out a contract with Equity the way the Gaslamp (Quarter Theatre) has done.”

Her eyes spanned the still-bare theater, where one of her assistant/set-designer/actors, Ocie Robinson--his clothes a riot of paint from “Joe Egg,” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and “First Night”--was flipping around a plank from “First Night” to be reused on the set of “Salt-Water Moon.”

Blackistone’s smile was dreamy and seemed to look beyond the visible scene. “Maybe in the long range, it would be nice to have our own free-standing theater of 400 seats,” she said. “Then this would be our small space for experimental theater and children’s theater.”