Impresarios Pump Life Into Mid-Size Theaters; ‘Carnage’ Heads for Edinburgh and New York

After some lean years, is the mid-size theater scene on the verge of a revival?

Westwood Playhouse impresarios Norman Maibaum and Edward H. Davis have taken over the lease at the Coronet Theatre in West Hollywood for at least two years beginning May 15. For their first attraction, they have booked the Reduced Shakespeare Company, the home-grown three-man band of Shakespearean parodists, for at least a four-week run, opening the same week their lease begins.

In addition to their own leases at the Westwood and Coronet, Maibaum and Davis also will manage and book the new Comedy Store Playhouse, at the site of the old Hollywood Playhouse on Las Palmas south of Sunset Boulevard. The building was sold last fall to Comedy Store owner Mitzi Shore, who is renovating it and hopes to begin booking comedy plays and one-person shows as soon as construction is completed.

The new signs of life at the 272-seat Coronet and the 248-seat Comedy Store Playhouse may be a harbinger of the increased activity at mid-size theaters that is expected to accompany the hoped-for enactment of a new Actors’ Equity contract governing productions moving up from smaller theaters.

Equity and representatives of the producers who operate the smaller theaters are involved in negotiations to hammer out such a contract.

Already, said Maibaum, he and Davis are receiving more inquiries about the availability of the Coronet and Comedy Store theaters than they are about the larger Westwood Playhouse.

“The size (of the Coronet and Comedy Store Playhouse) is right for this time because of what’s happening in (the sub-100-seat theaters),” Maibaum said. “Something shouldn’t be produced solely for those smaller theaters. If it’s successful, it should move up. Every show belongs on Broadway--that’s the ultimate goal.”

Maibaum and Davis themselves were among the partners who held the lease on the former Hollywood Playhouse from 1985 though 1987 without much success, but Maibaum is confident that “Mitzi (Shore) has the necessary financial backing to make it work.”

The renovations under way there include “a more practical seating arrangement” and a lowered stage, Maibaum said. The Playhouse will feature a patio restaurant run by Gigi Patout of the same Louisiana family that runs Patout’s on Westwood Boulevard.

GANGING UP: The Actors’ Gang, that band of politically oriented rowdies, will take its show “Carnage” to the Edinburgh Festival for nine performances at the end of August, to be followed by a three-week appearance in September at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre.

Founder-director Tim Robbins announced the plans as the Gang accepted the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Margaret Harford Award.

The Edinburgh gig will be at the selective main festival, as opposed to the bigger Festival Fringe. A representative of the festival said Wednesday that “Carnage” and Martha Clarke’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” are the only U.S. theatrical productions invited to the festival.

The Gang performed a staged reading for festival director Frank Dunlop when he visited Los Angeles several months ago, said Robbins in a telephone interview. Robbins hopes to obtain corporate support to pay for the trip--”as long as we don’t have to wear someone’s T-shirts.”

The New York Shakespeare Festival’s Joseph Papp did not see “Carnage” but booked the Gang on the basis of a script and reviews. The festival will attempt to raise grant money for the Gang’s appearance, but the Gang itself also will try to raise funds.

Until now, Robbins paid for most of the Gang’s activities from his own earnings as a movie actor (“Bull Durham,” the forthcoming “Miss Firecracker” and “Erik the Viking”), and “if push comes to shove, I’m sure I’ll provide whatever we need,” he said. However, he cited his new domestic responsibilities (his housemate, actress Susan Sarandon, is expecting their baby in May) as a reason why he wants the group’s fund raising to expand beyond his own resources.

Robbins said he hopes the Edinburgh and New York appearances “may make it easier for us to get grants. We’re not good fund-raisers, but with this step we’ll enter a new arena.”

The Gang has yet to appear in any of its hometown’s major theaters--a state of affairs that Robbins would like to change. “I’d like the LATC (Los Angeles Theatre Center) or the Taper to take us on,” he said. “It seems they could give us an opportunity to prove ourselves.”

Robbins said the Taper has been somewhat supportive, providing rehearsal space and inviting the Gang to appear in next fall’s Taper Lab--an offer that has now been preempted by New York. But he said that LATC’s Diane White declined three invitations to see “Carnage.”

(White responded that she isn’t aware of three invitations to “Carnage” but that she saw the Gang in a previous show at the Wallenboyd--”and I like them. I think they’re great.” She seldom sees any local shows other than her own, she said, “because I’m in this building 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Furthermore, LATC doesn’t book groups that can be seen elsewhere in Los Angeles--and probably won’t as long as its Theatre 4 must be used for rentals, said White.)

Meanwhile, the Gang will bring its latest production, “The Big Show,” to the Powerhouse for an April 27-July 1 engagement. The script, by Michael Schlitt and R.A. White, uses a game-show format to examine U.S. policy in Central America. “The Big Show” played at San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts for two weeks in February but has been revised since then.

“The Big Show” will follow on the heels of three Southland performances by the granddaddy of West Coast political theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe. The Troupe’s “Secrets in the Sand” is described as a “musical mystery” which investigates the connection between atomic-weapons tests in 1954 and the later cancer deaths of the cast and crew of a Hollywood movie that was shooting in the vicinity of the tests. It will play San Diego’s Marston Junior High School on April 19 and Culver City’s Robert Frost Auditorium April 21 and 22.

THE RUMOR MILL: It’s likely that August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” will be among the first entries in the new Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle season. Wilson’s friend Claude Purdy, who accepted Wilson’s Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for “Fences” on Sunday, referred in his remarks to the booking of “The Piano Lesson” at the Doolittle as a fait accompli . The producers and the Ahmanson acknowledge “talks” on the subject but add that the booking hasn’t been set.

Meanwhile, as already announced, “The Piano Lesson” will play the Old Globe in San Diego next month.