In This Kitchen, They Hang on Every Word

No one pays for a ticket, and the seats fill up fast. The regulars call out hellos and, once they’ve secured a spot, stand talking in the aisles. The director welcomes everyone, advertises upcoming programs and announces that, because the evening’s performance is intermission-less, the weekly fund-raising raffle will be held afterward.

Then the performers--who include Fred Savage, Ed Asner and Wayne Rogers--take the stage, and the room erupts in expectant applause.

It’s just another Monday night at the Playwrights’ Kitchen Ensemble’s weekly reading series, which is treasured by initiates yet little known even among hard-core theatergoers. Now in its eighth year, the program--a sort of coming-out party for play scripts--has assisted such writers as Lee Blessing, David Hare, Steve Martin, David Mamet and his sister Lynn as well as scores of lesser-knowns. Bringing their words to life have been such actors as Richard Dreyfuss, Peter Falk, David Schwimmer, Christian Slater and Stephanie Zimbalist.

Housed at the Coronet Theatre near the Beverly Center, PKE is Dan Lauria’s stand against the entertainment business’ cavalier attitude toward writers today. He founded the program during his days playing the dad on ABC’s “The Wonder Years,” out of a desire to give something back to the theater community. He and the die-hard theater pals who help him run PKE have presented readings of nearly 300 plays, and they all dream of the day when they can mount full-scale productions.

Savage, Lauria’s former “Wonder Years” co-star, breathlessly endorses the work, saying: “Everyone there really loves the craft of acting and the art of writing, and I think everyone’s there to celebrate that every Monday night. . . . There need to be more people as unselfish and as willing to take chances.”

It’s difficult for an emerging writer to get an agent or producer to read a script, explains Lauria, now PKE’s artistic director. And there’s little to entice honchos to the backers’ audition-type readings so common in this town.

But have the script read by a couple of Hollywood stars, as PKE does, and people begin to take notice.

The readings don’t draw nearly as much film industry interest as Lauria would like. But he counts theater and television types--particularly actors and directors looking for new material--as regular visitors.

It is the everyday people in the audience who keep the enterprise grounded, however. Many of them are regular theatergoers, and “they are our most sophisticated audience,” says Ted Weiant, one of PKE’s producing directors. “They’re a big asset to us. . . . They tell us a lot about these plays.”

Access to the big-name actors, all of whom perform for free, comes mostly from the friendships and associations of PKE’s principal administrators: Weiant, director of Los Angeles’ star-studded “Love Letters”; Richard Zavaglia, an actor-director recently seen as a wise guy in the film “Donnie Brasco”; Joe Cacaci, a playwright (“Self Defense”) and TV writer (co-creator CBS’ “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill”); and new executive director Ted Rawlins (a founder of American Stage Company in Teaneck, N.J.).

Lauria wins their award for most imaginative approach to a star: He happened upon a role that he thought would be perfect for Falk, but he didn’t know the actor. So he bought a map to the stars’ homes and placed a script (along with a note explaining who he was) in the “Columbo” star’s mailbox. A couple of days later, the actor called; he’s now a regular in PKE’s acting corps.

Scripts that have passed through the series include “The Crimson Thread,” “The Sisters” and “In the Moonlight Eddie,” all of which ended up on stage at the Pasadena Playhouse; and “Self Storage,” “Old Business,” “Ad Wars” and the recent “Up the Mountain,” at small Los Angeles theaters.

Word of mouth draws viewers to the unadvertised readings, and after the first visit, many become regulars. The first several rows are usually occupied by a committed corps of retirees, including 73-year-old Emily Monaco. “I love the plays here,” she says. “Once in a while I see one I would give a ‘not very good’--a ‘fair’--to, but not very often.”

Lynn Mamet, a 1994 Academy Award nominee for her live-action short “On Hope,” has had several scripts read at PKE. “It is the only pure thing I have ever experienced in this city; the rest, to me, is work,” she says. “This is somebody plunking me down in front of a box of Godiva chocolates and saying, ‘They’re all caramels, and no calories. Have a great time.’

“I cannot tell you how many jobs I have gotten off of PKE readings,” she adds.

It is the testimony of writers like Kelly Masterson that carries the most weight, however.

Although he’d had about a dozen plays read or produced before he came to PKE’s attention in 1993, he felt he’d hit a dead end. “I reached a point where I was incredibly frustrated in my writing,” the 40-year-old New Yorker recalls. “I wasn’t making any money at it. . . . [But] PKE gave me the exposure so that I could work professionally; they exposed me to the business--Hollywood and the theater world, both.”

To date, five of his plays have received Monday night readings. As a result, Masterson says, he’s been hired to turn his “Into the Light”--about a boy raised in a basement, never having seen the light of day--into a teleplay for Hallmark Hall of Fame, and his “Dare Not Speak Its Name”--about a priest accused of molesting a 16-year-old boy--was produced at Seven Angels Theatre in Waterbury, Conn.

He’s earning money off his writing now, and another break or two could enable him to quit his day job as an office manager and devote full time to writing. “I was a no one until they found me,” he says.

Success stories like this cheer Lauria, especially when so much else disheartens him.

“If anybody ever read ‘Waterworld,’ nobody would’ve produced it,” he grumps, referring to the bloated $200-million film that set a benchmark for Hollywood spending. The theater, he says, is “the last stand for the writer.”

Exposure, not development, is the name of the game. With only about eight hours of rehearsal devoted to each piece, writers aren’t able to churn out rewrites, as they might be able to do in longer workshop situations. And while the production teams may offer some feedback, no audience response sessions are held after the readings.

The readings themselves are decidedly low-tech affairs. Savage, Asner, Rogers and the rest of the cast sit on metal folding chairs in front of a torn and stained cyclorama, reading from scripts of Jason Sherman’s “Three in the Back, Two in the Head,” a military thriller about the execution-style slaying of a developer of antimissile technology. To enter a scene, an actor takes a seat next to another actor; afterward he or she retires to the sidelines.

It’s all fairly static, yet energy radiates from the stage because one can almost see the lightbulbs flashing on in the actors’ minds as they discover insights into their characters and into the story.

“It’s great exercise,” Savage says a couple of days later. “You get a script you don’t know and in a couple of days, you and the other performers have to make a performance. . . . You’re finding things as you’re performing. It’s kind of a fun cat and mouse game you’re playing.”

After years of floating from theater to theater, PKE was offered a permanent home last fall by the owners of the 272-seat Coronet. Readings are held most Mondays--excluding holidays and Oscar night--for a total of about 48 a year. Roughly 70% of them feature at least one well-known actor.

PKE gets hit by an avalanche of at least 1,000 scripts a year, generated almost entirely by word of mouth. The readings are devoted to works intended for the stage, not the screen. Of the works selected, some have been previously read or produced, but most have not.

For more intensive script development, PKE added two weekly, tuition-based writing labs last fall, each consisting of about 18 writers (playwrights and screenwriters alike) and as many actors. The better scripts may move on to the reading series--sort of like baseball’s “farm” system. Zavaglia, who directs the labs, plans to add acting workshops as well as a playwrights-only lab.

Incorporated as a nonprofit organization in summer 1995, PKE runs on about $120,000 a year, with an anticipated leap, due to a couple of new salaried positions, to $250,000 in the next year. Among PKE’s staunchest supporters have been television producers Tom Patchett and Ken Kaufman, of Patchett Kaufman Entertainment, and film-television producers and Coronet Theatre owners Deborah Del Prete and GiGi Pritzker, a.k.a. Dee Gee Entertainment Group. PKE has also received donations from Showtime and the Steve Tisch Foundation. The administrators have dipped into their own pockets on occasion, and they’ve received additional income from individual donations, lab tuitions, concessions and a weekly raffle.

With Rawlins’ arrival, PKE is getting ready to raise $1 million or more for its first full season of three or more fully produced plays.

Though Lauria doesn’t take any salary from his work, he says he’s amply repaid. “We’ve all benefited from this,” he says. “The last three jobs I’ve gotten have been from writers who we helped get established.”

He says he started out small, thinking he’d try to put together one reading a month. Before he knew it, the enterprise had become “this Frankenstein’s monster.” Yet even as he half-complains, the enthusiasm in his voice belies his true feelings. “I don’t want to stop because there’s such a need for it,” he says. “I just got grabbed along with it.”

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* Playwrights’ Kitchen Ensemble Monday Night Reading Series, Coronet Theatre, 368 N. La Cienega Blvd. Upcoming events: Rooster Mitchell’s “Never the Same Rhyme Twice,” featuring Carol Kane and Pamela Reed, Monday; Lynn Mamet’s “The Kiln,” featuring Ron Leibman and Jessica Walter, Aug. 18; David C. Hyer’s “Purple Squirrel,” featuring Paul Dooley, Aug. 25. Continues most Mondays, 8 p.m. Admission is free; first come, first seated. (310) 285-8148.