HOLLYWOOD — The theater seats fifty when every folding chair is pressed into service, which on a good night it is, and the company that runs it is about to celebrate ten years of not quite being able to afford the room.
The storefront theater sits on a Hollywood side street, a black-box space with a scuffed floor, two banks of donated seats, and a lighting rig assembled over a decade from other theaters’ castoffs. This spring the company marks its tenth season, a milestone its founders greet with the wary pride of people who have made payroll by the skin of their teeth more often than they would like to count.
“Ten years is either an accomplishment or a warning, and most mornings I cannot tell which,” said Nolan Frei, 44, the artistic director, who also runs the box office, fixes the toilet, and occasionally acts. “We have never had money. What we have had is a room, and a room in this neighborhood is the whole ballgame. Lose the lease and you are not a struggling theater anymore. You are a mailing list.”
The economics of a fifty-seat house do not work on ticket sales, and never have. A sold-out run cannot cover a real salary, so the company survives on a patchwork of small grants, a handful of loyal donors, and classes — acting workshops that, as at many small theaters, quietly subsidize the plays. Frei is candid that the shows are the reason the place exists and the classes are the reason it can.
The past couple of years have pressed on every seam. The slump in the film business, which employs many of the company’s actors between productions, has left performers with less time and patrons with less money, and Frei says he can read the health of the industry in his subscription renewals. The long repaving of the Boulevard has not helped either, snarling the streets and, he suspects, talking a few would-be audiences out of the trip.
For the actors, the space is worth more than the little it can pay. Aisha Bello, 29, has performed in five productions here and took her first class in the same room years earlier.
“This is where I found out whether I could actually do this, in front of forty strangers and a light that kept flickering,” Bello said. “Nobody gets rich here. But there is nowhere else that will hand a young actor a real part and a real audience and say, go, we believe you can carry it.”
Frei is negotiating a new lease this summer, and does not pretend to know how it will end. The landlord has been patient, but patience in this neighborhood has a market rate, and the company’s budget does not move the way the rent does. He has started, quietly, to price out what a move would cost, and to hope he never has to spend the estimate.
On the tenth-anniversary weekend the company will run its very first show again, recast with the actors it has since collected. Frei plans to leave one folding chair empty in the back, he said, for everyone who helped build the place and could not stay to see it turn ten.