{"id":5204,"date":"2011-04-20T18:39:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-20T18:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lbpost.com\/articles\/life\/the-garage-theatre-10-years-on\/"},"modified":"2011-04-20T18:39:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-20T18:39:00","slug":"the-garage-theatre-10-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/hi-lo\/the-garage-theatre-10-years-on","title":{"rendered":"The Garage Theatre, 10 Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/em><\/span>The Garage Theatre board members, clockwise from left, Matt Anderson, Amy Louise Sebelius, Eric Hamme, Jamie Sweet and Kristal Greenlea. Not pictured: Jessica Variz. Photo by Greggory Moore.<\/span><\/em>
<\/span><\/p>\n

3:01pm <\/strong>| <\/span>That one year ago the first-rate Pasadena Playhouse closed after 90 years in existence is testimony to the fact that theatre is tough business these days.<\/span><\/p>\n

To begin with, a night of theatre is typically regarded as a luxury \u2014 that is to say, one of the first expenditures people eschew in belt-tightening times like the last few years.
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The challenge of staying afloat is magnified for a small theatre. Let’s say you charge $18 per ticket and you’ve got 40 seats available. That means even if you sell out your entire 15-performance run of each of the six shows in your season, for your entire year you’ll clear about $65,000 \u2014 from which you’ve got to eek out your rent and utilities, your costumes and sets, your advertising, any rights you might need to purchase for the scripts you perform, and so on. <\/span><\/p>\n

What’s left for the board members, performers, and technical crew? You need not have mastered accounting or differential calculus to grasp how “labor of love” applies here.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Garage Theatre peeps have just begun their 10th season of love-laboring.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I sat down in mid April with board members Eric Hamme, Jamie Sweet, Kristal Greenlea and Matt Anderson, I found out that exactly 10 years ago they had just closed their first-ever show (Eric Bogosian’s Scene from the New World<\/em>) and were rather flushed with success, having made $1,500 that Hamme tells me he kept in a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup with Britney Spears on it. <\/span><\/p>\n

This was back in the days before the Garage Theatre company had the Garage Theatre, er, theatre (251 E. Seventh St. at Long Beach Blvd.), and so their first show took place at Studio 354 (in the space that is now a hat shop at Fourth Street and Elm Avenue), known for Monday-night keggers where $10 got you live music and all you could drink. “It was totally illegal,” Hamme reminisces, “but so much fun!”<\/span><\/p>\n

But this DIY paradise did not last much longer, and the Garage found themselves homeless when Studio 354 was shut down after the first weekend of the Garage’s next show.<\/span><\/p>\n

The difficulty of place would plague the Garage’s first few years of existence. Santa Ana’s Rude Guerilla Theater played host for a few shows, as did Koo’s Art Center (R.I.P.). It was only when the Long Beach Towne Center was built that the Garage got a big break, as the Found Theatre vacated their home for new digs at Towne Center. <\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the Garage Theatre had truly arrived, and today they find themselves rather where they had hoped they would be 10 years on. “Recently I dug up all of our old press stuff, since we were redoing our Website,” says Hamme. “What was interesting is that our philosophy hasn’t changed at all. I think we knew what we wanted to do and what we wanted to be, but we didn’t really have a plan. We never really thought past the next show. It was really unorganized. We knew what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go, but we really didn’t have a plan for how to get there.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“We’re about where I thought we’d be,” says Sweet. “Back then I just wanted to be a part of whatever the landscape would be 10 years later. And I think we are.” Adds Hamme, “We wanted to be in a position to do the kind of theatre we like. And most important, we wanted to have an audience, to be established in the city as a place to go for that kind of theatre. In that regard, we’re right where we want to be.”<\/span><\/p>\n

But a decade ago it was far from certain things would break this way. “Initially I think people didn’t take us seriously,” says Hamme. “They didn’t know if we were going to be around next month. \u2026 I feel like after 10 years we’re part of that community.”<\/span><\/p>\n

That community has changed much in that time. The board members estimate that nearly three times as many groups are doing theatre within city limits as there were at the Garage’s inception. “I think Long Beach has more of a name for itself in the theatre world than it did 10 years ago,” says Greenlea.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I point out that the Garage Theatre has become sort of a mentor and “elder statesperson” of indie theatre in Long Beach, the four seem to hear the statement as they might have in mid April of 2001. “Those are weird words, Greggory,” marvels Greenlea. After a few seconds of reverie, Anderson simply answers, “I think we’re the best,” an utterance greeted with a big laugh that gives you a sense of how seriously these folks don’t take themselves. “We’re learning a lot, still,” says Hamme, seriously. “We don’t have it all down.”<\/span><\/p>\n

But it’s no joke that the Garage Theatre occupies a central role on their particular aesthetic fringe. They’ve advised and collaborated with the younger Alive Theatre company \u2014 another product of Cal State Long Beach \u2014 and Olivia Trevino, who’s debuting at the Garage as director for the Garage’s next show and eavesdropping on my interview as she patiently waits for me to get the hell out of there so they can rehearse, notes that professors at CSULB often hold up the Garage Theatre as a model worthy of emulating, particularly in terms of relationships. <\/span><\/p>\n

To be sure, the concept of relationship is perhaps the main focus at the Garage. And while the six board members (Jessica Variz and Amy Louise Sebelius are the other two) are front and center here, enjoying each other both professionally and socially, the Garage is about a lot more than a half-dozen people. “If it was just the six of us [board members], we wouldn’t have made it past a year,” says Hamme. “The only reason this has worked is that it’s the six of us, but it’s also all these amazing people around us coming down and helping and being a part of it. It’s an army of amazing people.”<\/span><\/p>\n

An unexpected influence on the Garage Theatre is the band Phish, successors to the Grateful Dead tradition of performer\/audience union. Before the Garage’s first show, a lot of talk about the future of the Garage Theatre took place in a motorhome cruising to Las Vegas to attend a Phish concert, and the experience that followed had a lasting effect. <\/span><\/p>\n

“Surrounding yourself in that environment where the audience and the performer are one is pretty inspiring,” says Anderson. “I’d never felt like that as an audience member. And the things that I felt that were possible, and the relationship between the people on stage and the people that were watching was so connected and so tight, to somehow transfer that to theatre \u2026.”<\/span><\/p>\n

There are, of course, hard realities that come along with such elevated talk, especially when you’re a nonprofit company whose aim is to make theatre available to all, which means an element of casualness and low ticket prices. When I ask about the company’s most stressful moment, not surprisingly it has to do with money. “As someone who does the books, I have those moments all the time,” Hamme says. “I just don’t always share them.”<\/span><\/p>\n

That cash concern led to what Hamme calls a bit of a “freak out” their first year in their permanent space, what with the reality of making rent every month. To combat that fear they did eight shows in 10 months. “We had no idea what we were doing,” Hamme says. “At the end of that year I thought, ‘There’s no way we can do that every year. Moving into our own space was a bad idea.’ \u2026 It was a couple of years before we had it down.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Having it down does not mean anybody’s getting rich. The Garage is not a full-time job for anyone. “It would be fantastic to be able to pay the people who sweat here what they’re worth,” Hamme says, his voice pointing to the obvious fact that that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, even with the run of pretty much uninterrupted success the Garage has enjoyed in recent years, including triumphs such as being nominated for three NAACP Theatre Awards for their 2006 staging of Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman<\/em> and winning The District Weekly<\/em>‘s “Best Musical from an Unexpected Source” for their magnificent 2009 production of Trey Parker’s Cannibal!: The Musical<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

That success has continued into the Garage’s 10th season, which opened in February with a pretty much sold-out run of Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening<\/em> (<\/span>read my review here<\/a>) and continues beginning Friday with Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Resting on their laurels, though, is not an option.<\/span><\/p>\n

“If 10 years ago you’d said, ‘You’re going to have a space, you’re gonna sell out shows, you’re gonna do these crazy plays,’ I would have been stoked,” says Hamme. “But now that you’re here, you kind of start to look beyond that. You’re always sort of thinking, ‘Now where do you want to go?'” He laughs. “And we still don’t know how to get there.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Nonetheless, so far, so good.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Marmalade<\/span> runs April 22 through May 21 at 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Tickets are $18, $15 for seniors and students and $20 for opening\/closing nights and their parties (always a good time). For more information, visit <\/span>TheGarageTheatre.org<\/a>.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long Beach theatre troupe The Garage Theatre has launched its 10th season. Several of its board members recently sat down with the Long Beach Post to reflect on their decade-long journey to the present and discuss what’s on the horizon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_sponsor_sponsorship_scope":"","newspack_sponsor_native_byline_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_native_category_display":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_style":"inherit","newspack_sponsor_underwriter_placement":"inherit","inline_featured_image":false,"newspack_ads_suppress_ads":false,"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":"","_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_":"","_author_alias":"","cap-aim":"","cap-description":"","cap-display_name":"","cap-first_name":"","cap-jabber":"","cap-last_name":"","cap-linked_account":"","cap-newspack_employer":"","cap-newspack_job_title":"","cap-newspack_phone_number":"","cap-newspack_role":"","cap-user_email":"","cap-user_login":"","cap-website":"","cap-yahooim":"","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_email_html":"","newspack_email_type":"","newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_hide_page_title":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_show_share_buttons":"","newspack_sponsor_byline_prefix":"","newspack_sponsor_disclaimer_override":"","newspack_sponsor_flag_override":"","newspack_sponsor_only_direct":"","newspack_sponsor_url":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"newspack_spnsrs_tax":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-5204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hi-lo","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5204"},{"taxonomy":"newspack_spnsrs_tax","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/newspack_spnsrs_tax?post=5204"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lbpost.com\/esd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}