Seventeen years ago this weekend, a small group of us built a theatre. It’s called Moving Arts and it’s still running.

And then seven years after that, we built another, inside the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which we had to tear down seven years after that when we vacated the building. So I’ve built two theatres and torn one down. I hope some day in retirement to build one more, but I plan never to tear another one down.

Today the memories of building that first one came flooding back because a crew assembled again in that original space to take almost everything down and apart and rebuild the space. A long long time past overdue, the space is finally getting a rehab. My two younger kids and I arrived to find the risers disassembled, the ceiling fan apparatuses apart, all the drapes and carpet tossed, the bathroom stripped out, the seats unbolted and repositioned, and a nimbus of long undisturbed dust floating like the haze of Los Angeles over everything. It came as a shock.

I love building (and, now, rebuilding) theatres, so I’m glad I came to help out even if only for a few hours. I spackled holes, removed ancient twisted hardware, and painted. Somewhere in our archives we have a photo of my then 1-year-old standing in the window in November 1992 as we post our first (positive) review. That child is now off at college; his younger siblings are further along, so they also got to paint and spackle and drag trash around.

One of the things I tell students is that theatre takes place in a room. (Even when it’s staged outside, that room is implied.) It’s a form that insists on the isolation of space, defining a stage that is apart from an audience, urging us to believe in split universes, the universe of the spectators seeing into the world of the players. But we’re still in the same room. Actors who know how to play off audiences know that, and so does everybody else on some level.

So this is a room I’ve done a lot of theatre in. Hundreds of plays and rehearsals and auditions and workshops and readings over the past 17 years. I’ve grown fond of the place. I’m glad it’s getting a makeover that it has long deserved.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 7th, 2009 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Theatre, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.