EVEN
MORE About Arts on Real Theatre and Soundstage
Reprinted
from the American Statesman
How to build
a warehouse theater
Have a vision, find a site, hit the game-show
circuit.
Sweat — a lot. That's
what Blake Yelavich did to create Arts on Real
By Michael Barnes
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, September 25, 2003
" Well, it's big and white."
That was producer
Blake Yelavich's first response to the former meat
processing plant and ice factory just off East Martin Luther King
Jr.
Boulevard.
Delivery trucks
had rutted the building's loading area so badly that even
Yelavich's jeep scraped bottom. Raised on a 4-foot-high concrete
foundation, the industrial structure, built in 1971, was dirty and,
on an icy
day last January, bitterly cold. Miles of electrical wiring spilled
from the
cinder-block walls.
" It's absolutely
perfect," Yelavich said nine months ago. All the Austin artist
saw was the emptiness. Yelavich planned to inscribe the future of
his
theater company on the blank sheet of this 5,900 square feet of column-
free space.
Six months later,
on June 12, Arts on Real opened with a hit comedy,
"Tricks," written and directed by Yelavich. With just two
helpers, a few
one-day volunteers and frequent trips to Home Depot, he had
transformed that big, white, dirty warehouse into a presentable 120-seat
theater with spacious lobby, gallery, bar, restrooms, dressing rooms,
scene shop and rehearsal space.
"Vision and
sweat, " Yelavich says. "Basically, it takes vision and
sweat."
Old
spaces, new uses
More than a dozen
Austin warehouses, storefronts and former military
facilities have rated second lives as small-scale theaters that present
plays, concerts and art exhibits virtually year-round.
The oldest still-operating
reclamation turned a 1947 Naval Reserve Station
on Barton Springs Road into the city-owned Dougherty Arts Center
Theater in the 1970s. The trend accelerated in the '80s and '90s,
as
artists discovered underutilized structures, usually in scrappy industrial
areas, persuaded landlords to lease or sell the spaces, then, with
their
own hands and tools, turned these sows' ears into cultural silk purses.
The highest concentration
of warehouse theaters is found in Central and
East Austin. Although several beloved spaces were lost to the real-
estate boom of the '90s, The Hideout, Esther's Follies and The Velveeta
Room have survived in bustling downtown entertainment districts, partly
because these imaginatively remodeled storefronts operate like clubs,
with much of the income derived from food and beverage sales.
The East Austin
warehouse theaters -- The Vortex, The Off Center, Blue
Theater, Santa Cruz Center for Culture, Tillery Street Theater and
now
Arts on Real -- are grass-roots artistic ventures, rented or owned
by
arts groups, but shared by numerous nonprofits. They also tend to
be the
least improved spaces. Creature comforts are not always the first
priority
in these handmade theaters.
Perhaps the most
handsome warehouse theater -- despite its cramped
stage -- is Austin Playhouse in the sensitively redeveloped Penn Field
complex off South Congress Avenue. To the north, the Auditorium on
Waller Creek, adapted from a former gym, only just recently began
to look
more like a theater as troupes such as Different Stages have rearranged
the vaulted space more creatively.
Hyde Park Theatre,
a former post office off Guadalupe Street, has
experienced at least four reincarnations under producers Ken Johnson,
Eva Paloheimo, Vicky Boone and, now, Ken Webster. Despite its sliver
of
a stage and L-shaped house, the 60 to 85 seats -- depending on the
stage configuration -- are almost always full. The compact brick building
hosts FronteraFest, the wintertime performance fandango featuring
more
than 100 acts and the high point of the warehouse-theater season.
In fact, it could
be argued that warehouse theaters constitute the heart and
soul of Austin's performance scene. Like the storefront theaters of
Chicago and Seattle, these grass-roots venues are where most new
plays are born, where young performers get their first crack at stardom
and where audiences alienated by the formality of established theaters
feel comfortable sampling unusual material -- or just hanging out.
(The
parking lots of Hyde Park Theatre, The Off Center and Blue Theater
are
among the coolest places in town to make social connections.)
All the seats
in Austin's warehouse theaters combined (1,763) could easily
fit inside the city's largest theater, the University of Texas' Bass
Concert
Hall (about 3,000 seats). Still, the rough-and-ready warehouses often
present more than a dozen distinct shows each weekend, easily
trumping the more formal theaters for quantity -- and sometimes quality.
And there's no
need for government-mandated cultural diversity in this
scene. On any given weekend, one might see standard Broadway fare
at Austin Playhouse, a folkloric troupe at Santa Cruz Center, performance
art at Tillery Street, children's theater at the Dougherty, ritual
performance
at The Vortex, a living installation at the Blue Theater, the next
international marvel at The Off Center, an edgy comedy at Hyde Park,
a
scaled-down classic at Waller Creek, sketch comedy at Esther's Follies,
improvisation at The Hideout or stand-up comedy at The Velveeta Room.
When
'Making Porn' pays
A risqué
show with a provocative title helped usher Blake Yelavich into the
warehouse theater of his dreams.
The actor, director,
writer and producer had launched his Naughty Austin
company in the '90s with parodies of local theater in the mode of
"Forbidden Broadway." While the lyrics often hit their targets,
the potential
audience for this kind of satire was extremely limited.
Naughty Austin
secured a second audience base by branching into gay-
themed plays, some penned by Yelavich. But the formula that altered
the
troupe's fortunes was imported to Austin from San Diego.
The California-born
comedy "Making Porn" became a nationwide sensation
through a surefire marketing device -- at least one big-name star
from the
adult entertainment industry always played a leading character.
Naughty Austin's
2002 run of "Porn" at the Hyde Park Theatre, featuring
Ryan Idol and Chris Steele, confirmed the formula by becoming a
runaway hit. Naughty Austin walked away with a $17,000 profit, an
unheard-of amount in the world of warehouse theater.
" We had
the money," Yelavich says. "We also had the business savvy
to
know we needed to make money from this money."
Later that year,
Yelavich brought in more unexpected cash by appearing on
two game shows, "Win Ben Stein's Money" and "The Weakest
Link."
Simultaneously, friction with the managers of Hyde Park and Austin
Playhouse led Yelavich to an inevitable conclusion -- Austin needed
another warehouse theater.
So Yelavich, along
with his life partner, actor Kirk Addison, and close friend
Jode Lanclos, went to work. They first identified a metal storage
building
near the intersection of Lamar Boulevard and West Sixth Street, but
could
not nail down a deal with the property agent.
It was Lanclos
who first spied the empty ice factory after the address
came up during an online classified search.
" I don't
know if you are going to like it," Lanclos told Yelavich by phone.
Other artists and board members expressed reservations as well.
Despite its location near the popular Flatbed Press and other established
arts venues, such as Slugfest and The Vortex, scruffy Real Street
is a
block-long stretch of undistinguished industrial buildings abutting
railroad
tracks.
"Only Kirk
agreed with me about the building's real potential," Yelavich
says.
After all, they
had spent weeks helping to renovate Austin Playhouse by
knocking down interior walls and working around structural columns.
Here, they had stumbled on a wide-open space in which to construct
a
theatrical box inside an industrial box.
An ultimate
do-it-yourself
project
Yelavich devised
a new nonprofit, Arts Entertainment Group Inc., to
capitalize on and operate the new space. And he lucked into a sensitive
landlord in Larry Rother of LWR Family Partnerships, who not only
agreed
to a 20-year lease-to-own deal -- with a opt-out clause at 10 years
-- he
also replaced the rutted loading area with a smooth, new concrete
parking lot at his own not inconsiderable expense.
After some preliminary cleaning, Yelavich's first task was to widen
and
rebuild the public restrooms to comply with the Americans with Disabilities
Act.
" I just
went down to Home Depot and purchased a circular saw strong
enough to cut through cinder block," he says.
The original builders
of the meat processing plant had set deep, wide drains
into the thick concrete foundation, which is slightly cracked and
uneven.
Yelavich stained and finished the concrete himself -- not always a
wise
choice -- making a mess and requiring a second swipe at the job.
Another big task
was stripping the electrical wiring from the cinder-block
walls. The wires had controlled the making and cooling of ice in one
of
the building's previous incarnations; now they filled several trucks
with
detritus.
Yelavich defined
the interior theatrical space with a wood-frame structure
raised near the center of the old warehouse. Six tiers of seats were
built
to overlook a deep, narrow stage serviced by overhead trusses, a
modern lighting system and technical booth.
All told, it cost
$48,000 -- almost exactly Yelavich's game-show winnings --
to reconstruct the place. That amount did not include purchase of
the
theater seats ($1 each and rescued from a flooded Houston cinema
theater), office equipment ($15,000) or the truss and lighting system
($15,000), much of it acquired piecemeal by Yelavich prior to the
renovation.
Then there was
the matter of obtaining permits. A beer and wine license
from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission cost $1,000, but an
additional $1,000 went to filing a request for a zoning change. (Arts
on
Real is located 1,500 feet from the back fence of a school.)
Yelavich hit
the roof when he learned of an anonymous complaint accusing
him of opening an adult-oriented business, a rumor based on the openly
gay themes of Naughty Austin's previous shows. Arts backers Suzie
Harriman and Bettie Naylor helped Yelavich overcome that obstacle
and
walked him through the city government's Byzantine permitting system.
As the June opening
approached, Yelavich hit a potentially project-stopping
hurdle. A 5-ton air-conditioning unit did not cool the space adequately,
and a line of specialists disagreed about what it would take to fix
it.
Audiences and, especially, performers baked during the first months
of
operation.
" I don't
know anything about AC," Yelavich says. "I can do electricity.
I just
can't get a straight story from the repairmen. So we are putting in
another 5-ton unit -- right over the house -- very soon. "
Before opening,
Yelavich was concerned about the subletting potential of
Arts on Real. He was prepared to quit his day job as a graphic designer
for Texas Green magazine to promote the theater, but within three
hours
of announcing the space's availability, it was booked for a year.
Learning from
his experience at other warehouse theaters, Yelavich
contracts the space at a clean $1,000 a week.
" You can
have as many rehearsals, as many performances as you want,"
he says. "And you can stay all night if you need to do that.
I wanted to
make it as simple and convenient as possible. "
The $1,000 covers
his mortgage and utility costs. So while it may not turn a
profit, Arts on Real is not a drain on Yelavich's core product, Naughty
Austin, which opens the campy musical "Pageant" Nov. 15.
Three months after
Arts on Real opened in what Yelavich calls a "trendy
industrial bordello style," his instinct about the potential
of the East Austin
site was confirmed when former Dell Inc. executive Tom Meredith
announced he would develop a large retail and commercial site -- with
cultural attractions -- across Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. on what
is called
the Featherlite Tract.
Not everyone shared
Yelavich's vision. Way back in April, he broadcast an
appeal to the theater community for help transforming the space. Only
eight people showed up.
" It took
a 100 percent commitment on my part, but it's hard to expect 100
percent commitment from everyone else," Yelavich says. "A
lot of people
fear failure and fear being associated with failure. Everyone is looking
for
something convenient and cheap. "
Six months ago,
Yelavich was just one of Austin's many itinerant
producers, impatient with the indignities of shlepping his shows from
one
venue to another. Now he has the luxury of producing in his own space
and providing another warehouse theater for the city's performance
scene, which has not slowed down despite a two-year arts recession.
But that's not
how warehouse theaters get built, he says. "You're going to
sweat and you're going to have to believe in it all the way to the
end."
mbarnes@statesman.com;
445-3647.
Read
what the Barry Pineo of the AUSTIN CHRONICLE said about this fabulous
new theater space!
Read
what the Robert Faires of the AUSTIN CHRONICLE said about in a feature
article about the space!
