Patrick Dooley is a happy man. Giving a brief tour of the new home of his theater company, the founder and artistic director of the Shotgun Players shows off the dressing rooms with giddy pride, saying how exciting it is “just to have a Dressing Room 1.” Sitting in one of the leftover pews in the converted church at Ashby and Martin Luther King Jr. Way that until recently was the Transparent Theater and has been newly rechristened the Ashby Stage, Dooley seems very much at home. That’s only natural, because after thirteen years of nomadic existence and a long search for permanent digs, his company finally has one.
Shotgun couldn’t have asked for a better space. The former church was converted to a theater by Tom Clyde and Coley Lalley only three years back. The now-married partners staged shows at Transparent until a couple of months ago, when they canceled their last show to rent the space to Epic Arts for Tim Barsky’s The Bright River. The Clydes opted to move on, and in April Shotgun announced that a “very special supporter” was buying the 150-seat theater to “guarantee the company a home for the next thirty years.” The Julia Morgan Center for the Arts, meanwhile, released Shotgun from its recently signed five-year lease as the center’s resident theater group.
As for that “special supporter,” Dooley is now comfortable enough to reveal her identity: Mom. While he and his wife were visiting his family in Virginia and South Carolina, he got a message from Realtor Michael Korman that the theater was for sale. “He told me what the asking price was, and I said, ‘Ha!'” Dooley says. “It was Valentine’s Day, and I remember getting e-mail from him, and I came downstairs and was talking to my mom about it and said, ‘This theater’s four blocks from our front door. It’s like it was built for our company.'”
It would be normal enough for a mom to want to help fulfill her son’s dream, but Dooley’s mother, Kitty Herz, thought it might actually be feasible. “Growing up, our family didn’t have any money,” he explains, “a single mother raising two boys on a farm. But my grandfather had a bunch of real estate, and he passed away a couple years ago. … And so she said, ‘Well, Patrick, before you say no, let’s just see what I can do.’ My mom, with some support from my grandmother, took out a significant loan and is selling some property to purchase this building. I gotta tell you, man, it’s pretty intense. I still can’t really wrap my head around it. She’s taken an incredibly courageous step to make an investment like this, not even living out here.”
It’s a big step for the players as well. In addition to rent, they’ll have to cover property taxes and utilities on top of all the normal operating costs of running a theater. But Dooley says it’s high time. “I felt like it was a chance to step up to the plate,” he says. “If I let this opportunity pass, I would be kicking myself. I’ve been working thirteen years so I could be ready to do this.”
If this was the kind of luck that knocks but once, other prospects had been playing ding-dong-ditch at Shotgun’s door for several years. Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy made a big deal about building Shotgun a theater on the ground floor of his Gaia Building two years ago. The city let him build seven stories instead of five only if he would dedicate the bottom two floors to a cultural use — and because the planned Gaia Bookstore went out of business before it could move in, Kennedy told the zoning board, “Shotgun’s the girl I’m bringing to the prom.”
He wound up ditching her there: Kennedy announced later that year that it would cost an additional $800,000 to turn the space into a theater, rather than the $300,000 he’d previously estimated — and hey, coming up with that extra money wasn’t his responsibility.
Dooley, no stranger to performing in empty spaces, had expected to open A Fairy’s Tail, the first show of the 2002 season, in the building anyway, but city officials ousted the troupe eleven days before the opening because it lacked construction permits for the restrooms. “I got a phone call from my costume designer who was at the space working on costumes,” Dooley recalls. “She said, ‘People from the city just walked in and said, You have to leave right now. This is done.’ Fortunately, the Berkeley Rep became available — we rented the Thrust Stage for thirteen performances immediately. We loaded in and did our opening night in one day.”
Shotgun had its own crash course in permits when it cleaned up the shuttered UC Theatre just enough to stage Medea, its next show. The rest of the season was spent shuffling between Eighth Street Studio, the Julia Morgan Center, and John Hinkel Park. “When the Gaia thing went down, it kind of broke me,” Dooley confesses. “That experience, and feeling kind of embarrassed about it all, just made me realize I didn’t care if the Gaia ended up becoming a theater. I wasn’t going to go into it.”
But he says the Gaia experience taught him a valuable lesson. “I have to say we were naive,” he says “I remember Bill Lambert [then Berkeley’s director of economic development] said, ‘You have to get a lease. If you don’t have a lease, you have nothing. You have a handshake, and a handshake doesn’t mean anything. A letter of agreement doesn’t mean anything. A letter of intent doesn’t mean anything. A lease means something. ‘”
Now, lease in hand, the Shotgun Players have moved their offices into the Ashby Stage with remarkable speed, which Dooley credits to a whole lot of practice picking up and moving, and to the solidarity that comes with having an actual theatrical organization rather than a loose affiliation of twenty artists.
The Players won’t actually stage a production there until September 23, when Liz Duffy Adams’ Dog Act moves over from SF’s Thick House. In the meantime, they are finishing their Julia Morgan stay with Doug Wright’s Quills and will move from there to John Hinkel Park with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle in July. But they’ve wasted no time renting out the space: FoolsFURY Theater and the Z Space had short runs at the Ashby Stage last month, and starting in August the theater will host shows by Alchemy Works and two Persian groups, Darvag and Golden Thread. “I want this space to be also a place for other nomadic companies just like us to have a place to go,” Dooley says. “I think it’s a shame to have an empty theater when there are so many companies that need it. And that was one reason we called it the Ashby Stage rather than the Shotgun Shack or Chez Shotgun, because I really want other people to feel that when they’re using this space, it’s their space.”
Shotgun got its start in 1991 when another company displayed a similar welcoming attitude. “I was on my way to Seattle to do some theater,” Dooley recalls. “I was 24 and a young artist. I was just passing through town, and my brother told me there was a show going on in a pizza-parlor basement. So I went down there, and Subterranean Shakespeare was rehearsing The Tempest. Someone dropped out that night I was watching the rehearsal, and the director, Stan Spenger, asked me if I would step in. I would, I said, if I could direct the next play.”
Dooley was given a Wednesday-night slot to put on David Mamet’s Edmond while Sub Shakes did Tempest on weekends. He put a help-wanted ad in a local paper, and cast ten of the fourteen people who showed up. “They weren’t really actors,” he recalls. “There was a stripper, a drummer, a bus driver, a caterer, a legal secretary, a homeless guy who just kind of hung around La Val’s in the back alley there. And we did this play and got pretty good press, so we ran it on some weekends after The Tempest closed and were packing it. Packing it for us probably meant forty people back then, but we were so excited. And so after the show, we were like, ‘Let’s do it again! Maybe I won’t go to Seattle just yet — let’s do another play!’ And that play did pretty well, too.”
The Shotgun Players grew in fits and starts, one play at a time, learning as they went. “I didn’t study theater,” Dooley admits. “I’ve always seen the theater company as my extended Ph.D program.” Eventually he felt he’d learned enough to loosen the reins a bit and let other people steer now and then. “It took, like, five years before someone else directed a play,” he says. “I started seeing myself not just as the artistic leader of the company but more as a producer, a facilitator for theater to happen. I didn’t have to be the guy whose great idea it was; it was great if anybody had a great idea.”
La Val’s Subterranean served as a home base for five or six years, after which the group started bouncing around from space to space, including a church and the back of a print shop. It was only in 1998 that Shotgun officially organized as a theater company as opposed to an ad hoc cast and crew, and it didn’t happen without growing pains. “I’d chosen to do this world premiere — Mascara by Ariel Dorfman, the Death and the Maiden guy,” Dooley says. “It was a huge, colossal disaster. People were like, ‘I don’t know why we did that play! I didn’t want to do that play!’ And I said, ‘If you want to have a say in what fucking play we’re going to do, then you show up and clean the fucking bathrooms with me. If you wanna figure out where we’re going to go, you have to change diapers with me.’ Some people said okay, some people said, ‘I don’t want that,’ and they’re gone. The people who wanted to change diapers are still here. And when we became a company, the next year we had some of our greatest successes.”
Among Shotgun’s greatest successes was last year’s The Death of Meyerhold, a new work by local playwright Mark Jackson, which garnered rave reviews and packed in the crowds despite being exactly the sort of play usually seen as a big risk rather than a surefire moneymaker. “I feel like a lot of decisions I make on the face look like really bad financial decisions,” Dooley says.
Perhaps the boldest such decision was the choice to offer free admission all season, with a pay-what-you-wish donation encouraged, at a time when it would seem natural to raise ticket prices. “When I started the company thirteen years ago, I really wanted to keep it affordable,” Dooley says. “I wanted anybody to be able to go see a play. Our earliest ticket prices were six to eight bucks. But what happens as you grow is you try to pay people more, so we have to raise our ticket prices. So one day I turned around and our tickets were twelve to eighteen bucks. That felt like a lot of money to me. I would have a hard time going to see my play with the frequency I think people should go to see theater.”
Having noticed at Shotgun’s free shows in the park that people can be awfully generous when you give them a chance to be, Dooley decided to give free theater a tumble. “Our actors want to play to a large house, and there’s so many people who would come and check us out if it didn’t cost eighteen bucks,” he says. “They feel really good about it, because they’re paying what it’s worth to them according to what they can afford. I want people to think about what its value is to them.”
After all, you never know. For some that may be five bucks, but for others it just might be a million.
