Arts

Good Luck to Le Chat Noir

A new black box theater opens downtown this month to bring a new venue and variety of theatrical productions to Augusta audiences.

by Jim Garvey

But at the same time, lilacs-or azaleas anyway-were breeding out of the dead land. Other headlines in The Chronicle and Spirit confirmed the buzz in the restaurants and coffee houses and galleries up and down Broad Street, excited and hopeful: Something big is happening at the old Capri Cinema.

Sure enough, that old porno house turned occasional rock venue turned abandoned eyesore at the corner of Eighth and Ellis streets, along with the building next to it, was being transformed. Its new owners were turning it into Augusta's newest performance space, a black box theater called Le Chat Noir (The Black Cat). Not only that, the owners are no wannabes but five of the most highly respected members of Augusta's theatrical community: Richard Justice, Doug Joiner, Krys Bailey and Justin and Carrie Anderson. The right people at the right time in the right place seemed to have had the right idea. This was something to get excited about.

For years actors and directors in Augusta have lamented the lack of an intimate performance space, what's called a black box theater. The performing venues in town-the Fort Gordon Dinner Theatre, the Maxwell Performing Arts Theatre, the Imperial-have hundreds of seats. They call for big shows-comedies and musicals mostly-and require big audiences. So comedies and musicals have become the dominant theatrical fare in town. But that leaves out much of the spectrum: the serious drama, the quiet, small-cast play, cabaret-style entertainment and edgy, more experimental stuff. There's an audience hungry for such work in Augusta, but it's not one that will fill the big theaters. That's Le Chat Noir's niche. They're calling the 80- to 90-seat house Augusta's "Off-Broad Street" theater.

Le Chat Noir's first production will be Wit, the harrowing but often funny story of a coolly intellectual English professor whose terminal cancer forces her to come to terms with her emotions. The play won rave reviews and a Pulitzer when it was produced on Broadway in 1999 and was released soon after as a movie starring Emma Thompson. (Interestingly, the playwright, Margaret Edson, is an Atlanta kindergarten teacher.)

Le Chat Noir's production will open as soon as the five partners can get the theater ready-they're shooting for early June. Doug Joiner, who teaches communications at Augusta State University, is directing.

"There's a market in this town for even less-known plays," Joiner says. He learned that about five years ago in the Mount Helicon Gallery on Broad Street where he did Lee Blessing's Two Rooms, a tense drama focused on an American taken hostage by Arab terrorists. Night after night the place was packed. They had to bring in chairs from next door. Many had never seen live drama this intense before.

"There are so many plays that have won Pulitzers or Tonys and most of them never get done," Joiner says. Those are the plays that most interest him.

But the strength of Le Chat Noir is that each of the five partners has a different strength and a different interest, and they'll take turns as directors. Richard Justice will direct slightly more mainstream fare: Agnes of God, Bent, Greater Tuna, some Tennessee Williams. After doing so many musicals as artistic director of the Augusta Players, he's had his fill of them for a while. But there will be musicals at Le Chat Noir too. Carrie Anderson has a degree from NYU in vocal performance and theater. She'll direct small musicals that are at home in an intimate space, such as Cabaret and The Fantasticks.

The other two partners offer non-directing skills. Carrie's husband, Justin, a real estate investor, gives the group its business sense and his savvy in construction. He's been the one cracking the whip as they all shoveled debris, hauled lumber and pounded nails during the building's renovation.

"I'm writing the mortgage check every month," Anderson explains, "and if we don't get open, I still have to keep writing that check. So my whip is very long and very thick."

Krys Bailey is the technical theater expert. With years of experience at the Imperial, he'll design the lights, sound and sets. He and Joiner have nourished the idea of a black box theater since they shared the stage in Two Rooms. "We had to keep back-burnering it for a long time."

It moved to the front burner one day when Joiner and Bailey were telling Justin Anderson about their dream. Anderson said, "Let's make it happen."

Two weeks later they started walking up and down Broad Street looking for a place to rent. Richard Justice was working Steel Magnolias with Bailey and learned about the project, so he tagged along. "For a long time I've wanted to do an acting school-but there's no space for one," Justice says. "When I learned their take on what they wanted to do, I wanted to be involved. It would also give me a space to do a school. So you might say I went in the back door, but then I realized that their idea is very appealing to me."

So the five searchers poked through Broad Street's rental properties, but nothing was quite right. They remembered that the Capri was empty and rentable, so they ventured down Eighth Street to take a look. They were surprised when they got there to find a "For Sale" sign out front. That changed everything. For Sale? Well, why not? The partners negotiated a nice deal with the owner and two weeks later they owned the Capri and the building beside it. Owning the buildings, one of which will generate rental income, actually makes the venture less risky.

"While this is a for-profit business," Justin explains, "we're not in it for a profit but because it's what we want to do, and if it's a colossal failure and only three people come, we don't care. By the same token, we won't put shows on that will only attract three people. Any other company in town has to put 800 people in seats just to cover their costs. We have only 80 seats, low overhead on the building, low royalties to pay, so if we don't draw huge crowds, that's okay. If worse comes to worst we have a real estate investment, we bought the building, so we've got an asset-it's the best of all possible situations."

Owning the space allows the partners to do with it what they need to do. They've created a lobby/bar with a sunken floor that might be used as a piano bar when no show is being done. They plan to produce six shows in the first year. The length of the runs will be determined not by the calendar but by audience demand.

"Ideally it's a multi-purpose venue," says Justice, Le Chat Noir's theater manager. "We might have cabaret evenings, acoustic sets for small local bands, poetry readings, readers theater. I'd love to see us have movie nights for things not brought to major cinemas-award-winning documentaries, independent and foreign films-there's so much wonderful film not seen in this area. This will be the only theater in town you can watch an independent film and have a beer or a glass of wine. We want something happening each night. I hope even people who don't like theater will want to come because they love this movie or that band that's playing here. We want to create many levels of interest from the audience."

If Le Chat Noir does become the kind of gathering place the partners envision, it will be a 21st-century version of its famous Parisian namesake, the Montmartre cabaret where artists, musicians and writers met to talk in the 1880s and 1890s.

But how will this new venue affect Augusta's other theater companies?

"It can only benefit the arts community, raising awareness of drama," Justice says. "Lots of people don't care for big Broadway musicals. The community needs lots of options, and offering something else will benefit every art form."

Justin Anderson says he's learned that competition is the best possible thing to happen to any market. "What will end up happening is not that we'll diminish the pool of actors or audience. Ideally we'll bring more people into the arts and increase the pool. We'll draw the actor who doesn't sing or do comedy, who has no outlet to perform in this town."

"We're not here to knock what the other theaters are doing," Joiner says. "What they do is vital and they do it very well. Without them to create the audience for theater in Augusta, we couldn't do this at all. We're no better than them. We'll just complement what they're doing with something more intimate and, sometimes, edgier."

Anderson agrees. "Not only are we not better than anybody, if anyone in the community can do it better and wants to get involved, we will welcome them. We'll be inclusive, not exclusive. We don't want any animosity. And so far everybody seems very excited. We have deep ties to all the arts groups, we're friends with all of them, serve on their boards. We're not coming along to teach them how to do their jobs-they do it very well. We want partnerships. We want everybody in the theater community involved. We want this to be a cooperative venture."

Le Chat Noir is a great concept. It could be the missing piece in Augusta's downtown arts community. If it sounds too good to be true, consider this:

Among those left unemployed by the ballet's reorganization was its inventive choreographer, Peter Powlus. Would he have to pack up his family and leave town? Powlus had of late been feeling the urge to spread his wings creatively. His life in dance had begun in musical theater. He learned Richard Justice had resigned as artistic director of the Augusta Players to devote his time to Le Chat Noir. Now the Players needed a new artistic director. He gave them a call. Hand wringing turned to halleluias all around. "You'd be perfect for the job!" they said, and Powlus agreed.

Showing up just in the nick of time, the Black Cat seemed to be good luck for everyone.