Playwriting Is a Family Affair : Theater: Married artists from Los Angeles find it pays to stick close to home.

Productions of plays by Los Angeles playwrights pop up regularly around the country. They’re out there. But some of these playwrights are sticking close to home and finding open doors at local theaters.

Currently prominent among them are Bill Shick and his wife, Gale Baker. Baker just closed her one-act “207: My Own Space� at Actors Alley Repertory in North Hollywood (directed by Shick), and Shick himself has two one-acts opening tonight at The Third Stage in Burbank under the umbrella title “Take Two.� One of the plays, “The Grotto,� in which a doorman and a waitress match wits in the back room of a run-down Manhattan bar, had a recent successful run at Actors Alley and is being joined by “Jean and Bob,� in which a Texas couple change their views on life on the way to their Las Vegas nuptials. Both plays feature actors Brenda Isaacs and John Edwin Shaw, and both are directed by Aimee Patrick.

Shick and Baker agree that the active theater scene in Los Angeles is hungry for new plays.

“You’re able to do it more now,� Shick says, referring to the growth of Los Angeles theater giving a chance to more new plays. “And it has to do with packaging. If you can put everything together, you can always get money to do something.�

Baker agrees. “I think one of the reasons everyone is moving from New York to Los Angeles is because there is an environment here that’s conducive to the process. And it’s less expensive.� That doesn’t mean it’s inexpensive, she said. “No, the days are gone of producing something for a thousand dollars.�

“Unless,� Shick adds, “you’re doing it within a company parameter, like Actors Alley. Theater companies are terrific for that.�

Outside a theater company framework, Baker says, “the normal production costs at a theater can be $80,000 and up.�

“It depends on the length of the run,� according to Shick. “But when you’re paying 3,000 bucks a week in rent, it doesn’t take long to rack up costs. The wonderful thing about most theater companies is they’re predominantly acting companies, but many of the actors do other things as well--they’re designers and directors and writers, etc., so you get a common pool. It’s a group effort.

“Los Angeles is continuing to bloom as a theater town. There’s a lot of debate about that, why it’s not gone further, but the economics of the place kind of stipulate that we are what we are, and we’ll go where we go when we go there. It’s never going to be New York, but it’s going to be something else. There’s no shortage of writing talent, directing talent or performing talent at all. In fact, it’s getting richer and richer.

“The problem is audience. That’s a long culturalization process. It starts from an early age. The terrific thing about acting companies, like The Colony, Actors Alley and other established companies, is that they continue to support themselves off their subscription audiences. They have subscribers who support their season, just like� the Mark Taper Forum and the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“That’s how all these established companies do it. The Colony is unbelievable. They do incredibly well, but you can’t stay around for 30 years and not have a core of supportive audience base like Actors Alley and Theatre West, and companies like that.�

Shick, who is on the theater arts faculty at East Los Angeles College, had a play called “Deals� produced at Theatre/Theater in Hollywood, followed by his long-running one-man show “Silo.� Then he went to Cal State L.A. to get his master’s degree. After that he sat down to write “The Grotto.� He’s also the West Coast representative for the Dramatists Guild. He believes in getting out there and getting plays produced.

“The thing about theater,� he says, “is that other people are involved. You can certainly sit in your little room and write your plays, but in order to be taken to the next step it’s collaborative. You’ve got to have other people to collaborate with. That’s a wonderful situation to be in, but it’s tough to find a group and a director. It’s great to lock into a situation where everyone trusts each other, and it’s not always a battle of the egos. When you can find that, you stay there.�

“Hopefully with people you can trust,� adds Baker, whose “207� is a 1991 finalist for the DramaRama festival at the Playwright Center in San Francisco. She’s usually been able to find that trust. “The first thing I did in town here, Bill and I did together down at the Variety Arts before it closed. It was a revue called ‘Plain Rapp.’ After that I started writing ‘Pin Curls,’ and through Women in Film it was produced in the Fringe Festival that year, and Room for Theatre saw it and wanted to produce it again.�

Her next project was a country musical called “Watering Hole,� which ran successfully at the Tamarind Theatre on Franklin in Hollywood. “We had a reading,� says Baker, originally from Nashville, Tenn., “and invited people who would be likely backers, and found some money to put it together.� She smiles happily. “There are angels out there.�

For Shick and Baker, working on a new play is exhilarating. It’s the collaborative process that turns them on. It creates the same excitement for directors and actors.

“What happens with writers,� director Patrick says, is that “it may take them a year, two years to write a play. There’s a lot of time they’re spending with these characters. By the time they give it to a director, they know it well. We get six weeks rehearsal to get inside the characters the same way the writer did. We’ve got the blueprint, but you still have to find your way in, making tangential forays into other parts of that play’s world, to have the freedom to go wild, to try anything.�

“When everything is working right,� says “Take Two� actor Shaw, “when the idea that you start with, the words that you start with, are well put together, and they’re funny, what more can you ask? That’s what every actor hopes for.�

During rehearsals Shaw and his acting partner Isaacs tried switching roles in the newer “Jean and Bob.� It worked and the switch has remained. It’s all part of the process that can change a new play. “No one has a set idea of what this character is,� Isaacs says. “You’re not compared to anything. You’re able to really create the character.�

It’s the freedom and the excitement of working with new plays that keep the collaboration going, fostering Los Angeles as an area for hatching new works and encouraging playwrights to write them.

“I write because I’m trying to explain the world to myself in some way,� Shick says. “I think that’s what all people do in their own way.�

Baker nods. “Obviously we don’t write plays because we just want to write them. We write them because we want people to hear them and understand them. That’s a search, searching for something there, acceptance, love, understanding.�

“Take Two� opens tonight at The Third Stage, 2801 Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. It plays Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., through July 27. Tickets are $10, seniors and students $8. For information and reservations, call (213) 969-4633.