She's filling a new stage with dreams

Anita Sorel has done a lot of different things in a lot of different theaters during her long arts career, from teaching at the University of Kansas to dinner theater and touring with the National Shakespeare Company.

Now, she says, it's time to fulfill another dream -- creating a community theater in East Hampton, where there are so many actors and actresses wandering the streets this time of year that you can form a softball team with them.

Which, of course, they do every fall for the annual Artists & Writers Charity Softball Game in East Hampton.

Sorel bristles at the suggestion that bringing a community theater to an area bustling with thespians and that already boasts two fine local theaters -- more if you travel as far as Westhampton Beach -- is like bringing a deck of cards to Las Vegas.

Community theater, she feels, is a very special thing, a grassroots activity that nourishes the people who come to see it, the ones participating and those who will buy a ticket just to see their cousin on stage.

Her cast, she knows, is unlikely to meet the better-known actors of the Hamptons, unless they show up in local stores or need help from the volunteer fire department. Her actors, she says with pride, do not get paid.

That, to her, is what makes community theater not only different from any other kind of acting, it's what makes it fun.

"Guild Hall and Bay Street [two busy theaters in the Hamptons] are equity houses," she said. "I wanted to have a fireman [in the cast], and I wanted a bartender . . . and my leading man is a lieutenant in the East Hampton Fire Department."

The show, her first, will be June 16-18 in one of the LTV studios on Industrial Road in Wainscott, across from the East Hampton Airport. The theater, a basic black box with seats and a stage, holds a little more than 200 people -- less than half the size of the theater at the International School of Kenya in Nairobi, where she worked five years ago.

It was originally called the Studio Three Playhouse, but the name had to be changed when a local business, Studio Three Dance, complained it was getting calls about the new community theater and people were getting confused. Now, it is just the Studio Playhouse.

In the past few weeks, it's been a busy place. The sets are being built, the cast has been rehearsing and the technical crew has been busy getting the sound system and the lighting in place and working.

Seth Lowell, a former student of Sorel's when she taught at the Ross School, a private middle and high school on 140 acres in East Hampton, was working on the lighting. "I use an iPad to control it all," he said.

For her first play as director of the new theater, Sorel will be doing "Destry Rides Again, the Musical."

"Nobody knows it," she said. "It's a musical. It has a big cast."

Actually, several people know the 1959 play -- and the movie version -- including Sorel, who had a role in the musical in a European tour.

Still, the play, based on a 1939 film starring Jimmy Stewart as a sheriff who did not like to shoot people and Marlene Dietrich as a dance hall girl, will be new to a lot of people paying for the $15 tickets. She hopes to sell enough to cover the few thousand dollars it cost to put on the play -- even with volunteers, there are rental costs and material costs -- and notes that actually making money would be "amazing."

But, money is not the yardstick Sorel is using to measure success. "Everyone in the show is hustling tickets," she said. "And if only 15 people come to every performance, it's still successful. I had 23 people come to auditions, and they're all having a ball being here."

One of them is Stephanie Grady, who grew up in Utah and has lived in East Hampton for five years. She was painting the set just before dress rehearsal, but would later put on a costume and transform into character. "I'm just a dance hall girl," she said, happily.

Like several other members of the cast, it's hard for Grady to get time to rehearse. She has a 9-to-5 job in a store, and waitresses part-time during the summer.

That's why the first show at the new Studio Playhouse will be the last show until after Labor Day. Everyone in Sorel's cast is keeping their day jobs.