‘Room’ offers unique cultural experience

by Lauren Evans

In 1994 the Blue Room Theatre opened its doors to the public.  It moved from the humble locale of a family’s garage to the corner of First and Broadway streets atop Collier’s Hardware.  This one-of-a-kind venue offers the Chico community plays that spark appeal to the intelligent and hip masses.

Ø   Birth of the Blue Room

Ø   Content of plays

Ø   The crowd

Ø   Its success

Ø   The atmosphere

The upstairs of a hardware store in what used to be a Masonic temple sounds more like a place one might to go to witness a scene from "The DaVinci Code" than drink a beer and watch theater. Even the idea of mixing beer with theater sounds a bit strange. 

Alas, welcome to the Blue Room.

Resting comfortably atop Collier's Hardware on First and Broadway streets, the Blue Room Theatre's space does in fact have a history as a ballroom in what used to be the Masonic Lodge Building. And once you've squashed yourself into the tiny room that looks as though it could fit no more than 70 people, patrons are invited to sit back and sip a Sierra Nevada brew while peering down upon the acting taking place right at their feet.

Then again, the Blue Room Theatre isn't used to doing things by other's standards of normalcy.

Birth of the Blue Room

As Chico's primary venue to witness the unexpected, the Blue Room Theatre is the product of something that started in 1988 in the backyard of the Latimer family. With their parents away on a fishing trip, Denver and Dylan Latimer saw this as an opportunity to cut out a sidewall of the garage to create a makeshift theater, which became known, for whatever reason, as "The Butcher Shop." A few more years of this eventually prompted the brothers to take to traveling, performing in local coffee shops under the name "The Cosmic Travel Agency."

In 1994, The Cosmic Travel Agency landed itself in its current location, and a few name changes later, the Blue Room Theatre, a name inspired from the room's blue carpeting (which, by the way, remains only under the seats) was born.

The theater, however, stands out for more than just its locale.

Content of plays

Jeremy Votava, the theatre's technical director and one of the five paid staff members, says the Blue Room differentiates from other venues in the content of its plays.

“We’re not afraid to do things that’ll make you think,” he said.

An understatement, given the subject matter of some of the performances put on (their latest, “The Goat or Who is Sylvia,” focuses on a successful family man's love affair with a goat).

The plays in each season are hand-selected by the Blue Room's artistic director, Joe Hilsee, who makes an effort to select plays which appeal to what he calls "the highest common denominator."

The crowd

“We draw the intelligent, hip, discerning, cool crowd,” he said. “That's how I program the plays, because that's the kind of crowd that we want to draw.”

And it appears that Chico has responded. With a membership that continues to go up (the current count is 73, according to a 2005-2006 membership listing) the Blue Room is doing better than ever.

Its success

“I think the biggest factor in the Blue Room’s continued success is that when it started off, there were no grand delusions of how big, how great, how wonderful it was going to be right off the bat,” Hilsee said.

Indeed, hard work on the part of what Votava describes as the Blue Room’s “bare bones staff,” paired with a passion for theatre has helped it grow into the idiosyncratic mecca it has become.

“We are what we are, and we’re not going to try to be anything else,” Hilsee said. “We’re just a passionate group of people who are very passionate about theater and what theater can be in a community.”

Chico State music major Whitney George, who attended her first Blue Room production this month, says she enjoys the familial atmosphere that the place offers.

The atmosphere

“It’s like the audience is a necessary part of the whole atmosphere, not removed like in more traditional theaters,” she said.

She was also shocked at the content of the play she saw, “The Goat or Who is Sylvia.”

“I’ve never seen a play like this,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was expecting, just something more traditional, I guess.”

George’s reaction is exactly the one in which Hilsee strives for when selecting plays.

“People expect quality, they expect to have a good time, they expect to think, they expect to be engaged,” he said. “But they have no idea if it’s going to be a comedy or a tragedy or a musical or what the heck it’s going to be, and that’s what we aim for.”
However, the one thing that best defines the Blue Room Theatre from the rest is relatively simple:

“We say ‘fuck’ a lot more,” Hilsee said. “That’s basically what it comes down to.”

_______________________________________________________

Click here for a related column on other theater offerings in Chico.

Back to top

_______________________________________________________