New theater company will showcase original plays in Fresno. Here’s the first

Claudio Laso, the way his brain works, he sets his future out in five-year plans.

And five years ago, he established the idea of Playhouse Fresno.

“In 2021, I said ‘I will have my own theater company. In some way, shape or form,’” the 30-year-old director (and Fresno Arts Council Horizon Award winner) told The Bee during a local press tour for his latest work, which premieres at Arte Americas in downtown Fresno on June 12.

“El Rayo; or Self Deportation Nation,” is a sci-fi satire that follows three siblings living in Fresno, as they navigate their lives as immigrants. Also, there are extraterrestrials.

The original work was written by Mexican-born, Fresno-raised playwright Rodolfo Robles Cruz; his first since receiving an MFA from the University of Texas in Austin. The play was produced, at least partly, with Measure P grant-funding and it’s the inaugural production for Playhouse Fresno.

The upstart theater company services developing playwrights like Robles Cruz, Laso says.

“It’s huge for people to get their work onto a stage.”

Even if that stage is just a staircase in the main gallery of an art museum.

The idea for Playhouse Fresno can be traced back to Laso’s work on the Selma Arts Council and the Selma Arts Center, the $2.5 million facility designed by famed architect Arthur Dyson and built to be a creative hub for local artists (and audiences).

That’s where Laso had his first foray into community theater-making, after returning to the Valley from a year away at school. He starred in the arts center’s production of “12 Angry Men.”

Among his cast mates was a former Fresno-poet laureate (Lee Herrick) and Selma’s ex-police chief, Greg Garner.

“I realized the importance of community theater,” Laso says of the experience. “I shouldn’t have left. I should have put out all of my seeds here.”

In the Selma Art Council, he found a support system, a place where he could pitch an idea to people who would listen. In 2019, Laso started the Selma Originals project, which connected local playwrights and directors to workshops and produced short-form theater pieces. The inaugural event had more than 20 submissions and produced two original musicals and a short-from play. It has since become a recurring part of the season’s lineup at Arts Center.

Playhouse Fresno takes that same concept and applies it to full-length productions.

It will focus on original, local work, and connecting playwrights with directors, actors and stage crew, while facilitating logistical hurdles like venues space. And funding.

Laso says he has never been paid in a decade of directing theater around town. So, Playhouse Fresno won’t be staffed by volunteers. To make “El Rayo” happen, Measure P funds were supplemented with a Kickstarter campaign, so that each of seven actors could make $300. The campaign topped its $2,500 goal.

“Theater-makers in Fresno are underappreciated,” Laso says, even though “theater right now is thriving.”

Squaring those two ideas is in his next five-year plan.

There is immediate work. The company needs a proper board of directors, a workable website, more funding. This inaugural production is proof of concept. “This is something we can do here,” he says.

“The city is primed for this kind of theater company.”

Eventually, Playhouse Fresno will stage four shows a year (Laso will direct maybe one), while hosting regular playwright workshops and a play reading club (like a book club, but with live reading).

There will also be some kind of physical space. It will be a safe space, Laso says, by which he means a place where artists can be OK with failure, or at least not getting things right the first time.

But more than all that, Laso wants to push theater as an accepted and valued part of Fresno’s entertainment scene.

“I want to into (the Tower district taphouse) Goldstein’s and overhear someone talking about a play they just saw,” he says.

“Especially if it’s local.”