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Arts

Using Their Noodles

Lori Eanes

 Performing Arts Emerge in a West Oakland Factory

   In a cold, gutted factory on 26th and Union streets, some 50 theatergoers settle into their folding chairs. The stage is little more than raised particleboard, and a layer of dust covers the concrete floors. Yet there is the scent of new paint in the air, a whiff of promise. A stairwell with varnished, hardwood railings rises elegantly
to the tech booth, where a lighting technician throws a spotlight toward a man on the stage. “Welcome to Oakland’s newest performance space!” Norman Gee says to applause.
    Gee, a charismatic actor and artistic director, is a fixture in East Bay theater, having founded the Oakland Public Theater in 1998 after beginning his career with the Asian American Theater Co. in San Francisco in the early 1990s.
    On this night last autumn, Gee opened the Noodle Factory to a packed, if intimate, house. There was tension in the air, though. The Noodle Factory, a bold experiment in the East Bay live/work performance art scene, was three months behind schedule, prompting Gee to call this theater opening the “raw season.” The show was an Oakland Public Theater production of Richard Talavera’s Before the Dream: The Mysterious Death (and Life) of Richard Wright.
    In the production, characters move in and out of the life of Wright, a novelist, short-story writer and non-fiction author whose literature was best known for its controversial racial themes.
    The show was the first for the factory under its new configuration. Not since the Box Theater on Telegraph Avenue closed in 2004 has there been a venue for roving East Bay artists to perform.
    And now that the stage was set at the Noodle Factory, a perfect storm of funding issues threatened its existence.
    Above the stage are 11 solar-powered live/work lofts that need to be sold to pay for construction costs and property maintenance of the Noodle Factory. As of March, not one unit has sold. The loft revenue, plus a planned but stalled adjacent coffee shop, are to be the engines of this artistic co-op.
    The factory’s owner, a nonprofit called the Northern California Land Trust, wants to make good on its mission to market an affordable, mixed-use development. The Noodle Factory is one of 165 housing units the NCLT has reimagined for low-income residents. But to pay the mortgage and keep the theater lit, it must sell the lofts. The proceeds will enable the organization to recover the costs of rehabilitating the building and maintaining the property. But since viable buyers face a long application process and a stormy mortgage climate, the NCLT has reconsidered, and is allowing renters to move in. In three to five years, renters can apply to put their rent toward a mortgage. Land Trust officials say once the units are sold, government subsidies could kick in to cover roughly half the cost of the lofts, which average $250,000 each. The NCLT would stay on as the property manager, and the Noodle Factory, with its 2,700 square feet of rehearsal and performance space, wouldn’t become a dream deferred.

    The Noodle Factory has come a long way since its industrial beginnings. Years before it became a nascent artistic enclave, the factory produced noodles under the aegis of the Aoki family, who bought the building in 1903 and made chow mein noodles for years. The building and the family were at the center of vast shifts in Oakland during the 1960s and ’70s. Richard Aoki, the only Asian American to serve in a leadership position with the Black Panther Party, rose in the civil rights movement even as neighborhood demographics changed from multi-ethnic immigrants to multi-generational black families, and, decades later, artists in need of cheaper housing.
    Dana Harrison, the magnetic corporate refugee (Charles Schwab) who turned into an organizer for the Burning Man festival, bought the building in 1999, and for years it housed a rave collective until she sold the factory to the land trust six years later.
    She now serves on the advisory board that hired the factory’s program director, Norman Gee. Gee was introduced to the factory when his Oakland Public Theater lost its location, and with its artistic core dispersed, Gee found himself between projects. As the steward of the Noodle Factory’s artisan community, Gee has plans to root it in the surrounding community. One aspect will be a drama course with McClymonds High School students who will visit the factory and learn the craft of theater production, from script development to stage direction. Gee says he enjoys introducing students to the arts, since “theater made me love history, and I love inspiring that in kids. Art can give them a voice, especially in a low-income community where their identity isn’t about what they own, but where they are.”

    Ian Winters, director of the NCLT, leads a nice tour of the studios. As he opens the doors to one unit, he notes, “Visual artists and performers like upstairs apartments. But the sound engineer guys like this one, since it has more room for their equipment.”
    The cavernous unit extends far into the building and gains in space what it loses in natural light. Some units have private balconies, all have soundproof walls and a whopping 75 percent savings in solar-powered utility costs. The living units are ready to go, with the gas hooked up and all the Kohler faucet fixtures and granite countertops in place. “There are a lot of people who want to live here,” Winters says, “but since we’re currently paying the mortgage, we’ll have to lease the units at the market rate in a rent-to-own model.” He also expects to sign the dotted line for $1.4 million in city redevelopment funding. This should keep the units affordable and purchase a few more low-cost fixtures for the performance venue, an added attraction that makes the Noodle Factory project unprecedented.
    The region has made strides in sheltering artists. In the Jack London Square district, real estate firm Metrovation opened The Hive, a collection of 34 office studios where artists can rent units for $250 to $650 on a month-to-month basis. Hive writers, painters, photographers and sculptors get access to high-speed Internet access, a common kitchen and a room for office overflow. As at ActivSpace in Berkeley and the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, these studio renters can come to work on their art 24/7. But a rehearsal space is something they lack. Winters and Gee say the Noodle Factory can change that. If it works, theater companies, performers and dance groups may find a weigh station to refuel Oakland arts and generate cash flow.
    “The vision for the Noodle Factory is to curate,” Gee says later. While he sees the artist residents as an adjunct to Noodle productions, he’s interested in collaborating with them. “We’re making decisions,” he says, “about how to showcase Bay Area talent.”
    Toward this end, he is working on a new play that he hopes to stage next. It’s about the Pullman porters, who worked the railroad out of West Oakland and went on strike for their right to sit during trans-continental shifts.
    On Union Street, the factory’s galvanized steel walls fits in well among the corrugated rooftops. But there’s a palpable fear that the art scene won’t stick. At the center of the Noodle Factory dream, Gee says, is a need for permanency.
    “Artists want to be able to leave things,” he says. “It’s really that basic.”