Theater folk are known to be a peripatetic bunch, but Claudio Raygoza may have taken it to extremes. He and his family moved 56 times by the time he graduated from high school. His partner, Glenn Paris, moved from Massachusetts to suburban Washington D.C. to Norman, Okla., then to Hanover, N.H. (where Dartmouth is) and finally to Boston, his mother’s hometown.

Raygoza is founder and executive artistic director of ion theatre; Paris is producing artistic director. They teamed up as producers in May 2006 and opened New World Stage on Ninth Avenue between E Street and Broadway, only to be forced out six months later, when the city of San Diego made more remodeling demands on their Ninth Avenue theater space than they could afford. Like several other small local theaters, ion lost its home and has been forced to regroup.

Raygoza’s theater roots go back to grammar school in Imperial Beach, where at the age of 5 he was hit and dragged by a truck. The result was years in and out of hospitals and wheelchairs, 18 surgeries and the prediction that he would never walk again.

He spent much of the time flat on his back, and began writing stories on the ceiling with an imaginary pencil. When he’d filled up the ceiling, he memorized the story, “erased” it and started over. Raygoza and a British tutor who visited the hospital read Jane Eyre together. When he was mobile again, he thanked her by presenting a sock puppet version of the book.

Back in school in a wheelchair, he was cast as a dog in Toyland. But he got his big break when the star playing Raggedy Andy got sick. Raygoza went on opening night, chair and all, with a mop on his head and barely speaking English. “I stole the show,” he reports, although he said Raggedy Ann was not happy because he didn’t know the blocking. “She had to shove me around,” he says.

As the family moved (Raygoza’s father was a ranch foreman, and they sometimes spent no more than three weeks in a place), the one constant was theater.

Raygoza eventually graduated valedictorian of his high school class in Bakersfield, where he also got involved in the San Joaquin Valley Shakespeare Festival and became the first Latino to win a best actor award.

Raygoza’s checkered college career included majors in physics, pre-med, chemistry, physical anthropology and literature before he finally gave in to his inner voice and majored in theater at UCLA.

There are more than a few moves in Paris’ background, too. Born in Honolulu, he was bitten by the theater bug early, and played Prince Charming and Peter Rabbit in grade school. Soon after his father took a job directing the FAA School in Norman, Oklahoma, he was cast as the Duke of York in a production of “Richard III” at the University of Oklahoma (UO).

He went on to act in another half dozen shows at UO, was the “resident juvenile” at Dartmouth and founded The Minnisingers, a children’s theater company, when he was 15. He directed in high school, did Shakespeare, Brecht, Chekhov, Shepard and original work at Antioch College, and went to New York for several years before entering the MFA Directing program at Carnegie Mellon, where director Mel Shapiro was his mentor. Upon returning to New York, Uta Hagen asked him to direct HB Playwrights Foundation, the small theater for established and emerging writers next to the famous HB Studio in Greenwich Village. Later, he co-founded a new theater company, Native Coast, and developed a second career as a fund-raiser: “It’s hard to make a living in the theater,” he said.

Just before we went to press, Raygoza and Paris told me the good news: They’ve inked an agreement for the space they used last season – Studio A at the Academy of Performing Arts, a short jaunt from the Grantville trolley station off Mission Gorge Road and Highway 8.

The 2007-08 season begins in October with the world premiere of Punks, inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids, written by Raygoza and based on a concept by Paris, who will direct.

The Gay & Lesbian Times: What makes otherwise sane people go into theater?

Claudio Raygoza: The theater is not a job. You can’t choose it, really; it chooses you. It’s an avocation. I failed at science and anthropology and chemistry and history and philosophy and linguistics, and I hit every rung on the way down knowing in my heart the entire time that theater is where I needed and wanted to be. When you do theater for the sheer need of having to do it, something amazing happens.

Glenn Paris: A friend said, “You have to be sick, mentally unstable to pursue a life in the theater.” But it’s in your blood and there’s no escaping it. We all have crises when we want to pack it in and give up. I once told a friend I wanted to quit theater and she said, “What else are you going to do?”

GLT: How does theater in the U.S. compare to theater elsewhere in the world?

CR: Depending on where you are, theater is either more accepted as an art form or is so enmeshed in the culture that you don’t see it stirring until it’s already had its way with you. In Far Eastern countries, theater is an implacable element of life. In parts of the Middle East, art and performance are tantamount to religious ritual. In Western countries (excluding Latin America), theater is not just a thing to do, it’s a thing that must be done. It is so integral to the lives of the French that it’s not even taught at public universities – at least, it wasn’t when I was acting and directing there a few years ago. Interestingly, it’s an honor to be called an artist in Latin America – it’s a part of life for everyone – though it takes the legitimacy of European-style training to make it into a career. Art and craft merge in Latin America, so one could also make the case that there are more working artists in Latin America than anywhere else in the world.

In the U.S., theater artists have to become movie stars before they can become the craftspeople so important to theater. It is easier to do theater in the U.S., which is why there is so much theater that is not well thought-out … sort of like anyone picking up a scalpel can call himself a doctor.

GP: Max Stafford-Clark once said that in the U.S., the quality of a play is measured by whether or not it’s a success on Broadway. But in the 21st century, Broadway producers can’t afford to develop new American drama anymore. In Europe and in Russia, the theater is part of the natural fabric of life – it’s supported by the government, and if a person has a passion, she or he can probably train and grow up in a state theater, and will likely have the opportunity to practice the craft and earn a living wage. American society is obsessed with appearance and privilege, and Hollywood just recycles and perpetrates these values. Claudio and I just watched Isabelle Huppert in Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie.” I’d be willing to bet that the wages resulting from her body of work don’t add up to the salary of one picture Angelina Jolie makes. Yet there’s no talent comparison between the actresses. The French understand and acknowledge class. In America, our values are all skewed, and we pretend that nothing’s wrong. Instead of the support of the government, artists rely on the kindness of philanthropists to support their work.

GLT: How do you see the director’s job?

CR: Art is about taste and attitudes and how to work through them to evolve into something new. There are as many ways to view the universe as there are eyes to see it, but in theater we get a forced perspective in a series of moments strung together, like pearls on a string, and we are asked to experience them in the dark, sitting quietly with strangers, all while suspending our disbelief that we’re actually in Romania circa 1908, Mars circa 2765 or Narnia circa whenever, when we can clearly see that we’re not.

What a director does is flesh out written characters, giving them three dimensions, so that we can care about them as more than just intellectual constructs on a page. Faithfully acting a role is not the same as faithfully creating a character.

Too much American theater is “on the nose.” There is no art; the direction is utilitarian and simply puts the words onstage, hoping the story is clear. This is not what theater was meant to do.

A great director can take what isn’t being said and turn it into another character. The story is not paramount. Exposition, too much information and the pursuit of narrative are often the swiftest killers of theater. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf dazzles by leaving the most important story questions unanswered: What happens next? Has this happened before? Was there ever really a child?

One thing that frustrates me in light of recent playwriting and screenwriting is how little care is taken in creating these vessels, these sympathetic characters. I don’t want quirky. I don’t want lovable dolt. I don’t want dissolute, wisecracking youth with a heart of gold. I want real, unadulterated deep-feeling characters full of flaws and fears but with enough passion about something bigger than themselves that they are willing to take huge risks to make the world they live in better in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point? Whether it’s connecting with a dying grandmother or slaying the dragon that is threatening the village, great stories should have a character in the form of a hero who the audience would like to be, or could be, faced with a terrible or difficult choice, who must act and possibly be damaged – not just inconvenienced – or fail to act and submerge forever into a thick and gray abyss.

Too often I walk out of plays in San Diego feeling like I was rushed out the door to spare me having to feel anything other than entertained. I want to think. I want to be provoked. I want the drug of theater to hit me and make me wrestle with ideas bigger than I am. I spend way too much time, blood, sweat, tears, agony and fear working in theater just to feel I’m entertaining folks. If that’s all there is to it, I can think of far easier ways to do it.

But these days, we’re more concerned with getting what we pay for – getting to the destination intact – than learning and earning what has value for us on the way there. Art tries to lead us in this direction, but we don’t want to follow anymore. We want to be carried: I paid. Carry me.

GP: The director’s job is to tell the story, pure and simple. The play is a piece of written expression until it’s lifted from the page by the actors, designers and the director.

I was trained to tell the story visually so that, like ballet, you can take the words away and the audience can still get the story. That’s what good staging accomplishes – through the evocation of the actors’ movements in relationship to one another amid a world of particular images, the story emerges and is clear to the audience. A lot of directors simply don’t stage well, and it’s probably because they haven’t learned to do so, and aren’t aware of it as a value. If you look at the work of the great film directors of the ’30s and ’40s – Fred Zinneman, William Wyler, Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock – the craft is very clear. They use composition, body juxtaposition and movement to create tension and conflict. Strong staging is realized through working with the actors on their characters’ aspirations and obstacles, creating action as a result, and developing the journey of the play moment-to-moment to present to and share with the audience.

The director works in a delicate balance to be at once authoritative and yet collaborative, establishing a creative environment that feels safe for the artist. The creative arena is safe, but not the work, not the process and what results from the process. Mel (Shapiro) once said, “Acting is not a Sealy Posturepedic mattress.” Actors are always finding ways to be comfortable. But it’s not about being comfortable. It’s about danger – we are working on stories of life and death. A Broadway scenic director once told me he’s convinced that the strongest directors are fascists.

GLT: What should theater’s place in the school curriculum be?

CR: People who do school budgeting ought to be aware of studies that show that schoolchildren involved in theater score on average 30 points higher on SAT verbal sections, and kids involved in music score 40 points higher on the math portion of the SAT. Yet music and theater are considered “frills” or “enrichment” only.

GP: Theater in the curriculum must not be dropped. It is absolutely essential to the evolution of a person.

GLT: Why haven’t small theaters banded together for political action?

CR: Ion and Stone Soup Theatres have. We launched what we call the San Diego Coalition of Theatres (San Diego ACTs) as an advocacy group to work on common problems of the area’s small theaters.

San Diego has one of the most vibrant and diverse theater communities in the nation, yet a rash of recent theater venue closings is narrowing the range of theatrical offerings here.

A recent [San Diego Union-Tribune] article reported a study showing that collectively the arts in San Diego generate more revenue than our professional sports teams. It’s maddening that theater in San Diego consistently garners regional and national attention for its work, yet artists struggle here for a few years and then flee to greener pastures in other markets because of lack of support. We wonder why the hysteria generated when the prosperous Chargers threaten to leave town doesn’t extend to our poor but excellent theaters when they are literally in danger of going under.