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Sunday, May 11, 2008
Former Garage in Barelas Gets New Life in Arts
By David Steinberg
Journal Staff Writer
There's a new performance space in town, and its owners want it to be more than that.
The space, in the Barelas neighborhood just south of Downtown Albuquerque, is called The Filling Station. What had been a twin-bay automobile garage is now a 99-seat black-box theater space. What had been the office of the one-time station 15 yards away is where actors change clothes and where audience members find restrooms.
“We want to try to get as many different arts there. We'd love to get a gallery of local artists. We are trying to do workshops for kids this summer. And we want to keep it as a community arts meeting place,” said David Sinkus, one of the two owners of the space.
Sinkus and his wife, Beth Bailey, the co-owner, bought the property in September after looking for a commercial venture.
“I opened the Sunday Journal one day and there was an old garage on Route 66 for sale, and we said, ‘This has got to be the place.' I fell in love with it instantly,” he said.
Sinkus knew and liked the neighborhood, having been teaching playwrighting and storytelling at the Barelas Community Center under a University of New Mexico program.
Bailey said they had to gut the garage, update the electricity, add heating and air conditioning, replace the bay doors and install an emergency exit.
The first event in the renovated garage was held last year. It was a benefit for the Mother Road Theatre Company. Audience members were invited to vote on the productions they wanted based on a viewing of scenes of six plays. The top vote-getter was an adaptation of Homer's “Odyssey,” which was staged in March, Sinkus said. Mother Road is in residence there.
On Sunday mornings since mid-February, The Filling Station has been home to Felix Wurman's Church of Beethoven.
It's an ongoing hourlong program mixing music, poetry and other readings. The lineup changes weekly. Admission is free, but Wurman passes a hat, seeking donations to pay the performers.
Before each program, Wurman, an entrepreneur and a cellist with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra, offers customers free coffee and tea from a cart mounted on a teardrop trailer that's part of his EspressoArtists business. The trailer is hitched to the rear of his electric car.
At a recent Church of Beethoven event, Scott Vehill read from Jack Kerouac's “On the Road” in a preview of Vehill's one-man show that was staged there last weekend.
Vehill, who is co-artistic director of a Chicago theater group, is directing Don Garcia's play “Pajaros de Mi Sangre” this weekend through May 25 at the space. The play had been presented at UNM's Words Afire Festival.
“There's such talent here now,” Vehill said.
He and Sinkus are discussing organizing a theater company to present new plays by people of color in the garage.
Sinkus, a veteran actor in Chicago and New York City, is already planning to present the New Mexico Young Playwrights Festival at The Filling Station in late July.
The business takes its name from the Horn Oil Filling Station, which Sinkus said was built in the 1930s and remained there until 1977.
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