Cover Story: The Battle rages on

It's 20 minutes until 8 on a Saturday night at Peachtree Playhouse, and the theater is in pandemonium.

Throngs of patrons are practically fighting their way into this easily overlooked storefront space on (where else?) Peachtree Street. The line snakes down the block, past a sign proclaiming "Peachtree Battle is sold out."

Inside the theater, Peggy Lee is blaring, "You've Gotta Have Heart," as audience members struggle to find seats in the already cramped space. A tall, middle-aged woman in a fake fur edges her way down a crowded aisle, searching (in vain) for empty seats.

"Sorry, Bev, these three are taken after all," she bellows back to her friend, stepping on toes and nearly falling into the laps of a frightened-looking Cobb County couple. The crowd tonight tends toward the early-50s set, couples who look like they haven't set foot in Midtown since the Reagan administration.

A sign by the plate-glass door asserts: maximum occupancy, 212 persons. The theater actually only seats 121 — but the bustle of this bunch makes it feel like maximum occupancy is at hand. Despite the cracker-box constraints, one perk of the theater's space is its not-so-secret passage to the Vortex next door. Another traffic jam forms there as obedient dates retrieve cocktails from the bar.

As show time nears and the big green curtain begins to flutter, the masters of tonight's madness call the crowd to order. Theater co-founders John Gibson and Anthony Morris tag-team the curtain speech, thanking everyone for coming and laying some ground rules for the evening.

"You can drink in the Vortex, you can drink in the hallway, you can drink in here. But once you take a glass past that threshold," Gibson says, pointing to the front door, "you are officially white trash."

It's a tiny taste of the humor to come; using a uniquely Southern wit, Peachtree Battle parodies a blueblood Buckhead clan and their obsessions with appearances. A tongue-in-cheek soap opera filled with backstabbing siblings, shocking revelations and a particularly diabolical mother, the show takes a broad and hilarious stab at the mores of Atlanta's upper class. High art, it ain't, but don't tell that to the masses battling for tickets.

The most astonishing thing about Peachtree Battle may be its sheer staying power. The show opened in September and its run has been extended repeatedly. Even blockbuster plays like Horizon Theatre's immensely popular I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change or Actor's Express' Rescue and Recovery barely broke the six-month mark. (Driving Miss Daisy, the longest-running show in the Alliance Theatre's history, ran for 18 months in 1988-90.)

But then again, Peachtree Playhouse isn't your typical Atlanta theater. Unlike other stages in town, this little upstart is able to dedicate its space to open-ended runs when a show hits big. From the start, the for-profit theater has relied on a dedicated fan base and positive word of mouth to keep its decidedly campy comedies sold out. And Gibson and Morris have a deliciously unpretentious view of what they want their theater to be.

"We make our work blatantly commercial," Morris says. "We don't have any artistic ideas of nuances of this or that. We're just in-your-face funny."

The strategy must be sound. Peachtree Battle has just been extended again — now running through the end of June. Meanwhile Morris and Gibson are securing a new theater space on Peachtree Street, an additional location in which they can bring back their popular The Limousine Ride while keeping the Battle going at the current space. It's a risky experiment from a relatively young theater company, but one that Gibson and Morris are determined to make successful. Judging from their victories so far, it just might work.

Ask anyone involved in the business and you'll hear that 2002 has been a rough year for Atlanta theater. The recession and post-9-11 jitters have contributed to low attendance at playhouses around town, and insiders say that morale in general is low among the theater community. Peachtree Playhouse, though, seems impervious to the dark outlook, and its founders are only marginally aware of what's going on in the theater scene.

"Honestly, we've been so overwhelmed, we're not sure what other theaters are doing," Gibson says.

Gibson and Morris share the writing credits for Peachtree Battle and all the shows Peachtree Playhouse has mounted so far, a collaboration made all the more unusual by the revelation that they are partners outside the theater as well, together for eight years.

In person the writers make for an old-style comedy duo: Morris playing the quiet, often dry "straight" man to Gibson's zany chatterbox. They credit their different takes on comedy with being the key to their success.

"It works because our senses of humor are very different," Gibson says.

Morris chimes in: "Yeah, I have one."

The collaboration started shortly after the couple met in 1994. Gibson, a former actor who'd scored roles on "Knots Landing" and "General Hospital," had written a play called Veranda, about an upper-crust Atlanta family dealing with their gay son. He'd left the script lying in a drawer for several years until he dusted it off to show to Gibson, a partner in a major Atlanta law firm. Gibson's reaction was positive, but he thought the script could be lot better.

After a little polishing and a lot of editing, the duo mounted a production of Veranda at 14th Street Playhouse in 1995 — with unexpected results.

"We just did it for fun and it just snowballed," Gibson says. "It had this cult following and people wanted to see it again and again."

They followed the success of Veranda with two sequels and saw similar results. Like Peachtree Battle, the Veranda series also parodies Buckhead life, but takes a gentler approach than the dark comedy. The series follows the exploits of Sarah Edwards, matron of a Southern Baptist family who longs to be elected "Christian of the Year," all the while coping with her son's coming out.

But the popularity of the Veranda series was almost the theater company's undoing. Extended runs of sold-out shows invariably led to scheduling conflicts with the 14th Street Playhouse. In true Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney fashion, Gibson and Morris decided, why don't we just open our own theater?

After a couple of setbacks (including an early promising space that turned out to be in the path of the new 17th Street bridge), they finally found an old blueprint shop that just happened to have a raised platform suitable for a stage. With a little sound proofing, some black curtains blocking the traffic on Peachtree Street and the addition of a makeshift dressing room on the floor below, Peachtree Playhouse was born. The theater certainly has its limitations; actors in costume must quickly duck through the Peachtree Lofts lobby to get backstage, plus the shoebox-style seating area makes traffic flow a little hairy. But there's the nice perk of access to the Vortex, and the alcohol certainly helps.

When Anna House first read the script for Veranda, she thought it sucked. She reluctantly accepted the part of Viola, the level-headed housekeeper who helps keep Sarah Edwards in check, and found that the show worked a lot better on stage than on paper.

"It plays a lot funnier than it reads," House says. "A lot of it is in the staging, the interaction between characters. So I was pleasantly surprised."

That sense of surprise hasn't relented in the seven years since the first Veranda; House has returned to play Viola in both sequels and is now holding court as Azalea Wieuca, the alcoholic grandmother who unites the comedic and emotional heart of Peachtree Battle.

House admits she never suspected that Veranda would develop such a cult following, and she's astonished at Peachtree Battle's popularity.

"We're all sort of scratching our heads ourselves," she says. "It's like winning the lottery — you never expect it to happen."

House and others have called Peachtree Battle a "breakthrough show" in that its draw has extended beyond the theater's traditional intown audience and has begun to attract folks from the suburbs. Morris tells the story of receiving a call from a woman asking directions to the theater. After some initial confusion, the caller finally asked, "Now, where exactly is Midtown?"

After moving to the new space, Morris and Gibson added the tagline, "Atlanta's urban theater" to the Peachtree Playhouse name. Morris jokes that this was mostly a reflection of the car noise along Peachtree Street, but Gibson says that the theater space has "a very urban feel" due to its location in the heart of ever-changing Midtown.

"A lot of the people we're attracting now, the outer-Perimeter folk, feel like they are being very urban by coming down here," Morris says. "Coming to see us is like a field trip for some people."

But the show's popularity is not just an OTP phenomenon. The Peachtree Battle neighborhood association booked a night at the theater, and so did Sam Massell, president of the Buckhead Coalition. In fact, before each performance the theater is filled with the sounds of Melanie Massell (Sam's daughter) crooning the jazzy anthem "It's Buckhead," a song celebrating the neighborhood's, um, assets.

"Melanie Massell's song is perfect," Gibson says, without an iota of irony. "That is so Buckhead to me, it just exemplifies what you think of when you think Buckhead. People hear it and they buy it in droves. It's amazing."

It's interesting that Atlanta has embraced a show that so blatantly skewers the city. Darker than the Veranda plays, Peachtree Battle hits on similar themes of family turmoil. Trudy Habersham (played with no subtlety by Deborah Childs) is a blueblood Buckhead mother urging her son Ansley not to marry a Hooters girl, her mother Wieuca to give up the bottle and her daughter Candler to take up bulimia. Not that Trudy is a saint herself; she's on the verge of divorce with her two-timing husband Sherwood and hasn't spoken to her gay son Holcomb since his lover died.

The show succeeds as a sort of sadistic sitcom, rife with sight gags and running jokes.

Atlantans may have a reputation for being particularly touchy when it comes to any ridicule directed its way, but Gibson and Morris say audiences don't see Peachtree Battle as a reflection of themselves.

"That's not our family," Gibson says in his best Suzanne Sugarbaker drawl, "but you know our next door neighbors are just like that."

For Erin Fye, it's the Atlanta-specific humor that keeps her coming back to Peachtree Playhouse productions. Fye, who has seen all the Veranda episodes (some twice) but only recently caught Peachtree Battle, says she loved the show for its politically incorrect humor.

"It's such a parody of Atlanta," she says. "John and Anthony just have no fear in what they write. They'll put it out there. I like that, because we always have to be so politically correct and watch what we say. People just feel good about being able to laugh at themselves."

Fye has already made plans to see Peachtree Battle again — this time with 10 friends in tow.

The show packs in an extraordinary number of references to Atlanta people and places. In one particularly uproarious scene we're told that Gov. Roy Barnes' wife, Marie, has just gotten into a fistfight off stage with State School Superintendent Linda Schrenko; another finds former Fulton County Commission Chairman Mitch Skandalakis parking cars for the Habershams.

But Gibson and Morris aren't content just to throw in a few names for comic effect — they also frequently update the script with references to current affairs as often as possible. At one point in the show, Trudy Habersham laments that the family is going to become the biggest laughingstock this city has seen since the Atlanta Thrashers. A week later the butt of that joke might be Arthur Andersen, and a week later it might be the Atlanta Hawks.

The writers hand the cast minor revisions nightly — even after seven months of production. And gags that flop are swiftly cut.

"We track what jokes the audience responds to," Morris says. "If a joke falls flat one night, it may be the audience. If it falls flat two nights in a row, the joke is gone. It changes to something else."

A big lesson for Peachtree Playhouse was driven home by The Limousine Ride, the first new show Gibson and Morris mounted in their new space. After a sold-out run for six months, the duo decided to take the show for a spin in New York, giving it a two-week stint at the Off-Broadway McGinn/Cazale Theatre.

The comedy places four former first ladies, Hillary Clinton, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan and Rosalynn Carter, in the back seat of a limo — and hilarity, of course, ensues. Morris says the New York trip taught them a lot about the business side of running a theater and reinforced their feelings about extending popular shows.

"When you call up to find a space in New York to run a show, you're dealing with 100 different shows with open-ended runs," he says. "In Atlanta we're basically the only theater than has open-ended runs. We're going to run the show until we don't want to run it. Then we're going to run something else, whereas anywhere else you go, they've got a cut-off date when they've got another show opening."

Gibson hopes they'll be able to apply the lessons learned from the The Limousine Ride with an Off-Broadway run of Peachtree Battle, and they've already prepared a New York script of the show just in case. But that's not the only script currently in the works. Almost everything the couple has written together has had enough material left over to jumpstart a sequel, Gibson says. They're planning another installation in the Veranda series, as well as a sequel to The Limousine Ride, tentatively titled The Bush Report.

Also in development is a more serious work called A Place at the Table. And yes, Peachtree Battle may rumble on with another outing of the Habersham family, a possible sequel that brings the young couple's inlaws into play.

Of course, prolific writers with such a high-batting average of hits have to be prepared for criticism. Gibson and Morris say they take no offense at those who would call their shows "low-brow," or dismiss their work as artistically lacking when compared to other theaters.

"Our critic is the theater-going audience," Morris says. "They come back week after week. So I don't necessarily need someone to tell me if my show is good or not. I know by ticket sales whether or not it's good."

"'Roseanne' was the No. 1 show on television for three years," he says. "And it was very low-brow. But it was low-brow all the way to the bank."??