Pamela Moller Kareman, the artistic director for The Schoolhouse Theater in Croton Falls, says the venue’s first show as a professional regional not-for-profit theater — Lanford Wilson’s “Talley’s Folly” — had at least things going for it.

“It was a budgetary consideration: Two people in the cast,” she says with a laugh. “And (founder) Lee (Pope) loved the lyrical quality of the writing.”

“Talley’s Folly” also fit the mission that Moller Kareman and Pope had for the converted Croton Falls elementary school: Presenting lesser-known works of American playwrights.
“We’ve done Tennessee Williams, but we haven’t done ‘Streetcar,’” Moller Kareman says. “We look for award-winning playwrights, but we’ve also done newer writers, like Todd Susman.”
Susman’s “Locked and Loaded,” about two men with brain tumors who agree to kill themselves rather than to succumb to disease, opened the ninth Schoolhouse season. His play “Him” — about the last Jew on Earth, who is on display at the Brooklyn Museum — opens Schoolhouse’s 10th, with performances running weekends from Nov. 13-30.
For playwright Susman, who’ll also direct “Him,” having a stage for his plays “means the world.”
“Lee Pope is a patron of the arts, a lovely person,” he says. “And Pam Moller Kareman is not only smart and progressive, she’s really interested in the area. She loves her audience and she drives herself hard to bring them wonderful material.
“And she has great courage. Who’s gonna take a chance on my stuff? It’s nothing short of a godsend since I can’t seem to stop writing. What am I going to do with it? You can only read your own stuff over so many times.”
Moller Kareman knows her audience, often sitting among them in the tiny theater, or seeing them stroll through art installations in the Schoolhouse’s gallery space.
“These people can go to New York and be there in an hour,” she says. “We look for things that they won’t necessarily see in New York or that they may have missed in New York.
“When we did ‘The Sisters Rosensweig,’ we got more than one email saying ‘I saw the New York production and this was so much better.’ Not that I want to say we’re better than Madeline Kahn, but the experience of seeing a show in our intimate theater is wonderful.”

“Intimate” is an understatement. Moller Kareman likes to joke that the theater — which used to be the school’s cafeteria — “can seat 75 comfortably, 100 uncomfortably.”

Moller Kareman knows which  scripts are Schoolhouse scripts.
“There’s a certain sensibility of a play that is a play. Some plays are not really plays; they’re radio shows. They don’t need production, there’s too much dialogue.
“We tend to do well with plays that are richly interpreted theatrical pieces. Even if we do something like ‘Lost in Yonkers,’ it has such a big heart for our stage and a special place for our audience.”
Last season’s production of “The Crucible” had a huge cast and a huge budget but it came with a big upside — it transferred to a New York theater for a monthlong run.
After 10 years, Moller Kareman is not consumed by the idea of giving plays a life beyond Owens Road.
And she’s not being smug when she says that what she does on her tiny stage in Northern Westchester is just as important as what people see in Manhattan.
“Keeping The Schoolhouse and its mission in order and finding a way to keep producing these plays in that wonderful building with that great team behind the scenes is very fulfilling,” she says. “It’s a joy, a joy, a joy.”

Ten years makes for plenty of memories.
Moller Kareman recalls how a landslide north of the George Washington Bridge kept her and one of her cast members stuck in traffic, unable to make the curtain for George Kelly’s “The Showoff” in Croton Falls.
“We followed all the detours but there was no way we were making it there on time,” she recalls. “The actor had the small part of the insurance salesman. He had the script and we got on the cellphone with the stage manager at the theater and we quickly cut him out of the scene. The insurance agent comes to give the family the check from the father dying and we had to find any exposition that his character provided and fill it in by giving the daughter that exposition. Like: ‘Don’t forget, mom, when the man came to give us the check he said…’”
“It was all quite artful and achieved on the Cross-Bronx Expressway,” Moller Kareman says with a big laugh.
Other memories revolve around the reaction of playwrights to the way their work was treated by Moller Kareman and Co.
“George Furth read a rave review of ‘Precious Sons,’ which we did in our first Equity year, and he flew in from California to see it,” Moller Kareman says. “And we hosted him and he met all the actors. Things like that make it all worth while.”
When Moller Kareman reinterpreted Beth Henley’s “Abundance,” the playwright’s agent saw it and raved to Henley, who sent a note to the cast saying that her “heart was dancing for all of you.”

She has high hopes for S.N. Berman’s “Biography,” a comedy about a charismatic woman in 1932 who travels in New York’s elite circles and was decades before her time. Moller Kareman will direct Broadway regular Tracy Shayne, who did five years of “Phantom” and was in “Les Miz” and “Chicago” in the role.

“She’s come up to the Schoolhouse to see our shows and we’re thrilled to have her coming up to do this wild, wonderful comedy.”

Moller Kareman likes to quote Arthur Miller who, when asked why he chose to write for the theater, responded: “It’s a great, great human adventure. Imagine having a human being stand up on a platform and mesmerize an audience, and sometimes even illuminate something for them. You don’t need machinery. It’s a very primitive art. That’s the beauty of it.”
“That’s what we’re about,” Kareman says. “It’s very basic.”

The Schoolhouse Theater
3 Owens Road, Croton Falls
914-277-8477
schoolhousetheater.org
“Him”
By Todd Susman
Directed by Todd Susman
Nov. 13-15, 20-23, 28-30
“Biography”
By S.N. Behrman
Directed by Pamela Moller Kareman
March 5-29, 2009
“Dinner with Friends”
By Donald Margulies
Directed by Pamela Moller Kareman
May 14-June 7, 2009