This story begins with a brothel. The year was 1935 and men would come to the building late at night to court girls in seductive outfits and painted faces, slipping in through one of the three front doors facing the street, each leading to a different promise of delight. As the decades passed, the brothel was remodeled into a hearing aid shop, which was eventually converted into a church. Today, it is Westmain Stage, the newest live theater in town and the culmination of the sweat and efforts of Gregg Gilmore, a Walla Walla native who returned to his home town after 20 years to realize his creative vision of owning and managing his own private theater.

Westmain is an inconspicuous gray building located at the corner of 11th Avenue and West Main Street. The interior is not particularly spacious and accommodates only a limited audience, but the small size of the theater lends it a quality of intimacy and warmth that can be felt as soon as one walks through the front doors. The felt-padded seats are widely spaced with ample legroom for the comfort of audience members and aligned in a classic L-shaped arrangement around the stage, which is elevated about eight inches above the floor. The sheet metal wall layered like a freeway guard rail opposite the doors invokes a sense of gritty urbanism that complements the cozy feel of the theater and harkens back to the glory days of roadhouse entertainment.

Westmain opened its doors to the public last Friday night with its first show, a one-act, two-person play called “‘night, Mother,” written by Marsha Norman and winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play unveils the story of a conversation between a mother and a daughter as the daughter explains to her mother why she must commit suicide. The daughter, Jessie Cates, is played by Jennifer Elkington, and her mother, Thelma Cates, is played by Phyllis Bonds. According to Gilmore, Westmain’s opening weekend was a success, with Saturday’s performance being especially well-attended.

Gilmore was born in Walla Walla in 1965 and has been interested in performance since an early age. Whitman’s then head of the drama department Jack Freimann noticed Gilmore during a production at the local community college and advised him to travel to New York City to study drama professionally. For the next seven years, Gilmore learned the intricacies of the art at a school of theater in Manhattan called the Neighborhood Playhouse, ran by the renowned acting master Sanford Meisner and the alma mater of such celebrities as Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen and Sandra Bullock.

“It opened my eyes to the world,” said Gilmore. “I’ve never really been out of Walla Walla … I was a little country kid.”

Eventually, Gilmore moved to Los Angeles to work behind the scenes producing music videos, DVDs and press kits for big-name artists like Madonna and Fleetwood Mac. During his stint at Hollywood, Gilmore also spent some time playing roles in popular television series such as “NYPD Blue” and “The Fugitive.”

“It all culminated in an experience that really touched me when I went to Jerusalem in 2006 and produced a DVD for Matisyahu,” said Gilmore, referring to the American Jewish reggae artist. “He’s amazing. To see a guy do something from his heart so much … I was moved.”

Gilmore returned to find Hollywood an empty, meaningless landscape compared to his powerful, inspirational experience in Israel. That’s when he decided to return to Walla Walla to buy a building and convert it into a live theater. He purchased 901 West Main Street, which was then still a church, and stripped it down to its concrete base to begin working anew, building his dream theater from the ground up. Donations came flooding in as the community lent its support to the project, sending in such things as unused seats which Gilmore installed as seating for the audience and blocks of glass which he made into windows.

“Emerson talked about how when you truly commit to something, opportunities come to you,” said Gilmore. “That’s what happened.”

The next step was to recruit actresses for the theater’s first play. Gilmore uses an unconventional method to scout out and hire talent, forgoing the traditional audition process altogether. Instead, he prefers to simply meet and talk to people, trying to get a sense of who they are as individuals and going with his instincts.

“If I feel that they’re right for it, then I trust that they’ll be right for it,” Gilmore said. “As an actor myself, I never enjoyed the audition process. It seems so unnatural. You come in, you do a monologue or something and people don’t really get to know who you are. If you trust your instincts and go with it, it’ll more than likely work. This cast is just that … they’re perfect.”

Gilmore’s vision for Westmain is for it to become a theater that communicates on the universally human level, where people who wouldn’t normally attend theater would want to go to, where “the President of Whitman would be sitting next to a construction worker.” He cited his greatest influence as Meisner, who he described as a “monolithic presence.” He looks forward to eventually teaching the Meisner technique at Westmain over the summer.

Westmain will continue to show “‘night Mother” on Friday and Saturday nights throughout the month of October. Tickets cost $12 and can be purchased at local outlets like Hot Poop, Book & Game Company and Studio Opal. Next on the theater’s schedule is Sam Shepard’s “True West,” slated for January of 2008, a dark comedy about the relationship between two brothers, one a successful Hollywood screenwriter and the other a hobo thief.