Aubrey Hampton knows (tranquilly) what he wants to do, and has every intention (quietly) of doing it. And damn (without a lot of fanfare) the torpedoes.

The Gorilla Theatre co-founder, whose play 'Tis the Season to Do Folly opens this weekend, can seem deceptively mild when you first meet him. With his long gray-white hair and beard, he could be a Bohemian, or a panhandler — when in fact he's a millionaire, the head of a company that manufacture's organic, cruelty-free cosmetics. And however self-deprecating his manner may be, there's nothing tepid in the way he's turned the Gorilla into an essential area theater.

In fact, the more time you spend with Hampton, the more you realize that, appearances aside, this is one of the most resolute persons you've ever met, and one of the least vulnerable to the outside world's carping. Fascinated by science, he became a chemist and made a bundle. He loves the drama, so he built a theater, for which he also writes and directs. What could be simpler?

"The first play I worked on was Antigone by Jean Anouilh," says Hampton, 67, as we sit in his Drew Park office, a few blocks away from the theater he runs with wife and business partner Susan Hussey. On the walls are photographs of literary figures he admires — Thomas Mann, Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Vladimir Nabokov — and a collection of Venetian masks.

"I was living in New Albany, Ind. — I'm a Hoosier — across the Ohio River from Louisville," he says. "And they had a theater over there, which later would become … the Actor's Theatre … and I used to do the lighting."

At the same time — about age 11 or 12 — he was being introduced to the idea of making cosmetics by his mother, an herbalist who "made all kinds of stuff out of herbs, whether they were teas or shampoos or cleansers or creams or soaps, she made very good soap." The two fascinations — theater and applied chemistry — never ceased to be important to him. The one led him to work eventually with Julian Beck and Judith Molina of the Living Theater in New York, to act and to write plays of his own and finally to start his own theater in Tampa. The other led him to two degrees in chemistry from NYU, a job with Faberge, a couple of small businesses and finally Aubrey Organics. Since Aubrey Organics is the main funder of Gorilla Theatre, it's safe to say that Hampton has finally found the way to combine obsessions.

And the theater that's resulted is, increasingly, a significant force in the local arts community. Yes, Hampton and Hussey continue to produce their own plays there. But they do much else besides. For example, this current season: already it's included the interesting A Thurber Carnival and the beautifully produced musical Side Show (with a budget of $100,000); still to come are an original play about Sacco and Vanzetti, August Wilson's important early work Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Warren Leight's Tony award-winning Side Man. Past productions like Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner and David Marshall Grant's Snakebit have allowed area audiences to see notable plays from the national repertory that would otherwise have remained just rumors in the New York Times arts section.

And Hampton is aware of his theater's importance. "Where can you walk in a season and see a Wallace Shawn play that would never come here — The Fever?" he asks. "And where can you walk in and see a musical like Side Show — which would never come here, that would never be here. They don't have a road company out of it, it would never come here. And yet it's a musical that should be seen."

Further, he points out that no other theater in the area focuses as much on new works as Gorilla. "We do more original drama than anybody else. We actually do." The theater now presents an annual series of new play readings, some of which lead to full productions (Sex and Sensibility, American Road, Sacco & Vanzetti); and there's also the yearly Young Dramatists Project, which puts on four plays a year by high school-age writers. Hampton says he would love it if Gorilla eventually produced a season of nothing but new plays. What stops him, he says, is only that there aren't enough good new scripts available.

Still, you can't help but wonder: When a season can cost Hampton and Aubrey Organics as much as $400,000 a year, will he always be willing to foot the bill? Yes, he says — but with a proviso: "I will go on funding it as long as we're doing original drama. If all of a sudden we're not doing that, and it's just another theater doing plays that closed on Broadway and we're bringing them down here, like the other theaters around here — let's face it, that's what they do. We don't want to do that, and I don't want to fund that. It doesn't interest me."

He adds that Gorilla has recently begun some tentative fundraising efforts out in the larger community. But not too much has come of them; the theater, for example, doesn't yet have one significant corporate supporter.

Finally our conversation turns to 'Tis the Season to Do Folly, a play that Hampton wrote and rewrote over six months. He decided to write the play, he says, simply because "we didn't have anything for Christmas." He'd never written a murder mystery before, but he's long been a fan who's "read them all." So he decided to parody this favorite genre, and then to go one step further.

"I thought, well, I'm doing a play and it's Christmas; what can I do within this murder mystery that is funny, that young people can come and see, like a Christmas gift?" he says. "And I came up with John Calvert the magician; we do a magic show within the play."

Can this hybrid work? Hampton has demonstrated, with The Manhattan Play Doctor particularly, that he's capable of sturdy comic writing. But he's also shown, in GBS & Company and War of the Currents, the need for an editor who's familiar with the delete key. Which will it be with 'Tis the Season?

Whatever the answer, it's not likely to fluster Hampton. In his pleasant, consistent way, he's going to keep his theater going, keep writing plays, keep bringing us this or that gem from the regional and New York stage. And as for his detractors — well, in the past, he says, there have been "little criticisms, little pokes and punches in there." More likely, something more than a poke was occasionally intended. But Hampton, characteristically, only felt it as "little."

The dogs bark. The caravan — led year by year by gentle Aubrey Hampton — passes by.

Undisturbed.

Mark E. Leib can be reached at mark.leib@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888, ext. 305.

This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2001.