Patti West is in the middle of explaining her plan to do something unprecedented when she stops to order coffee. We're at the All City café down in Georgetown, just off exit 162, where everything is happening. Via Tribunali is opening a new restaurant here. As is Matt Dillon, of Sitka and Spruce, who also stops by to order coffee. The Sabey Corporation has bought the old Rainier brewery—five blocks of brick buildings—to renovate. And West wants to open a theater.
Exit 162 will, in fact, be two theaters, a community room, a restaurant, and a bar, all in an old Eagles lodge (a 25,000-square-foot hulk that looks like a seedy version of the '80s and smells like bleach and flatulence) three blocks south. She and her nonprofit company, Theatre Off Jackson, don't want to rent the building—they want to own it.
"A theater company with a $100,000 budget getting together with four other theater companies and trying to buy their own space," she explains. "Nobody does that."
West has a small army of supporters. She has invited four resident companies—Printer's Devil, Macha Monkey, Our American Theater Company, and Actor's Theatre of Georgetown, founded, in part, by Stranger Genius Award winner Amy Thone and her husband Hans Altwies. She has encouragement from 4Culture, the Georgetown Community Council, and the Sabey Corporation, which has lent its architects, designers, and lawyers to help West and ToJ research and buy the building. (They haven't closed yet, but ToJ has made an offer and the Eagles have accepted; things are looking good.)
This is a big deal. West is playing offense while most theaters are back on their heels, fretting and scrambling just to stay open.
West has been a lighting designer and stage manager for decades (as well as a metal finisher and occasional legal clerk). In 2005, she and her partner Amanda Slepski formed Theatre Off Jackson (a company) to save Theatre Off Jackson, a 20-year-old, seemingly doomed theater in the International District. They succeeded.
Technically speaking, ToJ is a rental theater, but West exercises curatorial control and coproduces some shows. "We've never rented on a first-come basis, or to the highest bidder," West says. We have all profited from her pickiness. In the past two years, ToJ has presented good work by Sarah Rudinoff, Scot Augustson, Keri Healey, the Cody Rivers Show, and so on (plus regular viewing parties for the Seattle Storm). Now her good instincts are tending southward.
"This place is exactly what's been in my head for 30 years—I'm constantly drawing theaters on napkins," West says, playing with a napkin. "We might fail. But at least we weren't too scared to try." 
