Not long after the Homewood Theater opened near the corner of 25th and Charles streets in 1946, a nurse reported to the police that there was a dead body with a knife sticking out of it in a nearby alley. On closer inspection, it turned out to be a dummy advertising Abbott and Costello’s Who Done it? It was a splashy entrance for what was to become, during the ’50s and ’60s, one of the city’s leading art houses. But in the mid-1980s, the theater—by then called the Playhouse—closed. Ever since, every endeavor there has been short-lived.

From 1989 to 1994, the 7,500-square-foot space was used as a church. In the late 1990s, it was the Heritage Playhouse, which played exclusively African-American movies. Then, for the blink of an eye, it was a Korean movie house. “[T]he space is so big, the electric bills got to be too much,” the owner told City Paper in 2002. That year, the Paragon Theatre Company leased the space in the hopes of turning it into a venue for live theater. That venture ended in 2004. By the time Billie Taylor toured the place last year, it had been neglected for years. “It was, like, feces and dead birds,” she says, mimicking tiptoeing through a pile of refuse.

Taylor, 55, is the latest to see promise in the space. After 33 years working at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C., she decided it was time to retire and make good on a lifelong dream. “This is all I ever wanted to do in my life, so I decided to go ahead and go for it,” she says. She had been involved in theatrical pursuits for years, but always as a sideline. She trained with the now-defunct D.C. Black Repertory Theatre, and more recently acted with smaller companies, including Heralds of Hope. (Taylor was also an usher at the Kennedy Center in D.C. for nine years, and thus had access to shows. Famed jazz musician Billy Taylor was an artistic advisor there at the time; the female Taylor says their tickets were always getting mixed up.)

Taylor sold her house in D.C. to buy the theater, which she took ownership of late last year. (She paid $205,000 to Alan Shecter, whose company owns the buildings that house the Charles Theatre and Everyman Theatre.) Her dream is to provide a venue for local performers to showcase their work. “Anything kind of goes,” she says. “Whatever one group wants to bring in, as long as it’s quality, I’m for it.”

Taylor has already proven herself adventurous. The first production in the new Autograph Playhouse, as Taylor has dubbed it, was a double-feature rock opera. Last May, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (BROS), a group of young, energetic performers prone to tongue-in-cheek productions of epic proportions, produced Amphion and The Terrible Secret of Lunastus (“Cue Lasers,” Stage, June 8). The show was a roaring success, with about 1,400 tickets sold over three weekends. Colorful foam monsters still lie across some of the seats in the auditorium, and a giant papier-mâché pig with an apple in its mouth dominates the former projection room.

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