“;Find a need and fill it”; is the starting point of any good business model. That's Paul Mitri's approach as artistic director of Honolulu's newest community theater group, the All the World's a Stage Theatre Company.

“;One of the things we're trying to do is to do theater that is affordable,”; Mitri said during an early morning Martin Luther King Jr. Day telephone interview.

Speaking from personal experience as a man with a family, Mitri continued, it's hard for much of Honolulu “;to go anywhere. You gotta get the baby sitter, pay for parking, get the tickets. ... It's important for me to do theater that's accessible for everybody, so we're really going to try to keep the ticket prices low.”;

“;Low”; means not only standard ticket prices of $12 for adults and $10 for students and seniors, but also a special “;Sliding Scale Sundays”; offer that works like flying standby—show up at the door on Sunday, and if there are any seats open, you can “;pay what you can (afford)”; for a ticket and see the show.

It's all on the honor basis, but Mitri said it works.

“;It's something we started in Seattle when I started the Seattle Shakespeare Festival. We experimented with different days ... but I think here in Honolulu trying to do the Sundays will be a good way to start.”;

The experiment begins tonight with the opening of “;Art.”; Mitri shares the stage with Tony Young and Ryan Wuestewald in Yasmina Reza's thought-provoking comedy about the nature of art.

Serge (Young) buys an expensive avant-garde white-on-white painting and raves about what a great deal he got—it only cost several hundred thousand francs!—while Marc (Mitri) is appalled by his friend's expenditure and the thought that his friend could think that the white-on-white painting is great art. Yvan (Wuestewald), a working man with problems of his own to deal with, tries to avoid disagreeing with either of them and gets caught in the middle.

Mitri sees it as “;a story about identity. 'Are we who we think we are, or are we who our friends say we are?'

“;The artwork is just a metaphor for that. Is the artwork bad because this person says it is? Or is it great because some 'name' person says it is? I think that (issue) is rampant through our whole culture. Do we go along with the crowd, or do we make our own decisions about something?”;

Mitri's set designer, Chesley Cannon, is painting the canvas that will be the centerpiece of the show.

“;Part of doing (”;Art”;) at the Arts at Marks is that we're trying to do more site-specific plays,”; Mitri continued. “;Since this is about art, we thought we'd do it in a gallery. The next play also has to do with art and takes place in a gallery, at least in the very last scene, and so we're going to stage it there, too.”;

Being site-specific “;limits some choices and kind of broadens others. ... We're looking at doing maybe environmental Shakespeare staging (and) some things that can take place in a restaurant.”;