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Yet that is what Tom Asad did, and since 1972, when he opened his arena style, 160seat You Are Cabaret Dinner Theater in a converted North Royalton truck stop, he has not only survived, he also has prospered, which only goes to show what can be accomplished by hard work, proper planning, cagy utilization of resources and a towering ego.

"Actually, I don't think I have a particularly strong ego,' says Tom Asad, an incisive man in his mid-30s with thinning, curly hair and a chin as jutting as some of his opinions. "What I really am is self-confident. I just believe that you can change anything in your life if you're not afraid.

"For instance, I used to be a teacher, and my fourth or fifth year of teaching I realized that I couldn't do it for the rest of my life. I mean, I just looked around at all those old teacher's faces and asked myself 'So you're going to end up like this?' Running a theater seemed like a good alternative.

"At the beginning, I figured that we needed four things to be successful: Product, a good show; good food; good liquor; good service total package.

"It took awhile to put all those pieces together; for the first two years of the theater I kept teaching, because there wasn't any money in the theater budget to pay me.”

Since Asad comes from moneyed Lebanese stock, and attended Baldwin-Wallace College, where he worked under William Allman, influential chairman of the theater department there, raising money for his prospective theater was not too difficult; in fact, for the first five years of its existence, Allman was an early partner in the You Are Cabaret theater.

Asad says it was Allman who influenced him into the pragmatic positions he holds about art in general and theater and its audience in particular.

"Theater is a product; it is either purchased or not purchased by the public. Art for Arts sake is a cop-out. After you've had your fun and discussed your motivation and the

auther's meaning and all that, the s.o.b. who paid his money has got to like it because if he doesn't, nothing else makes any difference.

"If

someone produces "Waiting for Godot' and it is the single finest textbook production ever put before the eyes of man, and if nobody comes to see it, then it has failed, and I don't believe in failure. I don't think the public should be insulted by asking them to pay for an author's, or a director's, or an actor's ego trip.

"Anyway, I don't believe in definitive art; theater is as good as the paying public thinks it is."

'I don't think the public should be insulted by asking them to pay for an author's, or a director's, or an actor's ego trip.'

Now, these are statements that amount to aesthetic heresy, in the world of the "theatah," and their outrageous crassness is compounded by Asad's Olympian certitude. The fact remains, however, that for his theater, and his audience, Tom Asad is absolutely right; he has devised a saleable theatrical equivalent to velvet painting; broad subjects treated in the most colorful manner possible.

For $13.40 you buy heavy-on-the-starch full buffet dinner-Asad has a total staff of 32, and his chef, he ruefully admits, makes more money than he does and a show. Asad acts as both greeter and bartender, and intermissions

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are milked to the limit to make sure that the bartender is very busy for a very long time.

Nowadays, Asad himself functions more as a producer than anything else, preferring to turn over directorial reins to people like David Bamberger, better known as the head of the New Cleveland Opera Company.

The utilitarian attitude is expressed onstage by the usual Neil Simon plays, mainline Tennessee Williams, previously unproduced plays by both unknowns and playwrights of some reputation like John Patrick; works that usually turn out to have been previously unproduced for very good

reasons.

There are, of course, occasional surprises: "Sexual Perversities in Chicago," for one, or James Kirkwood's "P.S. Your Cat is Dead," a cheerfully depraved comedy about the desperate loneliness of urban life and the fulfilling joys of falling in love with a very butch homosexual who doubles as a burglar not exactly your

basic dinner theater fare. "Yeah, they practically dared us to play 'P.S. Your Cat Is Dead,' admits Asad. "When you play something like that, your advertising has to make it very clear that if the audience doesn't want to hear certain words or see a guy's bare ass, then they shouldn't see the play."

While it may be possible to question many things about Tom Asad, there is no question about his entrepreunerial instincts or his business acumen.

He is the head of two corporations, a profit-maker that owns the land that the theater and some surrounding stores are on, and a non-profit maker that owns the theater itself.

Asad makes enough money from rent paid by the commercial stores to take care of all the mortgage payments and the utilities.

Because of what amounts to rent subsidies, Asad puts on shows only on weekends and can break even by running at approximately 50% capacity, a very small percentage in the theater business.

Since he is on what amounts to North Royalton's main drag, he also does a decent lunch

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