It’s a Thursday night in Portland. The crowd of about 50 settles into their seats at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, at the top of Munjoy Hill. They sip beers in bottles and wine in plastic cups as they whisper and giggle and smooch, waiting for “Pvt. Wars” to start. The front row is filled with players from the local theater scene. After a quick welcome speech and plea for donations, Deirdre Nice, the theater’s artistic director, takes a seat on the floor as the room fades to black.

When the lights come back up, the audience has been transported back in time to the early ’70s. David Currier, in the role of Gately, sits on the stage, in a bathrobe, tinkering with a broken radio in the rec room of a Veterans Affairs hospital. He needs to fix it for Hinson, a fellow Vietnam vet. As his efforts grow increasingly more frenzied, Gately’s friends Silvio and Natwick (played by Craig Bowden and J.P. Guimont) break the not-unexpected news: Hinson died the night before.

In the next hour and a half, the three University of Maine graduates lead the audience on a roller-coaster ride of high comedy – Silvio is a foul-mouthed nurse flasher, and that’s just the beginning – and heartbreak, as the three wait for their war wounds, both internal and external, to heal.

When Currier, 25, Bowden, 26, and Guimont, 24, met in the UMaine theater department, they dreamed of careers in acting, but after college, life had other plans. The three returned to their hometowns – Bowden stayed in Bangor, Currier returned to Presque Isle, and Guimont, a Bangor native who moved to the Portland area as a boy, went back home.

Eventually, the urge to act resurfaced. Two years ago, Bowden and Guimont reunited in

Portland, and both began to break into the local theater scene. A year later, Currier joined them and they started their own theater company, The Cast.

“Just the chance to act is what we want,” Bowden said, sitting in the empty theater about three hours before showtime.

“Getting paid for it isn’t bad either,” Guimont said, laughing. “Or else we’d put on shows in our living room. We don’t care.”

Fortunately, the St. Lawrence Community Center is available. Though The Cast’s second production, “Pvt. Wars,” hasn’t broken any box-office records, they don’t need to fill the house to break even. The St. Lawrence lets them use the stage for free, and then asks for half the house each night.

“It’s been a completely rewarding experience being able to work here,” Currier said after rushing back from his day job as a salesman for Wood Structures Inc. in Biddeford. “You don’t see a lot of spaces like this in Portland that you can just move into. It’s definitely a nice place for a lot of different small theater companies trying to get going.”

That was the plan when Deirdre Nice of Falmouth bought the St. Lawrence Church in 1993. The building, a landmark in the East End, occupies a full city block. It has steeples and spires that poke high into the sky and a slate roof that has leaked from the first year the church opened in 1897. By 1986, structural concerns and soaring heating bills made it necessary for the church to close its doors. A pair of developers bought the church, but didn’t feel it would be worth the expense to restore the building.

At the time, Nice worked at Silly’s, the restaurant she owned at the base of Munjoy Hill, and the developers were regular customers. They were looking to unload the building and Nice had just come into a $30,000 inheritance. Though she knew little about the arts, she had a vision of opening an arts and community center that would serve the neighborhood and the city.

“There are things that do not happen in this town – artistic, wonderful adventures – because the space is unavailable,” Nice said. “I am philosophically against that. You can talk about access to art or you can do it and this space does it.”

Turning the dilapidated old church into a functional space was hard. Turning that space into an affordable venue was even harder. Though she had a business partner, Nice was going broke. She could barely afford the mortgage payments. Things were looking grim.

“It became really apparent you needed to be a nonprofit if you were going to survive,” Nice said.

She organized a nonprofit, and sold the building to the board of directors for the exact price she bought it for, around $71,000. That was just pocket change, however, compared with the cost of repairs that the building needed. The center started a capital campaign, but it wasn’t attracting the same type of big-money donors as other projects throughout the city. So the board decided to chip away at it grant by grant.

“We just did what we needed to do in order to get things up and running,” Nice said.

They didn’t cut corners on the major renovations. There’s a radiant-heat floor to reduce heating costs, and theater groups say the lighting system is one of the best in Portland. However, much of the work has been done by volunteers. A local stained-glass expert started a workshop at the center to restore the church’s myriad windows. Bobby Lipps, a local handyman, showed up the day Nice bought the building. He completed the entire basement-level demolition and he hasn’t left since.

“I come here morning, noon and night sometimes,” Lipps said. “Most of the time I end up helping all the people.”

Nice recently sold her restaurant and has become a full-time volunteer as the center’s artistic director. She works odd jobs to make ends meet. It hasn’t been easy, and at times it hasn’t been fun. When asked if she would do it again, Nice pauses and shrugs.

“The reality has been it’s been hard,” Nice said. “How do you keep it up? It’s been hard. Would I today do this? I don’t know. The gratifying thing is that it’s actually turned out the way I envisioned.”

Nice bought the building when she was 30. She just turned 40. She says, only half-jokingly, that if the center’s second phase, the restoration of the church’s main sanctuary, isn’t done by the time she’s 50, she may “jump off the bell tower or something.” However, when she starts talking to the young actors who are able to realize their dream because of the St. Lawrence, any thoughts of giving up melt away.

“Each and every one of us has a dream. To be able to maintain the vision of accessibility to all, to actually have that happen 10 years later is incredibly gratifying to me,” Nice said. “Everybody’s a little artistic in their own way. Not everyone wants to get on stage. Maybe they’re a poet. I always wanted this space to be accessible to folks if they wanted that – where you could get your family and friends together on a professional stage – that happens here.”

For Guimont, Bowden and Currier, that’s what theater is all about. Nice takes a hands-off approach, which lets The Cast experiment without worrying about filling the house or offending anyone.

“It’s a refuge,” Guimont said.

More important, the St. Lawrence has helped the trio to grow as actors, and it has allowed them to “make it” in Maine.

“This is great – to be able to do what I love to do in a place that’s really inspiring,” Bowden said. “You keep coming back and it keeps getting better and better and more exciting. All of my friends are here. Maybe I don’t have to go to New York or L.A. where I don’t know anybody.”

“Pvt. Wars” will be staged at 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday at the St. Lawrence Arts and Community Center, 76 Congress St., Portland. Tickets cost $12. For more information on the St. Lawrence Community Center, visit www.stlawrencearts.org or call 775-5568.