Carleen Crowe makes sure everything is in smooth working order at the Theatre By The Sea restaurant.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Backstage at Theatre By The Sea’s restaurant kitchen, there’s high drama to be found every night, a dependable 90 minutes of fiery action, random moments of impending disaster, and a multi-layered love story electrifying the room.

This kitchen, Bistro By The Sea, keeps to a schedule of any busy restaurant kitchen, with one major difference:

All patrons have to be out the door when the curtain goes up at the nearby theater.

There’s no lingering over coffee and dessert. Checks have to be tabulated and on the table with enough time to square up before the curtain rises.

Forget the doggy bag — no one wants to sit next to veal parmigiana growing cold. And don’t sneak it into the theater, because food is not allowed there. (But it can be held in the kitchen refrigerator until afterwards.)

Chug that Chardonnay. The show’s going to start.

Patrons with jackets over their arms get bottlenecked at this restaurant doorway, arriving mostly at the same time, and leaving mostly at the same time.

Traffic back-ups abound like they do on the nearby road to the beach. Wait staff squeeze in near the charge-card machine, around the corner where the coffee is made, and in front of the grill, where two chefs and a chef’s daughter calmly produce more than 150 entrees between 6 and 7:15 p.m. That’s approximately two dinners a minute, six nights a week until Labor Day.

“We do in an hour and a half what other kitchens do in five hours,” said co-chef Duane Crowe, 48, of South Kingstown. “It’s really the most difficult thing I have ever done.”

And he comes back night after night to do it again, comparing the kitchen to a whaling ship preparing to set sail. Only, this trip is nightly, save Mondays, when the theater is dark.

“We prepare, prepare, prepare,” Crowe said, pointing out the pans of homemade bread, the cooler with desserts, the stacks of clean dishes, the salad greens, side dishes warming, garnishes ready for a magazine-cover perfect sprinkle.

It feels something like hurricane preparedness with the larders full, and residents waiting for the storm to hit.

And hit, it does.

IT’S 5 P.M. on opening night of The Producers, and Crowe has been prepping the kitchen since morning. Waitresses and bus people check tables and trays; kitchen crew check dishwashers and silverware. Cold-station attendants Brittney Brown and Emerson Bontecou, both of Wakefield, have their area at the ready.

Crowe has already baked the bread, made the chowder and the Key lime pies, filleted the fish, and discussed with co-chef Ray Weeden, of Charlestown, the night’s specials.

“Every day we start fresh,” Crowe says, pointing out that every evening they use up what they prepare, and then start it all over again the next day.

“I’m the guy who wants everything done,” he says. “We can’t relax until everything is ready, and otherwise we couldn’t do what we do.”

He paces back and forth, with daughter Emily, 21, in a steady chatter nearby. She’s a college student considering biology and environmental science, but in summer it’s food service, food service. She has grown up here, her parents having operated the kitchen for almost 20 years, taking over when Fourquest Entertainment began running the theater in 1989. Now, with new owners having reopened last summer after the theater’s almost-four-year closure, the Crowes are all back in place.

She’s surrounded at work by her two brothers, Adam, 27, and David, 25; her mom, Karleen; her aunt, Karen Johnston; her cousin Justine, her dad and people who have worked for her parents for so long they feel like family.

“I love it,” Emily says. “I have a pretty cool boss. It really is a family affair.”

Her dad and mom were high school sweethearts in Narragansett. Duane started working in local kitchens as a teenager. His wife and oldest son, he says, have always maintained a hobby-like curiosity about food. They love it, while he loves preparing it.

Duane and Karleen have been partners in other kitchens, and in life.

“Our first date was Oct. 18, 1975,” Duane says, proud of his good memory. She was Karleen Becker, they were sophomores at the new Narragansett High School, and they went to a Halloween dance as Raggedy Ann and Andy.

He smiles, nostalgically. But, like an early hurricane wind, movement suddenly is felt in the kitchen.

IT’S ALMOST 6, wait-and-see time:

Wait for the crowds. See how calm the kitchen staff can be when the storm of orders hits.

Emily ties an apron around her T-shirt and shorts, and steps into the cooking area, a starting block for a nightly Olympic-like race, where the temperature rises to roasting level. Her dad is on one side, Ray Weeden on the other.

“To produce the quality of the food that we do in an hour and 45 minutes is exciting,” says Weeden. “We try to keep a cool head. We keep it cool.”

Suddenly, the machine that spits out the order tickets comes alive, demanding Chicken Savannah, sole Française, baked salmon, New York sirloin.

“I also need French fries for that burger,” Emily says, loudly enough to be heard, but not shouting above the kitchen clatter.

Duane tosses fish in flour and sinks it into hot batter.

“Dad, Dad, two fried clams and a cheeseburger,” Emily says, moving all the while, not looking to her left or right as she adds garnish to dinners, scoops out sides, sprinkles parsley.

“Dad, salmon.”

“Dad, salmon,” she repeats.

Duane acknowledges her with a “Heard,” he explains later, though only Emily and Ray catch the quiet tone as they compete with the din.

He and Ray are steady and low-key. He has seen chefs throw pans around a crowded kitchen. But not in his kitchen.

“If you are in control,” Duane says, “it’s so much easier for the servers.”

He lines up orders on the grill. Weeden plates up scallops on the other end, while adding sauce to another entrée. Emily wipes the dish edge, adding a lemon slice to a visually pleasing plate.

“It’s like our show, too,” says Weeden.

MEANWHILE, 20 footsteps away in the dining room, cool spreads itself across the room like the butter going onto the freshly baked bread.

Karleen actually sits and chats with customers, her sister Karen Johnston dashing by with orders.

Karen works days at the Adeline LaPlante Center in Wakefield, a program for people with developmental disabilities, and nights at the restaurant. She’s done so for years, working 10-to-12 hour days, as she puts her daughter through college.

Hostess Erica Richards greets people at the door, checking the table blueprint and reservation list. Lights are dim. Rain falls romantically outside the weathered structure, a turn-of-the-century former summer home, where a lush perennial garden has grown so August high, it creates a feeling of isolation.

The clock ticks closer to crunch time as the rain picks up. People pour into the dining room, wet and slightly tense, knowing they are running late, the weather having delayed their arrival.

A customer checks his watch. Ten to 7. Still time enough.

Kitchen staff refill the ice. Put on a fresh pot of coffee. And another.

“Food up, guys,” Emily says, much louder than before. She checks the orders, moving them down in order of arrival.

“That’s going to that eight-top,” she says nodding to a plated dinner.

She knocks over a spatula. “Oh, no, we need another,” she says, smiling still.

“This order is going to be spectacular,” she says to no one, ladling out a sauce.

Karleen comes into the kitchen to say a customer claims the fried clams were the best he’s had in years.

More orders plunge in. It’s after 7. One hour until curtain. It’s “in the weeds” time, which in restaurant kitchens translates into way, way too much work at one time.

WHAT TIME is too late?

“Now,” says Richards, standing at the door adjusting her strapless dress.

A Courteney Cox look-alike arrives. “I’m sorry we’re late.”

She’s followed by Maureen, also late. “My name’s Maureen. We’re late.”

“Hi, Maureen, I’ll be right with you,” Karleeen says, turning to another couple as Erica takes a group to their table.

“Are you being helped?”

“We have reservations, but we’re late.”

Karleen tells the late arrivals, in a calm and even voice, they may have to settle for sandwiches, given the time. No one complains. She turns to a visiting relative to coo over her babies.

“Coming through,” she hears as a tray of desserts pass close to her head.

AS 7:30 inches closer to 7:35, the dining room takes on a growing movement of people looking for restrooms, gathering up charge cards, sweaters, pulling out combs for a swat at their hair.

Karleen brings a patron into the kitchen.

“She wants to thank you,” she says to her sweat-soaked husband, who looks like he ran a marathon, and in a sense, has.

A crisp, clean patron plants a kiss on his cheek.

“I’m so sweaty,” he says, embarrassed, having hit a tired wall that he knows he must climb over. There’s more work to come on this night, a post-show cast party, though some of that has been prepped, too.

“It’s crazy,” says son Adam, of their nightly race. Saturday nights are the craziest, when the 4:30 p.m. performance lets out, and its after-show crowd arrives around the same time as the before-show crowd for the performance at 8:30 p.m. But that’s nothing compared to the night that a gas line into the kitchen broke, and they served everyone salads and desserts.

Applause is heard from the theater, a response to the play’s opening scene.

The dining room is clean, re-set and quiet. The kitchen sparkles in stainless steel and soap.

Ray says “Good night,” and heads out. Wait and kitchen staff sit in a circle, looking a little stunned.

Adam predicts the family, which hasn’t eaten, will get sandwiches from Matunuck’s Sea View Marketplace. That’s something they look forward to, and talk about, in winter, when Duane and Ray go off to other jobs at URI, as does Karleen. Emily will return to her college courses, as will other kitchen employees. Adam will continue to audition for theater roles while he teaches dance.

Karen Johnston will work her day job, marveling at how much time she now has, with her nights free, and the theater dark until May.

Duane Crowe may finally be able to mow his lawn. After three consecutive rainy Mondays, that job may be more challenging than preparing dinner for the theater crowd.

In other kitchens, he’s often praised for getting dinner for dozens in the course of an afternoon. He tells them:

“You don’t know what I do in summer.”

To reach Bistro By The Sea, call (401) 789-3030. Hours are Tuesday through Thursday, 5:30 to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 5:30 to 8 for theater patrons, but Crowe said the kitchen will serve patrons of the late-night cabaret until midnight; and Sunday, 6 to 8 p.m. Diners can make reservations without attending the theater, Crowe said.

afleming@projo.com