John Rodaz and Maria Banda-Rodaz ''met cute'' (as they say in the movie biz) two decades ago.

He was tidying the lobby of the former Lincoln Road shoe store he had turned into a 49-seat theater called Area Stage. She was on a business trip from her native Ecuador and thought the little theater -- and the guy sweeping it -- looked interesting. She went in to chat. They fell in love, married and became partners in life and theater, though their pioneering venture on the Beach didn't last nearly so long as the marriage has endured.

Twenty years, two kids and many ventures later, the two are back in the theater business, operating a repurposed Area Stage out of the old Riviera Theatre in Coral Gables.

''Theater has always felt right to me,'' says Rodaz, 50.

Banda-Rodaz, 47, adds, 'Every day I wake up and say, `Oh, my God. I have a theater again.' ''

For 10 years on Miami Beach, ending in 1999, the Rodazes ran one of South Florida's finest small theater companies. They did plays by Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Terrence McNally, Joe Orton, Mario Vargas Llosa. They won Carbonell Awards, many of them. They gave numerous South Florida actors -- Carlos Orizondo, Paul Tei, Erik Fabregat, Lisa Morgan, Oscar Isaac and so many others -- their start in theater.

''I was like their illegitimate child in theater,'' says Tei, founder and artistic director of Miami's Mad Cat Theatre Company. ``They taught me so much about the business and forging relationships with people. But the greatest lesson was that they were true to their own vision, to a fault, regardless of how unpopular it was.

``It was do-it-yourself theater, spending all night painting a set, pushing back an opening, maxing out a credit card to buy what was needed. All of it had a resounding, unshakable impact on me, my work and who I am today.''

Orizondo, starring in Area's current production of Gustavo Ott's Tu ternura Molotov (Your Molotov Kisses), underscores the passion of a couple he calls his mentors and friends: ``John and Maria are artistic visionaries . . . whose ongoing commitment to theater excellence has touched countless lives.''

The skyrocketing rents that came with Lincoln Road's gentrification led the couple to close Area Stage in 1999. Life events were a factor, too. Banda-Rodaz gave birth to daughter Rachel, now 17, and son Giancarlo (aka ``John-John''), 13. And eventually her three children from a previous marriage (Melissa, 25; Anthony, 21, and Billy, 20) moved from Ecuador to Miami.

Supporting a large family helped spur a detour into more lucrative film location and production work. Banda-Rodaz and her husband freelanced as location scouts or managers, production coordinators, producers, coaches and art directors on more than 100 projects, including movies, commercials, sitcoms, industrial films and more. As associate producer of a company called We Shoot `Em, Banda-Rodaz worked on Ali, Bad Boys, Miami Vice and other films.

But theater kept calling to them.

FORMED COMPANY

Rodaz and Orizondo formed Oye Rep in 2000. The company focused on Latino work, staging one production at Miami Beach's Little Stage and another (in 2002) at the Miami Light Project's Light Box. Banda-Rodaz directed Hombres, a collection of short plays in Spanish, at GableStage for a company called Femenino Plural in 2001.

Rodaz directed a Spanish-language version of a play he had done at Area, Steven Berkoff's Kvetch (the translation was by Banda-Rodaz), for Venevisión International's theater at the Riviera in 2003. He had a one-show run (with Cindy Lou Johnson's Brilliant Traces) as artistic director of the Hollywood Playhouse in 2004 before developer-owner Gary Posner abruptly pulled the plug on having an ongoing professional theater company there.

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