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It was barely more than a month ago that Kristin Berg and Doug Montoya walked into the building at 11th Street and Lomas Boulevard Northwest.

Then, the building was winding up a long run as a video store and the landlord was looking for a new tenant.

Tonight, it opens as the Box Performance Space, a 50-seat theater that is headquarters for Berg and Montoya's Cardboard Playhouse Productions and also Albuquerque's new home for improv.

"This whole process took six weeks," Montoya said during a phone interview this week. "This past weekend we had 30 people in here on Saturday and more - maybe 40 - in here on Sunday, friends, family, teenagers, little children, parents, all painting and moving wood around. We are ready to open as a theater."

Montoya and Berg want the Box to be a space devoted to performances by young people for young people.

"Our goal for the Box is to create an environment where children of all ages can feel comfortable expressing themselves and performing," Montoya said.

Improvisation plays a big role in creating that environment.

Both Berg and Montoya are former members of Gorilla Tango Theater, the improv theater company that shut down operations in Albuquerque in January to concentrate its efforts on a new theater in Chicago.

That, Berg and Montoya agree, left an improv void in Albuquerque.

"We think it is very helpful and useful for children to have improv skills, so that's our focus," Berg said.

Montoya said the rules of improv - always positive, always a team - are good for kids in everyday life as well as in theater.

"Kids with improv training are more comfortable," he said. "It instills a sense of confidence in them. They are ready to roll with the punches.

"You can see that in theater when they are ready to cover for a dropped line. But you can see it when they are talking in front of their class, too."

Berg and Montoya are offering theater classes for kids at the Box. And down the line, they have ambitions of creating a nonprofit organization to offer scholarships to kids.

But now, they are the newest performance space in town. And tonight is opening night.