PLAYWRIGHT’S ‘WEDDING’ TURNS SOUR

Up to now, the most interesting theater performance in memory was the afternoon that Tony Curtis and Dinah Manoff both walked out on “I Ought to Be in Pictures” at the Mark Taper Forum, leaving the understudies to finish the show.

That’s been matched--if not topped--by New York’s Circle Repertory Theater. Audiences attending a preview of Julie Bovasso’s “Angelo’s Wedding” earlier this month returned from the second-act intermission to find a woman on the stage urging them to go home.

It was playwright Bovasso, who apparently had had a disagreement with director Marshall Mason on some cuts that Mason wanted to make. Nobody did go home, and the performance continued.

But the next day Circle Rep canceled the production on the grounds of irreconcilable differences. “Julie is very upset by the cancellation,” her agent told Associated Press. “But nobody can make somebody produce a play.”

Where are the new playwrights? In May a lot of them were at the Denver Center Theater Company for its first festival of unproduced plays, Prima Facie.

Bernard Weiner of the San Francisco Chronicle was one of several critics who dropped by. Reviewing the plays was against the rules--they weren’t being presented as finished works--but Weiner was impressed at the quality of the writing and the integrity of the program.

“It’s plain that Prima Facie can’t fail to become an important contributor to the new American drama,” he wrote. Of the 10 plays offered, he found Romulus Linney’s “A Woman Without a Name,” Stephen Parks’ “When the Sun Shines” and Shannon Keith Kelly’s “Hope of the Future” the most promising.

Prima Facie’s first season was overseen by the Times’ Sylvie Drake, on leave to the theater. She returns to The Times next week.

With nine extra minutes to fill on Sunday’s Tony Awards broadcast, will producer Alexander Cohen finally have time to include the awarding of the annual Tony to an outstanding resident theater? If not, for the record, it’s to go to Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre.

Speaking of For the Records: The remark in last week’s Stage Wire that “It probably sounded better in Spanish” was not--we swear--a comment on actor Alan Mandell’s performance in Beckett’s “Company” in Madrid. It referred to the somewhat ambiguous review that Mandell received in Madrid’s El Pais. Here’s a more felicitous quote from the same review: “Even for those removed from the English language, the concert of Voice and the elegance of gestures of Alan Mandell can have the beauty of a concert solo.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Richard Crenna to the Washington Times’ Scott Sublett. “I’d get angry when anyone got any part, whether I wanted it or not. ‘That s.o.b. is working again?’ I don’t think you ever lose your sense of envy, because that’s what motivates actors.”