STAGE WEEK : THREE DIRECTORS IN SEARCH OF A PLAY

Permit us a Pirandello-ish indulgence:

Quite by accident, two local resident theaters decided to stage Tina Howe’s “Painting Churches” this summer. Jonathan Gillard is staging the play at the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, with performances alternating between Santa Maria and Solvang beginning Thursday, and Robert Berlinger is directing the production at San Diego’s Old Globe, which opens Friday. Each director sees the play differently.

Berlinger, 28, was with the Mark Taper Forum last year under a National Endowment for the Arts grant as director in residence and now runs the Globe’s new-play development program, as well as functioning as associate director.

Of “Painting Churches,” he noted: “The play is a look at a Boston family. The father is a retired Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, the mother an eccentric grande dame and the daughter a New York portrait painter. The family is an archetype of the illustrious Boston family, and the play is about the daughter’s attempt to see them, now that the father’s gaga and the mother’s holding the strings. On a metaphorical level, it’s about how difficult it is to perceive the reality of one’s parents.

“Another contrast is the creativity these people represent, counterbalanced by the conservative Boston background, classicism on one side and romanticism on the other. It’s a strongly autobiographical piece. Howe’s grandfather was the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Mark Antony DeWolfe Howe, and her father was Quincy Howe, a radio journalist of the ‘50s. This is a portrait of how she wished her family had been, and how she actually discovered them to be.”

Gillard, 37, is part of the Vincent Dowling gang that came west from the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival when Dowling took over as PCPA’s artistic director. Gillard teaches voice at the conservatory and, as an actor, is currently appearing in PCPA’s production of C. P. Taylor’s “And A Nightingale Sang.” His view of “Painting Churches”:

“It deals with a portrait painter on the verge of her first big break who comes home to Boston to help her aging parents move (they’re in their 70s). The agreement is that if she helps them, they’ll pose for her. Fanny, the mother, feels that the house has grown too big for them--especially now that the father is no longer producing any work.

“At its core, I think the play is about the nature of creativity, about what it is to feel that germ bubbling up out of the subconscious, and the early guilt, pain and anxiety of trying to bring it to life and knowing that one is self-absorbed in the process. Too, I think it shows the creative arc in one’s life, which intersects here; the girl is just coming into her own, while the father is losing it.”

The real Pirandello, more or less (he wouldn’t have it any other way), takes stage center Thursday when “Rules of the Game” opens at American Theatre Arts. Once again, Don Eitner and William Murray have a meeting of the minds, Eitner as director and Murray as translator. (Murray is one of America’s foremost translators of Pirandello and Eitner did an evening of Pirandello one-acts when he was with the Melrose Theater. And while we’re on the subject of the two of them, they were responsible for rounding D. L. Coburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Gin Game” into playing weight when ATA had a playwrights’ unit.)

“Rules of the Game” deals with a triangle consisting of a husband, his wife and a man named Guido. “A wonderful, biting comedy” is how Eitner characterizes it. “Aside from how it depicts the heart at war with the intellect, it’s very much a product of what Pirandello was so fond of examining--the question of whose reality is real. Is there any beyond that which the individual perceives? Pirandello is like an Italian Pinter. He doesn’t fill you in on a lot of background; he just sets his characters in motion and lets them go from there.

“We’re setting the play in Rome around 1934, when the country was turning to the dark forces of Hitler. You can sense the clouds gathering. Even still, the play has a wonderfully Italian quality (I’m half-Italian on my mother’s side). I appreciate its invoking of a lust and passion for life, and its inwardness of expression.” After all, no matter how many unheard trees crash down in mythic forests, life on the Via Veneto surges on.

As far as other openings for the week are concerned, Thousand Oaks gets its own version of a cult favorite when “The Rocky Horror Show” opens at Shades Nightclub on Wednesday. Murray Mednick’s full Coyote cycle begins its run at the Paramount Ranch on Tuesday, and for the robust of theater appetite and the strong of butt, an entire dusk-to-dawn performance will be given Aug. 3. The inimitable clown Bill Irwin teams up with the darkly piratical director Robert Woodruff in Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man” at the La Jolla Playhouse, opening Tuesday. And if that pony girl in the chorus of “Sweet Charity” at the Ahmanson looks disconcertingly familiar, that will be model Carol Alt, who has made hot summer days hotter, or at least more interesting, with her poses in the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated. The Civic Light Opera musical opens Friday.