McANUFF AT LA JOLLA: NOBODY COASTS

There’s a magazine photographer waiting, one show opening, another closing, and where Des McAnuff wants to be is half a mile away in a dance studio-cum-rehearsal hall. That’s where he’s directing final rehearsals for Anton Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull,” opening here tonight and closing one of the most ambitious summer-theater seasons in the country. It’s been a good year for artistic director McAnuff and the La Jolla Playhouse, reopened in 1983 after languishing almost two decades. McAnuff won a Tony Award this year for directing “Big River,” the playhouse’s hit last season that went off to Broadway and collected a total of seven Tonys, including best musical. The La Jolla Playhouse press department hands out thick packets of favorable press clippings hailing his innovation, daring and imagination.

Yet the air doesn’t seem particularly charged here in this lush beachside community. It seems laid back, just like McAnuff, 33, a songwriter, playwright and director in baggy Williwear and sneakers. But appearances are deceiving. Despite his seemingly relaxed style, he has been known to take as many as 800 notes during a preview. He lives four blocks from the beach but says he rarely gets there. And he doesn’t drive.

“I also work about 20 hours a day,” McAnuff tells a visitor, idly picking at his new guitar during a photography session. “I hate it when it’s going on, but it’s very gratifying. I also think good work feeds good work.”

Neither the pace nor the good work are particularly new, either. McAnuff refers to himself as a “theater child” and says he’s been working 20-hour days since he was 18. Newsweek called him a Wunderkind three years ago in a review of McAnuff’s “The Death of von Richthofen as Witnessed From Earth,” which he wrote, directed and scored. The dozen plays, musicals and scores he wrote before he was 25 have all been produced in either Canada, where he grew up, or the United States, where he’s lived since 1976.

“Death of von Richthofen,” which played the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater in 1982, featured songs, soldiers dropping onto the stage from above and a flying piano. McAnuff doesn’t seem to have tamed his imagination much since then: His production of “As You Like It” last year was set in France in the ‘30s, included a Jacques in navy pin-striped suit and was laced with jazz saxophone soliloquies.

McAnuff encourages visiting directors to paint similarly risky, splashy, non-traditional canvases. This season’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man,” with Robert Woodruff directing, included a 3,000-pound steel pagoda facade, palm fronds cut from trees behind the theater, snappy ad-libs (“Listen carefully,” warned actor John Vickery at one point, “or you’ll never understand Act II”) and a seductress in green socks. And the revived La Jolla Playhouse debuted with another Brecht play, “The Visions of Simone Machard,” in a dazzling avant-garde production directed by Peter Sellars, now director of the Kennedy Center’s American National Theater.

Composer Stephen Sondheim and director James Lapine were here this summer reworking their failed Broadway musical, “Merrily We Roll Along.” Playwright Michael Weller’s “Ghost on Fire” was commissioned by the Playhouse and had its world premiere here earlier this month.

There are plenty of professionals on stage as well, calling to mind the Playhouse’s early days after Mel Ferrer, Dorothy McGuire and Gregory Peck founded it in 1947. In the current “Sea Gull” alone are such performers as Vickery, Bill Irwin, Phoebe Cates and Penny Fuller.

Whether as producer for visiting directors or director for visiting actors, McAnuff seems to clear the stage for their work rather than clutter it. “We have a strong belief,” says dramaturge Robert Blacker, “that if you pick the right people and give them the freedom to do their work, good producing can be getting out of the way.”

Picking the right playes doesn’t hurt either. “If a play is universal, it must apply as a window to the world we live in,” says McAnuff. “I don’t want to drag a classic out of the closet like it’s some sort of family heirloom, dust it off and admire it. A play has to in some way apply to my life and times. “

When McAnuff talks about “The Sea Gull,” for instance, he talks about the meandering of its characters as if he were discussing his friends, observing among other things that “everyone’s in love with the wrong person--it’s sort of an upward mobility in love affairs.” And one of the hallmarks of McAnuff’s direction, say actors who have worked with him, is his ability to convey that immediacy to his cast.

“He’s young, but he does what the great directors do,” says Fuller. “He goes to the text before he departs from the text. He doesn’t say, ‘I’ll do “The Sea Gull” in red silk.’ He says, ‘I’ll examine “The Sea Gull.” ’ “

Rehearsals generally begin with what McAnuff and Blacker call “sleuthing,” a process designed to place non-contemporary work in broader contexts. “If we look at ‘Ghost on Fire,’ ” says Blacker, “we would know the political and social issues Michael (Weller) is addressing. But 400 years have passed since Shakespeare was writing. (Without all this) we tend to look at plays as merely character studies when they were very much plays about their period.”

With “Sea Gull,” the cast spent one week around a table talking Russian history generally and Chekhov specifically, often with two Russian scholars and the original Russian text of the play. There were chronologies of Russian history, recalls Fuller, with notations as to when the characters were born, and actors read aloud the research materials pegged to their characters.

Actor Irwin calls the backgrounding “a tactical gamble because in theater you only have so much time to rehearse,” but McAnuff clearly feels it’s worth it. Or as actor Vickery puts it: “A lot goes out the window when you’re on your feet, but it’s nice to have it as an unconscious backlog.”

McAnuff talks at length about appreciating the intelligence of his actors--another benefit to sleuthing, he says, is that actors don’t feel so much like puppets acting out other people’s ideas--and weighs opportunities for actors when he chooses plays. “I don’t believe that an actor illuminates the soul of a great play,” says McAnuff. “I think rather a great play illuminates the soul of a great actor.”

Producer McAnuff wants to similarly spark his writers and directors, and that means letting them essentially choose their own projects. “We base our season around people, not projects,” says Blacker. “We believe that the work must come from the artists themselves.”

McAnuff quips that he wouldn’t go to Sellars and ask if he wanted to do “Pajama Game,” and Sellars concurs that “Simone Machard” was, indeed, a play he had wanted to do for some time. And the realization of that play here, says Sellars, was “one of the great highs of my life professionally.” It isn’t all laissez faire, of course.

Playwright Weller recalls that while he was writing the commissioned “Ghost on Fire,” McAnuff “leaned on me with a combination of rough and gentle encouragement,” and Vickery is similarly candid. He says McAnuff “has very strong ideas and is sometimes a bit more autocratic than other directors I’ve worked with. But it’s borne out by the fact that 90% of the time he’s right, so you go along with it.”

With such performers as Vickery and Irwin onstage, and with out-of-town producers and critics often out front, McAnuff and the Playhouse are clearly playing to audiences far beyond La Jolla. Given Broadway’s growing role of presenter rather than producer, regional theater companies are forging a national production network where both McAnuff and the Playhouse have quickly made a mark.

“The notion behind this place is to seed work, to gather together the best people we can and create the most meaningful work we’re capable of,” says McAnuff. “And when that happens, it makes sense for the work to move on.”

Yet he is equally aware of the practical difficulties in giving Playhouse projects longer lives. For one thing, it is difficult to keep a cast together once a production closes. For another, there often isn’t enough known about what other directors will do to plan ahead except on his own projects.

That doesn’t stop conversation, however. He’s discussed transfers, says McAnuff, with Harvey Lichtenstein at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Joe Papp at the New York Shakespeare Festival and with Sellars, who was here last week and says “there will definitely be shared projects. Absolutely.” Nothing’s definite with Sellars yet nor on “Merrily,” but McAnuff expects that the Sondheim musical “will happen in New York, although not necessarily on Broadway. I’d be shocked if they didn’t go on with it.”

McAnuff and the Playhouse have done well with musicals, including not only “Big River,” which is expected to tour next year, but also last season’s Randy Newman revue, “Maybe I’m Doing It Wrong,” which also played a stint at the Roxy in Los Angeles. The Shubert Organization put $65,000 into “Merrily,” according to Shubert President Bernard Jacobs, and McAnuff says: “It’s possible that in the future some liaison or cooperation” might occur with the Shuberts. He’s also talked with the Nederlander Organization “about our doing musicals, since we seem to have some sort of a track record now.”

Director McAnuff has been working with British playwright Barrie Keeffe on a musical version of “Around the World in 80 Days,” originally commissioned for Radio City Music Hall in New York, and says he hopes to mount that show in La Jolla next year. But he doubts it would begin here, because he likes the idea of working on a proscenium stage the second time around.

The idea of producing on a smaller stage first and at La Jolla second worked well last season, of course, with “Big River,” Mark Twain’s tale of Huckleberry Finn, set to music by Roger Miller. McAnuff and many of his La Jolla colleagues launched “River” at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., before bringing it here last season, then to Broadway in April.

What else might one expect at the Playhouse? McAnuff would like to bring back both Woodruff and Sellars, premiere or commission a work by “Big River” dramatist William Hauptman and entice such writers and directors as Sam Shepard, JoAnne Akalaitis and Garland Wright. And he isn’t limiting himself to traditional stage artists. A songwriter and playwright before he became a director, he played in rock bands in Toronto (concluding with a group called the Choke Sisters), plans to continue involving pop musicians and songwriters in Playhouse projects and already put out a casual invitation to Bob Dylan during the latter’s visit one evening to “Big River.”

Last year he was here until December, McAnuff says, although the season ends in September, but this year hopes to leave in time to go to Berlin for a while. He and his wife, actress Susan Berman, may then also indulge their “secret ambition,” to go around the world in 40 days (“We don’t really have the 80 days to do it,” he explains). He doesn’t expect any change in his own career just now, saying he eventually wants to get back to writing and songwriting but “for the foreseeable future, I plan to run the La Jolla Playhouse and direct.

“One of the advantages of this theater is that we are young enough not to have made any enemies,” concludes McAnuff. “In 10 years, that may not be true.”