PIRAZZINI’S BACK AGAIN IN NEW SPOT

Nobody who knows Edythe Pirazzini would ever consider that she had said everything she wants to say as a theatrical producer. Nobody, that is, except the twinkling-eyed grandmother herself.

That’s why it has been four years since San Diego playgoers have seen the feisty producer, whose part-Cherokee blood seems to overrule any sedateness from her English ancestry.

On Thursday, Pirazzini’s Mission Playhouse ended its silence, opening Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” in a new, 99-seat theater in Mission Bay’s Marina Village.

Pirazzini is the kind of woman who would never do anything without being sure why she was doing it. When, at 17, she strode into NBC studios in New York and asked to speak to the president, she knew exactly why she was there.

“I’m Edythe Bates from Nashville, Tenn., and I’m looking for a job because I’m going to be an actress,” she told the man. She got the job, of course.

Years later, after lots of hard work and acting study, her marriage to Robert Pirazzini brought her to San Diego, where she cleared nine acres of desert scrub around her first Mission Playhouse--built by volunteers in an old Mission Valley barn.

It was 1957. Not a great time for women entrepreneurs, but Pirazzini claims she never gave that a thought.

Eventually the Mission Playhouse moved to Old Town, where for 18 years Pirazzini directed hundreds of attention-grabbing plays. An avid reader who likes to keep up with literature’s ebb and flow, she prides herself on the plays she produced years before their time, like a manuscript version of Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

But when complicated circumstances moved her to a new theater on Twigg Street (now called The Theatre in Old Town), Pirazzini’s theatrical life changed. After mounting seven productions in eight months in the new space, she found that she could not continue--for reasons that she, characteristically, would prefer to leave in the past.

Mission Playhouse’s last production was in 1982, at Balboa Park’s Puppet Theater. Then there was silence from Pirazzini, who took time off to travel and to think.

“Since I had to find a new home, I just wasn’t ready,” she said during a break from cleaning up after the carpenters who had been swarming over the new space. “I needed to step back and look at my life and reassess, and to decide--have I done everything in the theater that I wanted to do?

“Because I had done a lot of shows; I mean, I don’t fool around. It was just a point in my life when I felt that I needed to make sure again, because I have always been sure. Maybe I had said it all--for me, because, you know, 10 people can do the same show and do it a different way, but for me, I had to know.”

During those years, Pirazzini occasionally looked at empty spaces and other theaters. But nothing felt right until one night when she and Robert were walking through Marina Village.

“I was drawn from over there by the boats to this corner and I looked in the window,” she recalled. “I said to my husband, ‘I think I can put a theater in here,’ and he said, ‘You’re crazy.’ I said, well, maybe I’m crazy, but I could do it.”

That night she telephoned an old friend in Los Angeles, William Bruce, who had done a lot of technical work for her in Old Town. He flew down the next morning, “eyeballed” the measurements, drew a little sketch, and Pirazzini was back in business.

The new theater, a tidy, attractive little space with bright red, hard-as-brick seats from Los Angeles’ Shrine Auditorium and virtually no backstage, is being financed by the same $20,000 that Pirazzini took into her short Theater in Old Town venture--and left with, after all the bills were paid. She’s counting on ticket sales to provide the rest.

What is it that she still has to say? Plenty.

She loves actors, she said with the trace of Tennessee that lingers in her speech. But she hates what’s happening to them.

“I call them plastic actors, OK, and that’s an insult to them.” she said. “I mean, that’s what we’re getting now--it just hurts me. It’s because they all want to be in the movies or television and so they take these little courses and they spend all this money for these gorgeous pictures and everything and they just indiscriminately hand them out to you.”

Pirazzini shocked some of the actresses auditioning for “Top Girls” by refusing to take their glossy photos or listen to their prepared scenes. She thinks this is a “dreadful way” to hold an audition, dreamed up by some “bright little monster in Hollywood or New York.”

Instead, she works with actors to draw out what’s inside them.

“We can go to the beauty shop, we can have our hair done, we can have our makeup put on, we can have our nails done, we can go down and buy a dress that is expensive and suits us, and outwardly, we’ll look great,” she said. “But what’s inside of that? That’s more important to me.”

And that’s the real reason Edythe Pirazzini built a new theater.

“Theater is the only medium that I know of where I can express some of the things that I find that I want to share. We’re part of a whole, and I want my part to count--maybe not in a big way, but in enough way that I feel that I contributed something. If I haven’t done that . . . “ Pirazzini stopped, tears filling her eyes. “I’d just like, I hope . . . I can leave something that somebody can find.”

A few minutes later, she was laughing again, admitting with a twinkle, “I’ve always fought for everything I believed in, and I think that I enjoy the fighting more than the winning.”