TRANSCONTINENTAL SHARING OF PLAYS

The La Jolla Playhouse and the American National Theatre of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington announced Thursday that they will trade productions this summer. The project involves two of the country’s most innovative directors.

Estimated to cost $350,000 and funded by AT&T;, “The AT&T; Performing Arts Festival at the Kennedy Center” includes the world premiere production of the musical “Shout Up a Morning,” about the legendary “steel-driving man,” John Henry. The play will transfer to the Kennedy Center from the playhouse in exchange for a modern adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy, “Ajax.”

“The La Jolla Playhouse was chosen because it is one of our nation’s finest performing arts companies, and it deserves national recognition,” William Clossey, AT&T;’s vice president for Southern California operations, said in a prepared statement at a morning press conference in the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts on the UC San Diego campus. The firm will not fund operating or production costs of the two shows. Instead, it will reimburse the Kennedy Center for any deficit incurred.

Clossey called the festival part of a marketing strategy that positions AT&T; “with a world-class institution, in this case two world-class institutions.”

“In a few short years, the La Jolla Playhouse has established itself as a standard-bearer for the new generation, “ said Roger Stevens, chairman of the Kennedy Center, who was also here for the press conference.

“Ajax,” which opens June 7 at the Kennedy Center, will be staged by the American National Theatre’s iconoclastic artistic director, Peter Sellars. Adapted by Robert Auletta, “Ajax” is set in front of the Pentagon after a U.S. victory in a Latin American war. It will open Aug. 3 in La Jolla.

“Shout Up a Morning,” with music by the late Julian (Cannonball) Adderley and his brother Nathaniel, will be directed by the playhouse’s artistic director, Des McAnuff. It will be staged in La Jolla from June 1 to June 28, then will open July 15 in Washington.

AT&T; will support the two productions with its corporate muscle in a major advertising campaign, including one commercial filmed last week at the Mandell Weiss Center. Sellars called such support from a corporation unique. “What non-commercial theater in America can afford a television commercial?” he asked.

“Ajax” will mark a return to the playhouse for Sellars, who opened it as a guest director in 1983 with his avant-garde staging of “The Visions of Simone Machard.”

“We look forward to having him turn the playhouse on its ear again with his production of ‘Ajax,’ ” McAnuff said.

The AT&T; Performing Arts Festival at the Kennedy Center began when AT&T; funded four plays that were presented by two Chicago theaters at the center last summer. They were “Streamers” and “Coyote Ugly” by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and “In the Belly of the Beast” and “Kabuki Medea” by the Wisdom Bridge Theatre.

Sellars said his task as artistic director of the American National Theatre is to provide an institution capable of putting “a new generation” of theater artists in one room. He called the La Jolla Playhouse “the next logical step, of course, for a theatrical hot spot” to be featured by the American National Theatre after the two Chicago theaters.

“It’s a real shock to me personally,” to see that the playhouse is still operating after three years, Sellars said facetiously. He credited the playhouse’s success to the “excitement” generated by McAnuff, which he dubbed “off-the-cuff lightning rod-ism.”

For his part, McAnuff said he is “especially pleased to be working with my friend Peter again. There’s little doubt that he is one of the finest minds in contemporary American arts.”

Besides “Shout Up a Morning” and “Ajax,” the playhouse will present the satire “The Three Cuckolds,” an adaptation of an Italian comedy; “Gillette,” a comedy by William Hauptman, who wrote the book for “Big River,” and the American premiere of Odon von Horvath’s “Figaro Gets a Divorce,” a play banned in Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.