PLAYWRIGHT PUTS SELF ON HOT SEAT

“That’s not my vision.”

The phrase may be Joel Gross’ only protection right now. The 35-year-old New Yorker is the first playwright in residence for the Old Globe Theatre’s Play Discovery Festival, an experiment in new play cultivation that was inaugurated last week.

Gross’ biographical drama, “Mesmer,” is undergoing two intensive weeks of examination by its director, cast, author and--perhaps most painfully--the public, who were invited in for an unrehearsed reading and given a chance to offer their advice and comment.

“When you’re in a place with 200 people, you really get a sense of what’s working and what’s not working,” Gross said the morning after he gamely endured that first public forum. “Now I’m literally seeing how people react to it. I saw one woman knitting, and one person fell asleep. I felt like I (wanted) to jump on stage a couple of times to tell the audience, ‘This is really an exciting scene you’re seeing now.’ ”

Next week, after nine days of rehearsal by director Robert Berlinger and an Equity cast that Berlinger regards as one of the best he has ever worked with, Gross’ play will be presented again in three semi-staged performances.

Instead of actors seated on stools, reading from scripts resting on music stands, the audience will see some minimal lighting, with movements blocked out and characters more fully drawn by the cast of four.

They may also see changes they might have triggered Tuesday, when the amateur critics descended eagerly on Gross’ play.

Gross said that the part of him that is very close to “Mesmer” didn’t want any criticism at all--the “it’s perfect, leave me alone” syndrome. But most of him is grateful for the feedback on this fifth draft of a play that he started writing more than a year ago. He was also glad that there were quite a few compliments mixed in with the complaints.

“I know from experience that usually it’s easier to criticize,” he explained.

The audience consensus was that the first act is terrific, the second act boring. Scattered patrons called for different endings, more clarity in character motivations, or scenes that would go far askew of Gross’ intentions.

Some simply had historical questions about the play, which delves into the personal life of Dr. Anton Mesmer, the charismatic 18th-Century man whose experiments with “animal magnetism” brought ancient hypnotic techniques back into use and foreshadowed modern psychotherapy.

Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien talked about increasing the “fever” of dramatic tension in Mesmer’s involvement with two women patients (actresses Madeleine Potter and Lisa Pelikan). One man bluntly criticized Bruce Davison, who had first formally “read” the script just the day before, for his acting as Mesmer.

Gross was appalled.

“It’s hard enough when you’ve written something and somebody says, ‘I think your second act stinks,’ but I think that’s easier than when you’re an actor and somebody says, ‘I don’t like your acting,’ ” Gross said later.

“You really have to be careful how you take criticism. This is very, very important for a playwright. There are so many factors in a play . . . you want to keep your original vision.”

The Play Discovery Festival was conceived by O’Brien and Berlinger as an extension of the theater’s popular Monday night Play Discovery readings.

The next play to be read, on Tuesday , is Reuben Gonzalez’ “The Boiler Room,” directed by Craig Noel, with “final” workshop stagings on Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 and 2. “Mesmer” will be presented again Oct. 24-26. The final selection, “The Gentlemen of 5th Avenue” by James Pensi, directed by David McClendon, will be read Oct. 28 and staged Nov. 7-9. All are at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

The 28-year-old Berlinger, head of the Globe’s Play Discovery Program, has an $80,000 budget for this first of what are to be annual festivals. That means he can hire good actors, directors, technical staff members and three playwrights-in-residence, whose plays were chosen from among the thousand or so new scripts he pores through each year.

“We understand the classics in a way that very few theaters do because it’s part of our daily bread and butter,” Berlinger said. “Both Jack (O’Brien) and I became very excited about the possibility of rearing younger writers in the company of Shakespeare, Moliere, Shaw.”

The festival is evidence of the Globe’s rapidly expanding commitment to new plays, he added. More new works are showing up in the theater’s season offerings than ever before.

“One of Jack’s long-term goals is to develop a corps of writers who will write for us,” Berlinger said. Stephen Metcalfe is the first of those writers. His fourth Globe production is scheduled to open just months after the last echoes of “Emily” have faded from the theater’s main stage.

Berlinger admits that the process they will attempt through the Play Discovery Festival is somewhat risky.

“We’re opening ourselves up to an audience before we’ve even begun, but one of the other ideas behind this program is audience development. It’s quite a voyage, from a first reading to the final product. The process of what a writer does is very mysterious--it’s an education for all of us.

“What we want to do is provide the freedom and the support for a writer to write his best,” he said. “I think that we recognize the fact that the writer is at the center of the dramatic event . . . and we (actors, director, designers) are concentric circles around him.”

Gross would agree.

“Everybody thinks that they can write,” the playwright said. “There is a saying in the theater that the first week the playwright knows best, the second week the actors know best, the third week the director knows best . . . but I think that is all based on a play that is not changing. The playwright must be strong about the original impulse. I don’t feel pretentious saying that I have a vision.”

Actors and directors are no threat in the workshop process, he feels, because they, too, are displaying unfinished work, putting their creative egos on the line.

“The fishbowl doesn’t begin again until the public comes back,” he said.