NON-MUSICAL PLAYS : CENTER MAY OPEN STAGE TO DRAMA

The Orange County Performing Arts Center’s executive director, pleased with reactions to the main theater’s acoustics, says he now wants to try straight drama in the 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall--very likely starting this spring with a recent Broadway production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” with Jean Stapleton. A “Macbeth,” with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson, planned for the Broadway stage, has also been tentatively discussed for Costa Mesa, said Thomas R. Kendrick, executive director.

The Center was planned for four performance disciplines: musical theater, opera, ballet and orchestral music. Before the September, 1986, opening, the main theater’s acoustics were an unknown, and Kendrick worried that spoken words might be lost in the cavernous hall. But he says the hall’s live response to various performances by the New York City Opera recently have helped change his mind.

“I am more open now than I was several months ago to experimenting with presenting drama on an occasional basis,” Kendrick said. “I think this is a large theater for straight theater . . . but there was very low miking for (the New York City Opera’s) ‘Candide’ and no amplification of any sort on ‘Madama Butterfly’ and ‘Carmen’ . . . and it worked very well. So we’re looking for an opportunity to try straight theater.”

Kendrick said there is no way to know yet whether the Center could handle straight plays without amplification.

He and several New York producers said scheduling problems have so far gummed up negotiations to put Plummer and Stapleton on the Center’s stage. But the “Arsenic and Old Lace” production is “a very serious likelihood” he said, either before or after the show’s run in Beverly Hills in late spring. Elliot Martin, one of the show’s producers, said in a recent interview that dates for the show’s run at the Wilshire Theatre have not been nailed down. He said the opening would be either May 25 or June 1.

But whether or not these productions work out, Kendrick said, the very prospect of them indicates a change in thinking among Center managers. One catalyst for it is the continuing dearth of successful musicals--which Kendrick calls the Center’s most salable fare--emerging these days from New York stage. Kendrick said he does not intend to compete with the South Coast Repertory theater across the street as a theatrical house, but to sometimes augment SCR with generally large-scale productions.

“I certainly don’t think the kind of Broadway tour package with TV stars and all that would be competition for us,” said David Emmes, producing artistic director at SCR. “It’s just not the type of thing that we do. But I would think that whatever they bring in there would have to be highly commercial to fill the house. They would be dealing with situations where the star names are more important than the play, and that’s an inversion of what we do.”

In the production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” being considered for Costa Mesa, Jean Stapleton plays Abby, one of two old sisters whose idea of charity is to poison aging and lonely men and bury them in the basement. Marion Ross, a regular as Mrs. Marion Cunningham on TV’s “Happy Days,” plays Martha, the other sister. Others in the cast are Gary Sandy from “WKRP in Cincinnati” who also played in touring production of the show “Barnum”; Larry Storch, who was Cpl. Randolph Agarn in “F Troop,” and stage and television actor Jonathan Frid, who played Barnabas Collins in “Dark Shadows.”

“It’s an ensemble show, but any straight play will play well in a stage that is not too deep. The distance from the stage to last seat in the orchestra is the yardstick as to whether it will play well, if we’re talking about being able to see facial actions and so forth.”

Acoustically, Martin said, it wouldn’t be possible to do straight theater in a 3,000-seat theater like the Center without using amplification. “The audiences today are conditioned to hearing amplification. They are used to hearing in a theater through a speaker.”