Pasadena Playhouse : Heat Is on Theater for Hit Season

It’s a rugged pillbox of a building, with foot-thick stucco walls, a tiled roof, a shady stone courtyard, a squat stone fountain and an arcade in the Spanish style. But walk through the front doors on South El Molino Avenue, and you’re transported into a less distinct space, vast and shadowy, with stone buttresses curling into baroque flourishes near the ceiling and a proscenium stage stretching airily toward the back.

Solidity seems ready to give way to illusion there in the dark interior of the 70-year-old Pasadena Playhouse, which is about to embark upon its second season since undergoing a $4-million refurbishment.

Though the season’s first curtain will not be raised for three weeks, the place already bustles with activity.

The heat is on Susan Dietz and Stephen Rothman, the theater’s two new producing co-directors, who were brought in three months ago after a lackluster first season left both critics and creditors disappointed.

Backstage ‘Catacombs’

The two are conducting a tour through the playhouse, nosing through the backstage “catacombs,” pulling doors open, edging past workmen and, finally, sauntering across their broad stage to look out at the 700-seat house. Dietz and Rothman, each a stage-struck producer/director with a decade or so of experience in the theater, are apparently still a little awed by the playhouse, where such actors as William Holden, Gene Hackman, Agnes de Mille, Lee J. Cobb and dozens more got their starts.

“Look at that,” says Dietz, standing upstage and surveying the tangle of theatrical equipment stretching high above her. “It goes up forever.”

Backstage, 20 feet away from her, stands Jerry Colker, co-author of a play called “Three Guys Naked From the Waist Down,” which arrives at the playhouse on March 17. The comic/playwright, something of a rising star, sidles over to Dietz from backstage and looks up.

“This’ll be perfect for the catapult number,” he says.

Dietz frowns. “Catapult?” she says.

“Yeah, we have this hydraulic device that’ll cost maybe twenty thou . . . “ Colker begins.

Dietz laughs. Even without elaborate stunts, the playhouse’s operating budget of $1.8 million is already stretched thin, with a four-play “main stage” season scheduled to begin on April 24 with the opening of John Guare’s “The House of Blue Leaves,” as well as a series of six “great performances,” each for a one-week run, beginning

March 3. The latter include one-person performances by such established performers as Kevin McCarthy (playing Harry S Truman), Ray Stricklyn (playing Tennessee Williams), Jack Guilford and Peggy Lee (playing themselves).

Money is tight, and Dietz and Rothman are facing what they acknowledge to be a “critical” season. “It’s not that we feel crisis-bound,” said Rothman, a smiling man with a furry, neatly trimmed beard. “But we don’t have 20 years to build an audience the way some regional theaters do. We’re not of the opinion that artists are best served by not having eaten for three weeks.”

By most accounts, last season got the playhouse off to a shaky start. After all the hoopla preceding the reopening last year after a 20-year hiatus, the 1986 season was something of a critical and financial disappointment. The critics were less than lukewarm to such productions as George Bernard Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” and Stephen Parker’s “Spokesong,” and the organization was left with a $160,000 deficit.

Developer David Houk, chairman of the board and the playhouse’s chief financial backer, denies that last season was in any way a failure. “We got the theater opened and started from scratch with almost 8,500 subscriptions,” he said. “In addition, we sold 5,000 single tickets for each of the three plays we produced. For a first-time theater, I don’t know anybody else who’s done that well.” Subscriptions entitled buyers to a seat at each of the theater’s three productions last year.

Not Designed to Make Money

Besides, the playhouse was not designed to make money, insisted Houk, whose company owns the theater but, under an arrangement with the city, leases it back to the nonprofit Pasadena Playhouse State Theatre of California Inc. “All theaters lose money,” he said. “Who cares?”

Houk’s company, Historical Restoration Associates, also owns the rest of the theater complex, including a soon-to-be-leased restaurant, the 99-seat Balcony Theater, a four-story office building and the now defunct Pasadena Playhouse Actors’ School, which Dietz and Rothman hope to restore to its former glory.

The pair’s predecessor, Jessica Myerson, who either quit or was fired last August, depending on whom you talk to, has blamed last season’s disappointments on the company’s failure to do “long-range planning” before she got there and on a shortage of funds.

Others have blamed insufficient rehearsal time. Dietz said the amount of time devoted to rehearsals under Myerson’s leadership and the small number of previews (only three per production, as opposed to the 11 that Dietz and Rothman plan) was more akin to hastily organized summer stock productions than most legitimate theater productions.

Even the two new co-directors, who are as delicate as doctors talking about the work of a brother surgeon in discussing their predecessor, did not attend last year’s playhouse productions but acknowledge that the opening season was lackluster. “Maybe the biggest problem was that it didn’t get my attention,” said Dietz, a short, restless woman, the worrier of the pair.

Field of 50 Applicants

Dietz and Rothman, who were selected from a field of 50 applicants, are determined that, at the least, the playhouse’s 1987 season will get people’s attention.

For one thing, the extroverted Rothman is overseeing the theater’s marketing effort. He has been throwing in some ideas of his own, like offering a “co-producership” to anybody who contributes $10,000. The honorary co-producer would get not only four house seats for every performance of a play, but would also be able to attend rehearsals, watching the production slowly come together from the insider’s perspective, says Rothman, who likes the sound of “marketing maven” to describe him.

Mostly, though, the emphasis will be on selling tickets to hot shows, the co-directors said.

“We have to get people to leave their VCRs and their children at home and to walk away from their four-hour dinners at La Couronne (an expensive Pasadena restaurant),” said Dietz. “The only way to do that is to offer them something they can’t get on the big screen or on the small screen.”

The big enticement this year is a series of four comedies, two of them established audience draws, another a show that played to critical praise last year on an East Coast tour and the fourth a new musical. Besides the Guare play, a production that has been playing on Broadway for a year, they are John Murray and Allen Boretz’ durable chestnut “Room Service,” William Gibson’s “Handy Dandy,” and, the new musical, “Mail,” by Colker and Michael Rupert.

‘Blue Leaves’ Main Event

“House of Blue Leaves,” which was actually produced Off Broadway in 1971 before being “rediscovered” last year for the Broadway stage, is the season’s main event. The play, written by the author of “Marco Polo Sings a Solo” and “Rich and Famous,” as well as of the screenplay for “Atlantic City,” is about a New York zookeeper and his wacky family. The New York Times called the play an “enchantingly zany and original farce.”

The musical, which Dietz and Rothman hope will eventually land on Broadway, is about a character who comes home after a long absence to find a stack of mail, ranging from a come-on from the Publisher’s Clearing House to letters from family and friends. According to the production notes, the mail “magically takes on a life of its own.”

The co-producers promise “star casting” for each of the productions. “We’re going to get people of the caliber of James Whitmore,” said Dietz. Whitmore, who is chairman of the Playhouse’s Actors’ Advisory Board, will appear as a cynical judge in the Gibson play, along with Audra Lindley as a peacenik nun.

That’s where the playhouse has a leg up over the competition, said Dietz. “This building is so filled with tradition, it’s kind of an honor to be here,” she said.

Founded in 1916 by Gilmor Brown, an East Coast actor with wanderlust, the playhouse became a gold mine for the movie producers after the “talkies” came in the late 1920s, turning out countless stars from both its stage and its prestigious school. It was also notable as the house where works by Eugene O’Neill, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, William Saroyan and others premiered. But by the 1960s, the theater, which has been on El Molino Avenue since 1925, had fallen on hard times, and IRS agents padlocked its doors in 1966.

City Buys Facility

The city of Pasadena bought it in 1975, and in 1979, the city completed negotiations with Houk for its reopening.

The co-directors want to use the theater’s prestige and historical tradition to forge an identity for the playhouse as an “actors’ theater”--a place where established actors can experiment with new work in front of a live audience. “There are theaters that focus on writer and theaters that focus on actors,” said Dietz. “We’re starting with the actor.”

Whitmore, the craggy-faced character actor who came to Hollywood from New York in 1949, said the playhouse meets a “palpable” need for many film actors. “There was always that hunger for a live audience,” he said. “For good or for ill, the theater offers an extremely human experience.”

Whitmore is joined on the Advisory Board, which helps to decide which plays will be produced, by Richard Dreyfuss, Eli Wallach, Estelle Parsons, Karl Malden, Lynn Redgrave, Martin Sheen and Sally Struthers, among others.

Dietz and Rothman acknowledge that there’s a certain lack of adventure in their 1987 offerings. “We’re committed to doing new plays,” said Rothman. “But we purposely went for a new musical rather than a drama this year. The first time out of the barrel, we needed something with entertainment value. A new Albee play, say, could be a painful experience. We’re just starting to build an audience base.”

Regional Audience

That Pasadena Playhouse audience is a regional audience, he added. It comes first from the communities of the San Gabriel Valley, then from the Greater Los Angeles area, said Rothman, who served as executive director of the playhouse from 1979 to 1984, when the organization was putting on productions in the Balcony Theater.

“I remember in those days people used to talk about not feeling like driving to the Music Center,” he said. “They’d rather pull into something in their own backyard. It was always a little deeper than people not wanting to take a 15-minute trip. I think they wanted to support theater in their own community.”

Rothman contends that the Los Angeles area, despite its tradition as a movie-making center, is the place to be for aspiring theater artists.

“The audience here is what the Broadway audience was 15 years ago,” he said. “People want to support their own theater here. They want to get together and talk about what Lily Tomlin’s doing or John Malkovich at the Taper. The New York audience is pretty much a tourist audience now.”

The good-natured, bantering partnership between Dietz and Rothman is still “a feeling out process,” said Dietz, who has directed both the Extraordinary Theatre Company and the Theatre Exchange, Los Angeles companies, and continues to co-manage Public Stage/L.A. The two, both voluble, outspoken people with strong ideas about the theater, work together like a pair of furniture movers. “We still have to go through everything together,” she said.

Defining Roles

They’re just beginning to define separate roles for themselves, she added. “Eventually, there’ll be certain areas that are mine and certain areas that are Steve’s,” she said.

The best part now is alleviating each other’s anxieties, said Rothman, who has been associate executive director at both Burt Reynold’s Florida-based The Theatre Inc. and the Paramount Arts Centre in Aurora, Ill. “It makes life a lot easier at night, when you’re lying there, questioning whether you really want to go this way,” he said. “It’s good to have someone you can call up at those moments.”

Dietz, who is married to a magazine editor, and Rothman, who is engaged to an actress, never tire of poking into the theater’s dark crannies. They’re prowling through the backstage area again.

A close examination of the bowels of a theater can show how far a theater company has to come to produce its riveting illusions. Dietz looks into a cramped, drab-looking dressing room. “This is the star dressing room,” she says. “How do I know? Because it has a sink in it.”

Creating powerful images with shifting scenery and costumed actors is a singular passion for her, Dietz suggests, coming to rest again in her upstairs office.

“The theater is the most pressure you can put yourself under,” she said. “The budgets aren’t big. The rehearsal process is limited. But when the end result hits, there’s this sense of achieving a higher reality. Nothing can compare with that rush you can get on opening night.”