GROUP WAITS IN THE WINGS FOR THEATER

When the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s leaders last week announced their plan to start building a second theater in 1989, the people who run South Coast Repertory were elated.

The county’s best-known theater company has long been envisioned as the main user of a proposed 1,000-seat theater, and SCR’s success with its own two theaters has left the company badly in need of growing room.

“I was very very pleased that they are moving on it,” David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director, said this week. “We have discussed (with Center President Thomas R. Kendrick) the possibility for us to be the major tenant. We need it. We’re playing right now to somewhere around 94 or 95% capacity.”

Kendrick said this week that the proposed second theater, which he has insisted must be built to complete the Center, would feature dance, music and opera groups. But he said it also would be available to SCR for theatrical productions.

“What has been discussed between SCR and the Center is that they would make use of the theater roughly half the time,” Kendrick said, adding, “SCR was involved in the early stages of the concept design, last fall.”

Ground breaking for the Center’s second theater isn’t set for another two years, but it couldn’t come too soon for SCR.

Next season, Emmes said, an estimated 25,000 subscribers will attend about 11 plays at SCR. The company has stretched its capacity to the limit to accommodate theater-goers by extending the runs of the shows in its two theaters, one with 507 seats, the other with 161. SCR now operates 45 weeks of the year, including rehearsals, leaving seven weeks in summer for maintenance.

SCR currently is completing an expansion, but that is for office and rehearsal space, not audiences.

“There’s just no place to grow,” Emmes lamented. “Thousands of people are expected to move into south county in the coming years and we want to be able to accommodate them.”

As recently as a May 13 meeting of the Center’s board of directors, the second theater has been described as a facility with about 1,000 seats. But Emmes and others involved in the planning process say it may end up closer to 800 seats. Plans call for it to be built due east of the existing 3,000-seat Segerstrom Hall and to be entered from a pedestrian walkway now connecting the Center and its parking structure.

Emmes, who took part in some early planning for the theater a year ago, said Center and SCR officials tentatively have projected the cost at between $10 million and $15 million. Center leaders have declined to discuss the structure in depth, saying that details still are too speculative.

SCR’s plans to be part of such a theater appeared to get a boost when the board of directors at the May 13 meeting elected real estate builder and philanthropist Kathryn Thompson to head the Center’s committee for the new theater. Thompson, of Newport Beach, is not only a member of the Center’s board, but also a trustee and longtime SCR supporter.

Thompson was ill this week, and unavailable for comment. But Center President Kendrick said Thompson is regarded as someone with a special sensitivity to the needs that SCR and the Center have for the second theater.

“If you are discussing a theater in which SCR would be the prime user, then you would obviously want somebody involved who is with SCR,” Kendrick said. “She is highly valued by both organizations.”

Kendrick spoke cautiously about the second theater, saying that many questions remain unanswered, including defining the exact relationship between SCR and the Center. “I would not assume that the word ‘tenant’ is the right one for SCR’s involvement,” he said. “Whether they are a tenant or co-operators of the hall is one of many things that have to be worked out.”

A more exact plan for SCR’s role was expected to emerge from a fund-raising campaign for the second theater, he said. If it is a campaign jointly run by SCR and the Center, SCR could become an equal partner in managing the proposed theater. A Center-dominated campaign, however, would indicate that SCR would more likely be a rent-paying tenant, as are Opera Pacific and other local groups that currently appear at Segerstrom Hall.

A theater design consultant already has prepared preliminary drawings for the second theater, said Kendrick, who declined to make them public, saying that the concept reflected in the drawings may change.

Emmes said his discussions with Center officials a year ago suggested that the second theater would be a more modest project than Segerstrom Hall, whose innovative “asymmetrical” design boosted the hall’s price to an unplanned $72.8 million.

While its design remains undecided, its size alone suggests that the second theater is likely to be a more modest facility, Emmes said.

“Just by the fact that this will be 1,000 seats or under, it really falls into a conventional, tried-and-true realm of construction techniques--and as a result will be more cost-effective,” he said. “I think it will be a more traditional space.”

Emmes said SCR would use a new theater and its current 507-seat facility for its main productions and relegate the 161-seat space to new works and readings.

“Our main stage does not have as much off-stage space as we would like to do multi-set shows,” he said. “ ‘Lear,’ would work better on a much wider canvas, as would many of the classics.”

The Center’s perspective on the second theater is shaped by the desire to offer productions with their creative roots in Orange County. So far, the Center has mainly served as a stop for imported artists and productions.

“Any major regional arts center has to have a theater element,” Kendrick said. “Right now, we are offering musical theater, ballet, opera and symphony. But if we are to talk about the Center as a major complex, it must have a theater element.

“And for SCR to grow, it must have a larger hall. It would be mutually advantageous.”