SCR’S NEW WING BRINGS END TO WRITERS’ CRAMP

Even after he won fame in the theater world, Keith Reddin remained a closet playwright at South Coast Repertory, polishing his scripts in the small SCR office he shared with so many people that his dialogue almost withered amid the distractions.

“I’ve had three plays here, and every time I did a lot of rewriting. . . . The problem in the past is that it was so cramped,” said Reddin, one of many who came to the Costa Mesa facility Monday to celebrate the dedication of SCR’s new $1.7-million, 11,000-square-foot wing, designed to allow administrators and artists room to think.

“I’d be in an office with five people trying to write, with the director, the dramaturge, a designer. It was very hard,” the 30-year-old playwright said Monday.

“I have a new play that I’ve written and that may be produced here in the fall. . . . This time it will be different.”

The Artists Center, as it is called, will house 11 offices for visiting writers and SCR staff members on its three floors. It also will have a much-needed, an expanded costume shop, a board room and a 1,700-square-foot rehearsal hall, which will equal the size of SCR’s main stage.

“Before, my desk was a typing table, and I had to share a phone,” said SCR casting director Martha McFarland, who is also an actress. “Can you imagine a casting director without her own phone!”

During Monday morning’s dedication ceremony, arts patrons, SCR officials and a few actors swirled about in the new wing, temporarily creating the kind of claustrophobic condition that the building was built to avoid. But even with the crowd, the interior had a light, airy quality, with an abundance of natural light streaming in through a curving, 45-foot skylight on its northern face.

Allowing natural light to dominate was one of the several goals that architect Stewart Woodard set for himself. He also wanted the new structure to form an aesthetic whole with the broad, sculptural arcs and curves of the Orange County Performing Arts Center and its adjacent office building across the street from SCR.

“We used a circular vocabulary for the design, so the building would fit in,” Woodard said.

He added that SCR, which was formerly a white building, has been repainted a light brown with a purple border to harmonize with the Center buildings’ colors. Monday’s brief ceremony, which began at 11 a.m., featured several speeches that hailed the addition as ally to the creativity of artists and playwrights such as Reddin.

“In 1984, we looked around at what we had done,” SCR board president John D. O’Donnell said. “We decided we should do more, and we decided to capitalize on what we did best, which was new play development. . . . Out of that came the Artists Center.”