Part Two of Donenberg’s Shakespeare Fest; Four Plays in One Week by Czech Director

You’ve got to hand it to Ben Donenberg. He doesn’t take no for an answer. Not easily.

Through a barrage of skirmishes with Actors Equity, Donenberg created the first Shakespeare Festival in Pershing Square last summer--Part One of a five-year plan. Admission was canned goods for the homeless.

On Saturday at 3 p.m., he’ll unveil Part Two: his second annual Shakespeare Festival at Citicorp Plaza (which also runs Sunday, Aug. 29 and Aug. 30). The production is “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and admission has been expanded this year to “nonperishable essentials for the homeless.”

What’s new and different is that the acting will not be free.

According to the terms of a letter of agreement with the actors’ union, Donenberg is paying performers $100 a week, plus health and welfare benefits, unemployment and workmen’s compensation. As he put it Tuesday: “I’m doing all the things that you do, I find out, when you’re a real professional theater.”

You might even accuse him of overpaying the company. The Equity rep who came around to check things out told Donenberg he’d have to pay the actors for two extra days because he started rehearsals on a Saturday. Donenberg who had, in fact, paid them for the entire week, declined to take a refund for the five extra days.

“I made the deal with the actors, not the union,” he said. “But I’ll be in a better position with Equity the next time we have a round of discussions.” He is not above a little nepotism: His dog Puck is in the show (though he might argue that the Shakespearean pedigree earns Puck the right to be there).

Not to be upstaged by a quadruped with connections, Mary Crosby and Ian Abercrombie head the cast. Robert Berlinger, an associate director with the San Diego Old Globe, is staging. Sets are by Fred Duer, a former resident designer with the Globe (who also designed the set for “Bent” at the Coast Playhouse). Nathan Wang, who won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award for the complex sound in “Bouncers” is doing the same for “Two Gents” as well as contributing original music.

How did Donenberg do it? “We raised about $28,000,” he said.

Not easy. From Citicorp came the largest single grant of $10,000 (“They’re our sponsor; they’re giving us free parking and providing 80 chairs, so we’re asking people to bring their own because we can actually accommodate as many as 500 . . . “). The city’s Cultural Affairs Department contributed another $5,000. Houk Development (a subsidiary of which operates the Pasadena Playhouse), Grand Central Market, the Jewelry Mart and Drexel Burhnam Lambert each donated $500. Another $10,000 was raised from private sources and the balance came from Donenberg.

Rehearsal space at the Embassy Hotel was donated by its new owner: USC.

“I don’t want to do Waiver any more. I’m not going to do shows if I can’t pay actors,” said the budding 30-year-old downtown impresario sounding just the faintest bit like the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Joseph Papp.

“ Do I?,” said Donenberg, surprised. “I emulate Mr. Papp. If I can achieve a third of what he’s done, I’ll be a happy guy. I was in Papp’s ‘Henry IV, Part I’ directed by Des McAnuff in 1981. Citicorp funded that. It’s how I got them to help me. I reminded them of that.”

CHECKING OUT THE CZECHS: “Basically, it was purely economic,” said director Pavel Cerny who is opening four plays within one week at the Callboard Theatre.

Economic? “The theater was available,” is one answer, but Cerny, who’s been directing abroad for five years, had more in mind.

He’s combining the West Coast premiere of a play by Richard Nelson, “Between East and West” (about a famous Czech director who has to emigrate to the United States with his actress wife and the new pressures it puts them under), with two plays by Czech playwright Ladislav Smocek (“A Lovely Place for a Picnic” and “Labyrinth”), and the return to Los Angeles of Czech actor/mime Antonin Hodek reprising his 1975 family show “For Whom the Sunflowers Bloom.” The whole package starts Sept. 26.

“I tried to get ‘Hunting Cockroaches’ (a play on a similar subject that is part of the Taper’s coming season) and when I couldn’t, Nelson’s agent said to me, ‘Do you know Richard’s play?’ I’ve always admired his work. This piece was workshopped at the Yale Rep this year and is scheduled to open in London in the fall.”

Cerny has adapted and translated both Smocek plays. “Smocek was dramaturge of Prague’s Drama Club, the town’s main theater, during the late ‘60s,” he said. “I knew him then. What interested me about ‘Picnic,’ which I’m cutting from a full-length play to a long one-act, was that it was about American soldiers in Southeast Asia on a purely human level. No politics. It may not be the greatest piece ever written, but it’s a very powerful drama in human terms. Doing this play in Prague then was, in itself, a political statement.

“ ‘Labyrinth’ is Kafkaesque. It ran for about three years before being banned in Prague. It involves an amusement park that people are allowed to enter but nobody’s allowed to leave. It’s frightening and funny--I hope funny.

“I thought doing an American play about Czechs and a Czech play about Americans and another play with a Czech actor performing an American character was a way of completing the circle. I call it the ‘Between East and West Project.’

It marks an anniversary.

“This month is 15 years since I’ve been back to Prague,” added Cerny, who was denied a visa to go back. “They don’t have to give a reason,” he said. “I have never been a political person. It’s about as Kafkaesque as it can get.”

MORE EAST AND WEST: On Tuesday, East West Players is launching a fund-raising campaign.

Los Angeles’ 22-year-old Asian-American theater company wants to move into the Union Church in Little Tokyo and convert it into two theaters: a 299-seat Equity house and a 99-seat Waiver theater. But there are hurdles.

While the city has agreed to lease East West the building for $1 a year, there’s much renovation to be done to the 1923 structure (a local historical landmark).

To get things going, the Community Redevelopment Agency has given East West a $500,000 one-to-one matching grant and the National Endowment for the Arts has given them a $75,000 three-to-one matching grant.

“Everyone is waiting to see our ability to raise funds,” said Mako, East West’s artistic director. “The endowment gives us three years, but the city’s anxious for us to move faster. They would like to see results in about 60 days--some tangible figure. We’ll be looking for money from American corporations, Asian-American companies, Japanese corporations.”

Required for starters is about $500,000, but Mako would like to raise $800,000 to $1 million. “There is so much to be done to bring the building up to code, enlarge the sanctuary area, put in elevators,” he said. “The list is endless . . . Ideally, we should raise $2 million.”

THE RUMOR MILL: That “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” is in the news again. Look for it to come to the vacant Hollywood Playhouse ( not the Westwood) in late September with S. Epatha Merkerson as blues singer Billie Holiday. Andre Ernotte would direct . . .

PIECES AND BITS: The San Diego Old Globe has received a $280,000 multipurpose grant from the Ford Foundation to fund, in part, a two-year arts program for Teatro Meta, its bicultural Latino arm . . . And KCET will chronicle the 20-year history of the Negro Ensemble Company on “American Masters,” Sept. 14 at 9 p.m.