UCSD Unveils Plan to Add a Theater, Upgrade Drama Training

Unveiling a model for a striking $4.8 million theater complex by noted Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock, UC San Diego officials announced plans Wednesday to develop a dramatic-arts training program to rival the nation’s top-rated program at Yale.

The planned 400-seat, thrust stage-style of theater and associated rehearsal, teaching and office space, will join an existing 492-seat state-of-the-art theater and another “flexible-seating” studio theater that is also planned for the complex.

The three buildings, which will be shared by the professional La Jolla Playhouse will also allow the playhouse to expand to a year-round season.

The new theater was made possible in part by a $1.2-million gift by arts patron Mandell Weiss. Weiss previously had donated $1.14 million to UCSD to help build the Mandell Weiss Performing Arts Center, where the La Jolla Playhouse now stages its summer season. Weiss’s gift augments the $3.6 million in UCSD financing for the complex.

The new theater will be called the Weiss Forum and the name of the 492-seat center will be changed to the Mandell Weiss Theatre, with the entire complex becoming the Mandell Weiss Performing Arts Center.

Weiss, a 97-year-old Romanian emigrant, whose business was in jewelry sales, said he made the second donation so that the drama department and the playhouse can expand their existing programs.

Besides the Weiss Theatre, the only other stage now available to the drama department and the playhouse is the 260-seat Warren Theatre, a converted World War II boiler room.

“The Warren Theatre is very, very limited, especially for designers,” said drama department chairman Adele Shank. The new theater would allow for “more adventurous experimentation.”

Predock’s work was described last week in Time magazine as “tough and sensual, fabulously imagined, altogether persuasive.” He was chosen by a joint UCSD-playhouse committee that sought architects who could design a striking building, said Stanley Chodorow, UCSD dean of arts and humanities

Chodorow acknowledged that the “push is on in general to get really good designers” for the school’s busy construction program. Last year, UCSD was publicly criticized by a group of architects for its hodgepodge of architecture.

The model that Predock unveiled at a morning news conference revealed that the front of the complex will be a huge, 27-foot-high, 260- to 280-foot-long mirrored wall. He said the choice of a mirror, designed to reflect on a clearing in a dense grove of eucalyptus, is to blur the point where “reality stops and fantasy, the dream, begins.”

Predock has worked mainly in the Southwest, but received an Honor Award last year from the American Institute of Architects. He is noted for his sensitivity to the urban and natural environment in which his structures are placed.

Among his other public buildings are the American Heritage Center and Art Museum at the University of Wyoming, theaters at UCLA and Arizona State University and a classroom-laboratory-administration complex for California State Polytechnic University at Pomona.

The playhouse also announced that it is launching a 3-year, $5 million capital campaign to build the third theater complex, which will provide permanent offices. A $500,000 grant from the James S. Copley Foundation is the campaign’s cornerstone award.

Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff called the studio theater the “key to the Playhouse’s evolution into a financially stable institution. The playhouse season is necessarily limited, and at this point we cannot offer enough seats at enough performances to meet our costs.”

McAnuff said that, because the university’s school year prevents expanding the season “horizontally,” the addition of theaters offers the chance to expand the season “vertically,” with eight or nine performances during the summer.

“Once we have access to the third theater, we will have the capacity to truly become the national theater festival promised in our artistic mandate . . . . Upon completion, the Mandell Weiss Center . . . will be one of the few venues I know of in this country that will be able to offer artists the unparalleled opportunity to perform on a full proscenium stage, on a thrust stage or in the flexible space of the Studio Theatre--all within one complex.”