Major Expansion Set for La Jolla Playhouse

UC San Diego officials announced plans Wednesday for a $4.8-million theater complex that could put the university in competition with Yale University among the nation’s top-rated dramatic arts training programs.

The planned 400-seat theater and adjacent 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, designed by Albuquerque architect Antoine Predock, could allow the playhouse to extend its program to a year-round season. (There are, however, no immediate plans to expand beyond the current May to October schedule.)

The complex is being partially funded by a $1.2-million gift from arts patron Mandell Weiss. Weiss previously had donated $1.14 million to UCSD to help construct the Mandell Weiss Performing Arts Center, where the La Jolla Playhouse currently stages its summer season.

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 jewelry sales, said he made the second donation so that the drama department and the playhouse could expand their existing programs.

The front of the new theater complex will be a 27-foot-high mirror, 260 to 280 feet long, Predock said at a morning news conference at UCSD. The choice of a mirrored wall that will reflect on a clearing in a dense grove of eucalyptus trees will blur the point where “reality stops and fantasy, the dream, begins,” Predock said.

Predock’s work was described last week in Time magazine as “tough and sensual, fabulously imagined, altogether persuasive.” Among his other public buildings are the American Heritage Center and Art Museum at the University of Wyoming and theaters at UCLA and Arizona State University.

The playhouse also announced that it is launching a three-year, $5-million capital campaign to build the third theater in the complex, which will also provide permanent office space.