A New Era Begins for La Jolla Playhouse; East West Players Sets Summer Workshop

Who would have thought six years ago, that the iconoclastic La Jolla Playhouse would have survived and prospered in staid, unruffled La Jolla?

Not only has it done that, but with the announcement Wednesday that a new gift of $1.2 million from Mandell Weiss is going to help build the Weiss Forum (see article on Page 1), the playhouse seems to be securing its future. The new state-of-the-art thrust stage theater will complement the existing 492-seat proscenium house that Weiss helped build on the UC San Diego campus in 1981, and which has been the home of the La Jolla Playhouse since 1983. The new forum is also phase two of a still more ambitious project that will eventually include a third theater to complete the Mandell Weiss Center.

For now, the addition of the Weiss Forum will mean an immediate expansion of theatrical activity for the playhouse and the university--independently and together.

“We need it badly,” said artistic director Des McAnuff, “not just the theater but the rehearsal spaces. The Warren Theatre (which McAnuff uses as an alternate on-campus space) has 250 seats. This will have 400. I actually quite like the Warren. It’s warm, very intimate. We’re trying to retain those features in the new theater.”

Few would have wagered that this playhouse--given as it is to an eclectic theater of conscience and standards measured as much by classical innovation as by stylistic excess, a taste for the esoteric and a frequently taunting modernism--would conquer the arch conservatism of affluent La Jolla enough to secure such community support.

It appears to have done precisely that, however. Not only has McAnuff got his forum (the university has committed $3.6 million to the project), but he’s already looking beyond it. His unabashed emphasis is on phase three: The start of a $5-million capital campaign for the construction of the third theater--a flexible 400-seat, 30,000-square-foot “black box.”

“The Copleys (James S. Copley Foundation) have donated $500,000 towards the start of that campaign,” he said. “That third theater is critical. Once we have it, our programming will expand in a major way. It’ll enable us to invite artists to come experiment with us. Behind-the-scenes facilities are extremely important.”

But don’t look to a year-round operation for the playhouse for a while. Even with three theaters, McAnuff still plans to keep the playhouse operating only from May to October. He places more importance on “density” of programming than on extending the season.

“The university needs the space some of the time,” he said, “and I think it’s healthier to have a concentration for part of the year and let the theater artist go off and do whatever theater artists do away from here. The hope is to go to six productions a year when we have the forum. And when we get the black box, eight or even nine.

“I’d like to have it by 1992. (The forum is expected to be ready in 1990.) It will allow us to fulfill our artistic mission, do plays like the (Wolfgang) Hildesheimer ‘Mary Stuart’ which I did at the Public (New York’s Public Theatre), or develop a show from the ground up. It will be a theater you enter, rather than a theater where you sit back and watch. I want this to be a diversified place. That’s the American theater--a diversified theater.

“If we did only one kind of work, the Weiss Forum is all we’d need. But we’re developing a closer relationship with the theater department here,” said McAnuff touching on another major endeavor. “We plan to be keyed in to the university training program more and more.

“Students will appear in (this season’s) ‘Once in Lifetime.’ Many were in (last year’s) ‘Matchmaker.’ Assistant directors have come from those ranks. Putting on progressive theater and training students go hand in hand. We’ll always have separate managements, but we can work shoulder to shoulder. It also gives us an added and healthy responsibility--to have to articulate to students what it is we do.

“We did a week of ‘Silent Edward’ (for young audiences) at Christmas. But now we won’t be working between the cracks. (The forum) will also give us the flexibility to run something that’s hugely successful, like ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ for a couple of months.

Will it also inflate the budget?

“The budget will grow somewhat,” he said, “but the theaters are designed to earn a substantial income. We’ll have more seats to sell, and we’ll be earning a slightly higher percentage (of our budget) than we are now. We’ll be more secure, but,” he added as if to reassure himself as much as the reporter, “we’ll never be fat.”

So it’s business as usual. But McAnuff, a goad and a renegade in prim La Jolla, has planted his feet more firmly than ever in its ground. By aligning his theater with the university, he’s participating in the growing movement toward professional involvement in the training of young artists.

He’s attracted such major talents as Stephen Sondheim, James Lapine, Bill Irwin, Mark Lamos and Robert Woodruff to work in La Jolla. He’s sent one musical (“Big River”) scurrying off to Broadway and a Tony award. These latest developments only confirm the promise, not always so assured, of more high-potency iconoclasm to come.

PIECES AND BITS: East West Players will offer its seventh annual Summer Workshop in all aspects of theatrical arts, July 25-Sept. 4. Applicants must be 16 or older and deadline is June 30. For information write to East West Players Workshop, 4424 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, 90029. . . .

The Center Theatre Group-Ahmanson and the Music Center Unified Fund will be honoring Neil Simon and Robert Fryer on Sept. 9 at the Century Plaza Hotel. The dinner-dance will be held in recognition of both men’s achievements in the theater. It will be a fund-raiser for the Ahmanson and the Unified Fund. For more information, call the Music Center Special Events office: (213) 972-7567.

Reza Abdoh’s “The Peep Show,” which takes place entirely in a motel, will be peeped at in a different location. The original motel location is being demolished, so “The Peep Show” will now be seen at the Courtesy Inn, 2011 N. Highland Ave., with parking in the motel lot. For more information, call Jennifer Loeb at (213) 627-6500, Ext. 243.