Tony Award Crowns South Coast Rep’s Winning Season

South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa has won this year’s regional Tony Award, it was was announced Thursday at a meeting of the American Theatre Critics Assn.

The award, which includes a $15,000 prize, is made on the strength of a theater’s body of work and continuing contribution to the cultural life of a community. It will be officially presented at the Tony Awards ceremony June 5 in New York.

“We’re dancing on the ceiling,” David Emmes, co-founder and producing artistic director of South Coast Repertory, said in Costa Mesa. “As we go into our 25th season, this is a wonderful affirmation of what we’ve been doing to serve the art of the theater and our Orange County audience.”

As for the cash prize, “we haven’t begun to think about what we’ll do with it, but undoubtedly we’ll plow it right back into programs that will advance the cause of new plays and new playwrights.”

The regional Tony crowns a prize-laden season for SCR. The company was this year’s big winner at the Los Angeles Drama Critics Awards on March 28. Its production of George Bernard Shaw’s “Misalliance” took six awards, and “Three Postcards” by Craig Lucas won a seventh.

The company earned its first Critics Circle Award in 1970 for a series of productions that included Arthur Kopit’s “Indians.”

SCR, which began in a converted five-and-dime store in Newport Beach in 1964, has a multimillion-dollar complex that includes the 507-seat Mainstage theater and the 161-seat Second Stage theater. Its current annual budget is $4.6 million. It has about 25,000 subscribers, which makes it the fourth largest subscription theater in the country.

The company has staged scores of controversial plays by such contemporary writers as Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Lanford Wilson and Wallace Shawn, as well as the accepted classics of such playwrights as Moliere, Strindberg and Sheridan.

“The (movie and television) industry doesn’t take South Coast into mind,” said guest artist Joe Spano, who gained fame as Lt. Henry Goldblume in “Hill Street Blues” and currently is starring on the Mainstage in Sheridan’s 18th-Century comedy of manners, “School for Scandal.”

“Producers don’t come here to see your work and you don’t come here to be seen,” Spano said. “So you’re free to serve the play and the director and the audience. I think the best theater being done in Southern California is at South Coast.”

Apart from the prestige of national recognition, the regional Tony award can translate into greater box office receipts. “We got a boost in subscriptions,” said Robert Whitney, house manager of the Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I., which won a regional Tony in 1981.

In addition to Emmes, founding members of the South Coast troupe who are still working in the company include actors Richard Doyle, Hal Landon Jr., Don Took, Art Koustik and Ron Boussom, as well as artistic director Martin Benson and casting director Martha McFarland.

The American Theatre Critics Assn., a fraternal society of critics from all over the country, is entrusted with recommending an annual winner for this regional award. The recommendation is then ratified by the League of American Theatres and Producers and the American Theatre Wing, the organizations that present the Tonys, which date back to 1947.

Previous California winners of the regional Tony are the Mark Taper Forum, San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, and--last year--the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Times theater reviewer Don Shirley contributed to this article.