STAGE : How to Win a Tony Without Going to Broadway : Defiance Pays Off for Emmes, Benson

Everybody said their idea of establishing a serious theater company in Orange County was lunacy. They’d be lucky to end up doing “Under the Yum Yum Tree.”

Twenty-five years and 234 productions later, David Emmes and Martin Benson recall their defiance of those doubts with obvious pride.

“That’s the old, bad rap on the county,” said Benson, rolling his eyes in a leonine face. “And it still is. But look at the shows we’ve done. For chrissakes, we opened our first theater with ‘Waiting for Godot.’ ”

Emmes, more self-contained, simply smiled. “We knew we could be the big fish in a small pond,” he said.

Make that a big pond. Tonight, the co-founders of South Coast Repertory will accept a special Tony Award in New York for its achievements as a nonprofit regional theater.

But the distance that Emmes and Benson have come from a night in 1963 when they scribbled their first plan for an acting troupe on a coffee shop napkin can be measured by more than the Tony. One need only contemplate SCR’s 23,000 subscribers, its sleek $5-million theater complex, its operating budget of $4.6 million or its $5-million endowment fund.

The company began touring Orange County in a beat-up station wagon during the fall of 1964 with a commedia dell’arte version of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” The text was pirated from the San Francisco Mime Troupe by John Arthur Davis, an early collaborator.

“Jack showed up in the spring of that year,” Emmes recounted, “and what evolved was a leadership of the three of us.”

Their first name for the troupe--Theatre Workshop--was no accident. All three had studied drama at San Francisco State College in the early 1960s with Jules Irving, a co-founder of the San Francisco Actor’s Workshop. But Irving urged them to drop workshop , lest audiences expect a less-than-professional company.

In fact, when the renamed South Coast Repertory made its Orange County tour debut with “Tartuffe” in a Newport Beach meeting hall on Nov. 12, 1964, the fledgling troupe hardly could be called professional. Of 12 players, seven had just left college and five had come from community theater.

Before taking up drama, Benson, 51, who was born in Oakland and reared in Walnut Creek, Calif., raced hot rods at the Half Moon Bay drag strip in San Mateo County.

“Martin and his racing partner called themselves Bill and Victor Venom,” Davis recounted from his Mission Creek houseboat in downtown San Francisco. “Anyone who calls himself that isn’t a big step away from theater.”

Emmes, 49, grew up in Newport Beach. He starred in high school plays and, during SCR’s infancy, taught drama at Long Beach City College.

Davis, who left the troupe after five years, remembered: “Martin and I surfed by day and rehearsed by night. David went to work. He had a family to support.”

South Coast Rep soon learned to capitalize on its weaknesses. Because the troupe couldn’t afford to mount sophisticated productions, Emmes recalled, Davis persuaded it to “stress simplicity and adaptability.”

At the same time, the lack of acting experience was turned to advantage by cultivating “a broad, rustic, highly theatrical style,” Emmes said.

In 1965, when SCR converted a marine hardware store on Balboa peninsula into its first permanent theater, the shoe-box size of the 75-seat house pushed the troupe toward “a subtler, more intimate, naturalistic acting style.”

The programming also gravitated to such realistic offerings as “The Glass Menagerie” and Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.” This dovetailed with “our desperation for literature,” Benson said.

“During the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,” he said, “literature was out. You used media. Slide projectors. You poured water on somebody from a gasoline can and lit a match. It was all freaky. . . . “

“The playwright was banned from the theater,” Emmes interjected. “It was all actor-oriented.”

“That’s when we went to American novelists,” Benson continued. They did Joseph Heller’s “We Bombed in New Haven” in 1969 and Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” the next season.’

By then, SCR had graduated to a 217-seat house on Newport Boulevard in Costa Mesa. There it began to establish a wider reputation for staging contemporary plays.

The 1972-73 season, for example, featured back-to-back West Coast premieres of Mrozek’s “Tango,” Weller’s “Moonchildren,” Durrenmatt’s “Play Strindberg” and Rabe’s “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.”

“We became a playwright-driven theater as opposed to a director-driven theater in which the play is supposed to serve the director’s vision,” Emmes said. “There are successful theaters that do that. We never have.”

SCR’s success depends as much on the remarkably serene professional relationship between Emmes and Benson as anything else. And that comes from their very different personalities.

“They work so well because they’re two halves of a formula,” Davis said. “They’re so totally different from each other, they have nothing to argue about.”

Davis described Benson as “unstructured, easy-going, intuitive” and Emmes as “orderly, precise, very sharp. David is also very private. He’s the guy everybody gets (ticked) off at. Martin’s the guy who hangs around and has a beer and listens to the complaints.”

As different as their personalities are, their sensibilities tend to coincide. “That’s been astounding to me,” Emmes marveled. “We’ve never been in a situation where I wanted to do Greek tragedy, say, and he wanted to do French farce or something so weird, you could never get them together.”

But there was a problem with Brecht’s “Galileo” in 1985. Both had wanted to direct it for years and neither would give way. They solved the problem--”Like true executives,” Emmes joked--with a flip of the coin. Benson won.

Both maintain that “artistic R&D;”--research and development of original plays--is SCR’s wave of the future.

“Everybody talks about the talent drain from the theater,” said Emmes. “We say, ‘Let’s put our money where our mouth is.’ We’re not going to stop the talent drain, but we can encourage young writers to stay in the theater and maybe write that masterpiece.”

In 1982, spurred by a grant to produced a single new play, they produced an entire season of them on their Second Stage. Two years later, they embarked on the Collaboration Laboratory, an ambitious project to support young playwrights.

The SCR commitment to Colab now includes not only a $1-million endowment but also a $300,000 annual budget and a $1.7-million wing that open in 1987 at the Costa Mesa complex.

Currently commissioned to write new works are David Henry Wang, Keith Reddin, Richard Greenberg, Howard Korder, Eric Overmeyer, Thomas Babe and half a dozen others.

“I don’t think we have ever been more in touch with our artistic imperatives,” Emmes said. “Except for that first year, when we used to talk about everything long into the night. . . . “