STAGE : How to Win a Tony Without Going to Broadway : South Coast Rep: Play Comes First

Tonight’s Tony Award doesn’t make South Coast Repertory an important American theater. It has been one for a dozen years.

But the award does remind us of SCR’s importance. Co-directors David Emmes and Martin Benson have always been a little diffident about hype. It’s as if somebody long ago advised them to promise less than they delivered.

The upshot is that some of us still think of SCR as an upgraded storefront theater, rather than as a really important house like, say, the Ahmanson. I mean, how many stars have played there?

It’s true that SCR has never cast a show around a film or TV face. Nor has it ever acted as a tryout house for a Broadway show. But these don’t detract from SCR’s credibility. They add to it. They say that this is one resident theater that lives up to code.

Stars do work at SCR, if they can act. Joe Spano wasn’t hired for “School for Scandal” because the audience would recognize him from “Hill Street Blues” but because he could play 18th-Century comedy. At SCR the play comes first, and it remains a very sensible procedure.

If SCR hasn’t sent shows to New York, it has seen them go there and has taken a lesson from their fate. Last season there was “Three Postcards,” a charming little musical by Craig Lucas and Craig Carnelia. They loved it in Costa Mesa, but it lasted only 22 performances at Playwrights’ Horizons.

Yet when the “Burns Mantle Best Plays of the Year” volume came out from Dodd, Mead & Co. the other day, there was “Three Postcards.” So, how do you figure?

Emmes and Benson realize that you don’t figure. The test of a good script is whether it works for your audience, not what happens to it later in the big city. All resident theaters pretend to believe this. SCR pretends more successfully than most.

It probably helps to be located 50 miles down the coast from Los Angeles, just out of the Hollywood slipstream. L.A. theater people have a hard time knowing what community they’re supposed to serve, but SCR has the kind of line-of-sight on its audience that’s possible in a city like Seattle or Minneapolis. Emmes and Benson know that if they see something in a script, their subscribers--being educated professionals like themselves--will at least understand why they’re doing it.

That gives them a certain confidence about choosing their seasons. SCR isn’t one of those supine theaters that go around quizzing their subscribers about what they want to see next. It’s for Emmes and Benson to say what they want to do next. Again, the horse precedes the cart.

SCR has never been a radical theater. It has a certain conscience about the need to challenge the community, but the challenge is generally accompanied by a literate and, if possible, witty text.

There’s an affinity with contemporary English playwrights such as Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill. There’s an interest in upscale social ritual, as in the plays of Craig Lucas: Trendy restaurants (“Three Postcards”), Sunday night parties (“Blue Window”).

When it comes to the classics, there a special love for Irish writing--last season’s “Misalliance,” a mellow 1983 “Playboy of the Western World.”

When it comes to original scripts--and no American theater does more of them--there’s a like appreciation of the word, sometimes (as in Thomas Strelich’s current “Dog Logic”) to the detriment of the dramatic line. If this is a fault, it beats forcing a play to toe that line. One rarely hears a playwright complain that SCR developed his play to death.

SCR hardly ever produces an absolute lemon. The writing will be coherent, the acting capable and the design apt. (Cliff Faulkner’s setting for “Blue Window” comes to mind--faultless both as stage sculpture and as a playing space.)

But SCR shows do have a tendency to be bland. It has never come up with a really rousing production of Shakespeare. Its British imports can become exercises in getting the accent right--and still getting it wrong. A little hairiness, a touch of the uncouth, would be welcome in the middle of all that balance.

But SCR can surprise you. There was plenty uncouth in 1973 about Ron Boussom’s performance in “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel”--a much tougher performance than Al Pacino’s on Broadway. An ’85 revival of “The Show Off” was far less affectionate than it had figured to be. This season’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” probably cost SCR some subscribers too. It will rock the boat, in moderation.

It has also been something of an actors’ theater. SCR has never quite managed to live up to the “repertory” part of its title, but it does maintain a core company of actors--people such as Boussom, Hal Landon Jr., Art Koustik, Don Took and Anni Long.

The SCR audience greets these actors as old friends, which is not to say that they have become the same old tired faces. I had to pinch myself when a cocky young tennis player in Keith Reddin’s “Highest Standard of Living” turned out to be Ron Boussom. May he never run out of noses.

Halfway through the same show it was also clear that SCR’s regulars do come close to being a rep company, sharing the ball with the easy camaraderie of a championship basketball team--still having fun after all these years.

Perhaps theater still is fun in Costa Mesa. Emmes and Benson are said to run a very tight ship. Schedules and budgets are met, people get to go home and have a real life as well as a theater life.

Maybe that’s suburban; maybe it’s sane. As a theater operation, South Coast Repertory’s rhythms have nothing to do with smasheroo hits and Tony awards. But it will be nice to have one for the lobby.