‘Golden Girls’ Warms Up a Cool Director

Nobody can accuse David Chambers of false enthusiasm.

“Theater bores me,” the 43-year-old director said. “I rarely go. It’s more fun to make than watch.”

Such candor, delivered with a cool smile, would be less striking if he were not in the midst of previews for the American premiere of Louise Page’s “Golden Girls,” which opens tonight at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa.

The play has nothing to do with the TV sitcom of the same name. It is about a British women’s track team. Chambers means, moreover, that most theater bores him.

“I don’t do living-room plays,” he said recently. “Realism leaves me cold.”

His words seem haughtier on paper than they sound. What warms Chambers up is Page’s sense of “theater as theater,” which resonates with Brechtian echoes, like the work of other British playwrights of her generation from Caryl Churchill to Trevor Griffiths.

Chambers prizes their self-conscious theatricality, their heightened characterization, their manipulation of language and, not least, their generally leftist point of view.

“These people challenge the status quo in and out of the theater,” he said. “They have a boldness about theme, a social mission.”

“Golden Girls,” which opened in 1984 at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon, deals with Olympic competition, corruption through corporate sponsorship and the use of steroid drugs.

“Louise announces all of that in neon,” Chambers said. But the play also deals with an underlying issue facing second-generation feminism: “It asks what do we gain in the name of liberation if all we’re doing is creating emancipated women in male models. Are we just creating more soldiers for the capitalist march?”

The questions are hardly new. Yet they are pertinent and, he maintained, “nobody in the theater except Page and Churchill addresses them head on.”

Born in St. Louis and educated at the Yale School of Drama, Chambers has had a wide-ranging directorial career. After graduation in 1971, he knocked around from the Manhattan Theatre Club, which he helped found, to Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival.

By the mid-’70s he was mounting plays at Washington’s Arena Stage, where he first directed the work of the new British playwrights--”The National Health” by Peter Nichols, “Comedians” by Griffiths--though he made his name with David Rabe’s “Streamers,” an American play set at the start of the Vietnam War era.

The next season, in 1978, he was asked to take over Arena Stage as producing director while its founder, Zelda Fichandler, went on a two-year sabbatical.

“I had always wanted to run a great big regional theater,” Chambers recalled, “so there I was at age 33 with a life ambition fulfilled. But it had an odd repercussion.

“When Zelda came back, she offered me the chance to co-produce. But I didn’t think it would work. It was her theater, after all. So I left. And for the next three or four years I was lost.”

Chambers came full circle in 1984, going back to his home town to become artistic director of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. It was not a good idea. “We made two mistakes,” he said with a laugh. “One, they offered me the job. Two, I took it. Nobody was happy. I was doing the kind of play they just hated.” He lasted two years.

Nowadays Chambers lives in New York on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and commutes to Yale, where he’s joined the drama school faculty (“my sinecure”). Aside from teaching, he stages professional and student productions at Yale Repertory--most recently “Sarcophagus” by Vladimir Gubaryev, about the Chernobyl disaster, and “Neapolitan Ghosts” by Eduardo DiFilippo.

He also does at least one Shakespeare a year there.

“Shakespeare wildly excites me, although I actually have problems with the reactionary politics,” Chambers said. “Marxist critiques of Shakespeare say we maintain the status quo by ignoring the politics. I go in with troubled conscience and do him anyway.”

Invited by SCR to direct Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” Chambers turned down the chance because “the play doesn’t interest me.” He suggested “Golden Girls” instead. The swiftness of SCR’s response delighted him.

Equally pleasing, he added, were the auditions. The casting of five actresses in the play’s physically and psychologically demanding roles would be far more difficult in New York, he contended.

“The actors are out here,” said Chambers. “It’s that simple. In fact, I think there has been an enormous power shift to the West Coast.”

Still, he won’t be moving to California any time soon. “I don’t want to pay the price,” Chambers said. “I don’t want to assist on some sitcom for two years.”