Trio of Dynamic Duos Bring Their Babies to Stage : These Director-Playwright Teams Love Their Premiere Relationships

First comes love, then comes marriage. Then comes a play with a Tony nomination.

That is often the secret dream of directors and playwrights who decide to collaborate on birthing world premieres. The process, like marriage, brings all the hopes and fears attendant with keeping a relationship going and starting a family.

Most people will admit to seeking only a dynamic that is mutually rewarding. To dare to think of the Tony is tantamount to imagining your child will grow up to be president, or a major league baseball star.

Here in San Diego, three such premieres are debuting in June.

Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre, and playwright A. R. (Pete) Gurney Jr. are working on Gurney’s autobiographically based “The Cocktail Hour,” running through July 10. They describe their interaction as “just dating.”

Lee Blessing, who wrote last season’s smash at the La Jolla Playhouse, the Tony-nominated “A Walk in the Woods,” compares his relationship with Des McAnuff, artistic director of the playhouse, as similar to that of an “old married couple.” They are now readying “Two Rooms,” the story of an American hostage in Beirut, for a June 26 opening.

As for Olive Blakistone, artistic director of the 6-year-old North Coast Repertory Theatre, she is experiencing her first world premiere thanks to a long-distance correspondence with playwright Jack Neary, who wrote her theater’s hit of last season, the West Coast premiere of “First Night.”

Neary subsequently decided to make his first trip to the West Coast to meet Blakistone and work with her on his new romantic comedy, “Road Company,” playing through July 24.

Each of these parties agrees that the relationship between director and playwright must strike a delicate balance.

The playwright has a vision he transmits to paper. The director, in turn, must

transmit that paper dream to walking, talking stage reality. It takes respect, regard and love. Like Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, one half of the equation cannot exist without the other.

Yet, even if playwright and director are “right” together, that doesn’t mean the public will agree. If theirs is a mismatch, and visions collide, the one to suffer--inevitably--is the play.

Are these San Diego theatrical partners the right ones? Do they have the chemistry to make any of these artistic dates result in long-running, winning professional relationships such as that of Shakespeare and Burbage? Or of director Lloyd Richards and playwright August Wilson, who won Tonys for “Fences” last season? Or of director Gene Saks and hit playwright Neil Simon, who will work together on “Rumors” at the Old Globe this season?

Time and the tensions inherent in working on a world premiere, not unlike the challenge of having children, are two ways these couples will find out.

Lee Blessing likens his first meeting with Des McAnuff to “a blind date.” Neither had directly experienced the other’s work when Blessing was looking for a director for “A Walk in the Woods,” his story of a growing, but grudging, friendship between a pair of Soviet and American arms negotiators.

Then Blessing’s agent sent the play to McAnuff, and McAnuff was hooked.

“I immediately fell in love with it,” McAnuff said. “I heard about it and thought, ‘This is an awfully good idea, but (the script) has to be awfully good to pull this off.’ I read it from cover to cover and decided I had to do this play whatever it took, that it would be my first priority. It took some shuffling around, some weeks of nerve-wracking schedule moving, but I was determined to do it.”

“A Walk in The Woods” kept McAnuff and Blessing together through three productions and three casts at the Yale Repertory Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse and the current Broadway show, which was nominated for a Tony for best play but failed to win.

McAnuff was so excited about their working relationship last summer that he commissioned Blessing’s next play, sight unseen, for the playhouse.

“It was very simple,” McAnuff recalled. “I said, ‘What are you going to write next, and whatever it is I want to commission it.’ When you’re on a creative roll together, these relationships are to be cherished.”

That play turned out to be “Two Rooms,” a world premiere about an American hostage in Beirut, which will run through July 31.

During rehearsal breaks, Blessing and McAnuff are already discussing putting another Blessing play on the schedule next season, “Eleemosynary,” the story of three generations of women, from 1910 to 1985, and the changes in women’s status. The play debuted at a now-defunct theater in Washington, D.C. under the direction of Blessing’s wife, Jeanne Blake, who is now working as adviser on “Two Rooms.”

For Blessing, the initial appeal of working with McAnuff was the reputation of the man behind the nationally known playhouse who had directed the Tony-award winning “Big River.” Before they agreed to work together on “A Walk in the Woods,” they had a meeting in New Haven, Conn., home of the Yale Repertory Theatre. There they began to click.

“It’s always hard to see what it is that works,” Blessing said. “In an odd way, it is like dating. You look for someone whose energy seems somehow in tune with what you wrote. If directors can’t get energetic and enjoy what you are doing, then they shouldn’t do the work. I think Des has that energy. I liked the ideas he had about the play. They seemed consonant with my own.”

McAnuff nodded.

“The fact is there aren’t a lot of writers out there writing ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ ” he said. “There are very few writers writing anything meaningful. There are very few writers writing things intelligently and with heart. And that is the basis of collaboration. You find someone whose work you admire and respect. I think, if there is that respect, then you’ve got a very good shot at developing a friendship and a good working relationship.

“I don’t think there are hundreds of playwrights out there doing important work,” McAnuff said. “I also think you want to take care of these relationships when they come along and behave properly and not be a jerk.”

One way in which they take care of the relationship is by working together on every aspect of the play, including sound, design and set.

“You spend enough of your time working with dead playwrights whom you can’t ask about how this or that looks downstage,” said McAnuff. “Lee’s alive--why not use him?”

“Yes,” Blessing said with a half-smile. “Des has cured me of my lifelong ambition to work with a dead director.”

Gurney said he knew he and O’Brien were going to hit it off when he saw O’Brien direct a scene in “The Cocktail Hour” in which the father is talking to his son and the mother enters the room. Without the benefit of any notes in the script, O’Brien told the actor playing the son to stand up as a gesture of respect.

“That’s not just a stage direction, that conveys a whole world of moral values and attitudes,” Gurney said.

It was a world of manners that Gurney and O’Brien found they had in common.

Gurney’s background was upper-middle-class Buffalo, N.Y.; O’Brien’s was upper-middle-class Michigan. Both, however, know the same manners and traditions of daily formal dining--ties only--and pre-dinner cocktail hours. And they share the touchstones of such upbringing: the polished silver, the ironed linen, the mahogany dining table. “Never pine,” Gurney emphasized with a smile. “Mahogany all the way.”

At first, Gurney wasn’t aware the two had those things in common, O’Brien said.

“Pete didn’t know how thoroughly I come from this world,” he said. “He didn’t know how much of a product of it I am. After all, I was elected president of my fraternity because I knew what all the silverware was for--what fork to pick up at which time.”

What Gurney did pick up on was a similar vision of the show itself.

“You signal each other back and forth,” Gurney said. “You begin to see you’re on the same wavelength. You say, ‘How do you see the set?’ And, if Jack said, ‘I see the whole thing in dark purple,’ then I would have said, ‘Well . . . ‘ “

Not only didn’t O’Brien see the show in dark purple, but it is in the context of their shared experiences that Gurney and O’Brien are still discovering things about “The Cocktail Hour.”

Gurney drew upon family tradition to write his play “The Dining Room,” which was produced at the Old Globe in 1983. However, he didn’t get the inspiration to do it until his own children were grown and gone and he and his wife found themselves folding laundry on their dining room table.

That setting is in marked contrast to the before-dinner cocktail hour in which Gurney has put his current play.

“You can use liquor as an excuse to say things you can’t say during dinner,” he said. “You let your hair down. The tone of the conversation is different.”

“When there is food put in front of you, you don’t trash the conversation, because you can’t trash the meal,” O’Brien said, turning to Gurney. “Your mother prepared it. You respect her by respecting the conversation.”

“To honor the food, you have to have a positive conversation,” said Gurney. “In the cocktail hour, you can sit right down next to a person. There’s a kind of intimacy that liquor gives you an excuse to have.”

“Cocktails are Dad’s domain and dinner is Mother’s,” said O’Brien. “In the cocktail hour, the father controls the conversation--even the rhythm of it.”

Gurney sat back in his chair and nodded.

“I never quite thought of it the way Jack expresses it, but it is true. This is a father-son play, and the father directs the terms of the experience.”

“And the son finally takes over and stops it,” O’Brien said.

During the moment of quiet that followed, the two men exchanged a glance and smiled. You could almost hear them thinking about what had been said.

Jack Neary was surprised when he got a letter from Olive Blakistone expressing interest in his play “First Night.”

Neary, an actor and artistic director at Mt. Holyoke Summer Theatre in Massachusetts, had only started writing plays three years before. He hadn’t sent a play out to Blakistone, or anyone else for that matter. And he had never heard of Solana Beach, much less its one dramatic house, the North Coast Repertory Theatre.

“Up until three weeks ago, Amherst was a long three hours away,” Neary said, shaking his head. “Now I’m 3,000 miles away. It’s my first time out of the Eastern time zone.”

What got Neary on a train (he turned down the theater’s offer of plane tickets because he did not want to fly), was a friend of Blakistone’s in Amherst who told her about “First Night,” the story of a 20-year reunion between two former sweethearts, one a nun, the other a video store manager.

The show, which Blakistone produced, turned out to be an extended hit for the North Coast and aided the theater’s expensive transition to a larger space in January. It also stimulated a correspondence between Blakistone and Neary that led to the theater’s current production of “Road Company.”

Blakistone sent Neary the reviews. At first he was taken aback that his Irish-Catholic lead character had been recast as an Italian to accommodate actor Vinny Ferrelli. Then he looked at how glowing the notices were and decided, “This woman should be listened to.”

For Neary’s first three days on the set of “Road Company,” he limited his role to giving Blakistone notes. As a director himself, he was careful not to intrude on her territory.

Then Blakistone, sensing his discomfort with one of the scenes, encouraged him to talk to the actors directly, even to the point of directing a scene where a bat comes swooping down, frightening the company.

“Why not?” Blakistone said. “We’re seeking the same end.”

For Neary, that is part of what makes the process at the North Coast so unusual and so pleasant.

“I wouldn’t recommend that other playwrights talk directly to the actors,” he said. “But for some reason it works here. The actors even feel that they can say things to me. It’s been a nice collaborative process.”

Blakistone has no complaints.

“I was so delighted to find Jack,” she said. “It’s like having our own resident Neil Simon. You can’t find any really good comedies unless they’re on Broadway, and then you can’t get them.”

They are already discussing the possibility of doing the West Coast premiere of a new Neary comedy, “To Forgive, Divine,” about the friendship between a young woman and a priest. That could appear at the North Coast as early as next season.

“Every playwright needs a theater to have the confidence that the work is good,” Neary said. “The respect for both sides that there needs to be is here.

“This theater is young and growing rapidly,” he said. “I like to think it falls into the same category I fit into.

“I write about people who are in their mid-30s who are learning that they don’t have to settle for what they have romantically,” said Neary, a 37-year-old bachelor. “Someday I’ll be able to do that myself, and then I won’t have to write plays about that anymore.”