Old Globe’s O’Brien Takes Talent Back to TV--Again

For Jack O’Brien, artistic director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre, one of the greatest pleasures of taking time out from his stage duties to direct public television’s “I Never Sang for My Father” was watching Daniel J. Travanti wimp out.

“He’s an excellent wimp,” O’Brien said enthusiastically of Travanti, who is best known for his role as that antithesis of wimpdom, tough police Capt. Frank Furillo on “Hill Street Blues.” “For my money, he’s a better wimp on television than he was on the stage. The camera truly loves him, and he really knows what he’s doing.”

In “I Never Sang for My Father,” an “American Playhouse” production that airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on Channels 28 and 15, Travanti portrays Gene Garrison, the timid and, yes, slightly wimpy son of a domineering father, finally reconciling their strained relationship after the death of Garrison’s mother.

Travanti played the same unassuming role on stage in December at the Ahmanson, in a production directed by Josephine Abady. Harold Gould and Dorothy McGuire also reprise their roles as the mother and father in this KCET adaptation, filmed at Channel 28’s Hollywood studios and on location in and around Los Angeles.

Just as he thinks Travanti makes a better wimp on camera than on stage, O’Brien believes “I Never Sang for My Father” makes a better screenplay than a stage play. Robert Anderson originally wrote the drama as a feature-film script before adapting it for the stage. It finally made it to the big screen in 1970 with Gene Hackman and Melvyn Douglas, and now, in this production, it has been adapted again.

O’Brien, who has directed numerous TV adaptations of plays--including “All My Sons” and “Painting Churches” for “American Playhouse”--describes “I Never Sang for My Father” as “the least theatrical piece I’ve ever done. For me, it was conceived as a camera piece; it’s not a stage piece at all. That’s why I had so much fun with it.”

O’Brien always has a lot of fun, seeming perpetually tickled by the world around him. Part of the fun is in dividing his time between stage and television projects.

“I’m having a very interesting career,” he said. “I keep looking to see who else is doing it, and I don’t see too many other people who are doing it.

“I have the great joy of running my own theater, which is going great guns, and I’m allowed to direct opera from time to time, and my friends here in television call me every year or so to do a fabulous project. I have a lovely little library of things beginning to be assembled.”

O’Brien, a Tony Award winner for a Broadway production of “Porgy and Bess” in 1986, has been artistic director of the Old Globe since 1981. The Saginaw, Mich., native got his start at the University of Michigan, where he and roommate Bob James, who later became a jazz musician, wrote, directed and choreographed several campus musicals. “I mean, I’m a musical-comedy baby; I grew up with those tap shoes over my shoulder,” O’Brien said.

After receiving his master’s degree in English from Michigan, O’Brien moved to New York and collaborated with James on a musical called “The Selling of the President,” which bombed after five performances (“I mean, if you blinked you missed it, and I blinked,” O’Brien said wryly).

The failure of the musical did not stop O’Brien from pursuing a distinguished theater career, which has included directing for John Houseman at Juilliard, teaching at New York’s Hunter College and directing for regional theater and Broadway. He has had a long-standing relationship with Ellis Rabb’s Assn. of Producing Artists.

O’Brien’s name had been bandied about this spring as a possible candidate to become director of the Ahmanson Theatre, but he emphatically denies any interest in leaving San Diego, where construction was recently completed on his house, Chateau ‘Brien.

“We (he and Ahmanson officials) talked at length, and they were very kind,” he said. “I don’t think the timing was right for me to consider a shift at this point. I am deeply committed to the Old Globe. I am flattered; I’d love to run them both . . . . But I just don’t think that’s practical.”

Though he feels ill-equipped for the imposing task of directing two major theaters at once, O’Brien is not shy when it comes to stating his goals. “Frankly, I’d like to run the American BBC someday,” he said, grinning. “I mean, let’s get it all out there.”

Until such an entity is created and summons him east, however, O’Brien is more content with the West Coast’s burgeoning theater scene than New York’s--particularly the opportunity it offers for cross-pollinization with Hollywood’s TV and film actors. “I believe passionately in that,” he said.

“I think the axis is really shifting. Most of us who have experienced New York realize that the possibility of getting work done on a continuing basis in New York is practically nil. The economics and the pressure, the reception of the press, make it very difficult.

“And the essence of theater is a lot of theater. The only way theater gets good is when it is not self-conscious, when it can afford to take chances. (The West Coast) is right now glutted with wonderful theater. From Seattle down to San Diego, you’ll find some of the hottest work in the country going on here.”

And even though directing the Ahmanson is not in his plans, O’Brien expressed great hope for Los Angeles as a potential theater capital.

“Los Angeles has always had some trouble identifying its theater, and its temperament, I think primarily because the television and film industry is so big (that) it sweeps everything else before it. But the roots of television and film are all theatrical.

“Los Angeles really has to take responsibility for itself theatrically, and I think it’s ready to do that,” he said. “And when it does, I think it will shift the focus from the East Coast to the West Coast, because I think the money and the sensibility and the power are all here.”