Miraculous Recovery After ‘Brain Death’

When the San Diego Repertory Theatre takes its indefinitely extended musical, “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know,” home to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse next month, it will be a triumphant return.

The triumph may come as a surprise to those who watched the theater come close to knuckling under to the budget demands of the past two years, since the Rep made its move from a converted funeral chapel on 6th Avenue to the brand-new, state-of-the-art two-stage Lyceum Theatre in Horton Plaza.

Last June, the Rep had $750,000 to raise in the following 12 months, half of it by the end of the summer. There was no shortage of whispers that it might succumb to the financial hard times that were behind the scenes of the play “Hard Times,” one of the Rep’s many critically acclaimed productions of last year.

But co-founders and still partners Sam Woodhouse and Douglas Jacobs have been full of surprises ever since they opened their first season of plays, at San Diego City College in 1976. The cost for that season was $25,000. In 1985, when they did their last major show on 6th Avenue, “Rap Master Ronnie,” their budget was $800,000. As of 1987, it was $2.1 million.

Through it all, they continued to pay rent on the 6th Avenue space, which they in turn rented out to other theater groups since they could not afford to mount a season of their own there.

“We were really in the trenches,” recalled Woodhouse, the producing director of the Rep. “It was a survival battle. There was a point in time when we realized we needed to raise $150,000 in 60 days in order to continue operating. Then we bought ourselves another few months and had to raise another $100,000.”

Now, thanks to generous gifts from Joan Kroc and the Parker Foundation, a benefit from Whoopi Goldberg and the continuing success of “Six Women,” the Rep has not only been able to clear its budget deficit, but is able to return to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse as a third venue, thereby quadrupling its original 200-plus seats on 6th Avenue to a total of more than 900, including the Lyceum Space and the Lyceum Stage.

That makes the Rep the only theater in town besides the Old Globe to have three venues, and the only one to have a space designated for long-running shows such as “Six Women.” Just recently, when the Old Globe struck gold with “Suds,” the highest-grossing show in its 50-year history, it could extend it only a few weeks before continuing with the scheduled subscription series.

“Suds,” which had a workshop premiere in the Lyceum Space before “Six Women,” is now readying itself for its off-Broadway opening.

The Rep’s ability to maintain “Six Women” from its October, 1987, opening to its closing night at the Lyceum Space tonight, has been a major factor in the Rep’s recovery, Woodhouse said.

He calculated that by the end of the show’s run at the Lyceum, it will have grossed about $20,000 a week for a grand total of about $700,000--more than seven times the normal gross of a Rep production. It will have reached about 50,000 people, a fact that has had an “energizing effect” on the Rep’s subscription campaign, he said.

“It’s like being visited by the tooth theater fairy every week,” Woodhouse said. “Except you have to work very hard for the visit. These things don’t happen just like miracles.”

Certainly, the extraordinary success of the show was something neither the Rep nor the authors of the show counted on.

According to Rosanna E. Coppedge and Valerie Fagan, two of the show’s eight authors and members of the current cast, the seeds for “Six Women” were planted when several actresses performing in “Side by Side by Sondheim” got bored and started reading tabloids on the road.

“Mark Houston (who became the composer) had the idea of having a musical around the tabloids,” Coppedge said. “We took things in life that made us angry: media and the kind of power that commercials have. How we’re supposed to look. How we’re supposed to dress. Self-help books. Barbie and Ken. Soap operas. Rambo. Why you never see large, full-figured prom queens. . . . It’s like a sort of exorcism every night.”

The result was a very funny series of musical vignettes performed by six actresses playing a variety of roles--from women at their 20-year high school reunion and a mother bewildered by her Rambo-loving children, to alien-worshiping divas and a quarrelsome severed head.

The show had distinctly shorter runs in its earlier Kansas City, Chicago and Denver incarnations. The Rep show, however, was the first to grant it a full-blown production, complete with set, in a respectable-size Equity theater space.

The Rep’s commitment to the show is underscored by designer Rob Murphy’s elaborate portrayal of the inside of an exploded head plastered with tabloid headlines, giant hanging eyes, ears, curlers, and a tongue and Stonehenge-like teeth on the floor where the women perform.

They show the wear and tear of an eight-month run on a set that was built to last six weeks. The teeth are chipped. The tongue is parched. But no wear yet shows on the six talented and energetic women in the cast who say they’re looking forward to continuing with the show indefinitely after it returns to 6th Avenue on June 7.

Only two women have left during the run--Seraiah Carol, who will be returning to the Rep to perform in “The Colored Museum,” and Melinda Gilb, who co-created and performed in “Suds.” Carol and Gilb were replaced by Coppedge and Fagan in February.

Coppedge, Fagan and the other original authors are still working on the show with an eye to readying it for off-Broadway. When another production is mounted in Kalamazoo, Mich., this summer, the authors plan to try out a new finale to replace the current one about Nancy Reagan, which will become dated after the November election.

If the number works in Kalamazoo, audiences can expect to see it at the Sixth Avenue Playhouse as early as the fall.

No other changes are expected soon. Even though the Sixth Avenue has a high proscenium stage, contrasted with the Lyceum Space’s black box, freshening it up will be the major alteration in the set, according to Murphy.

Instead, Woodhouse promises changes of another kind.

“We’re going to renovate the theater. We’re going to do a mini-overhaul of the lighting system, a good amount of painting, serious cleanup, and put in two more rows in front so we’ll have 200 seats.”

Driving down 6th Avenue, one can see the painters already at work.

“It was an incredible experience when I went back to the Sixth Avenue Playhouse last week,” Woodhouse said. “It was like going home, going back to the house you were born in. The air is just filled with ghosts. Happy ghosts. Fun ghosts. We produced there non-stop from 1977 to 1986 as a theater, doing 6 to 10 shows a year.”

Now the “Six Women With Brain Death” are on their way to becoming the new ghosts of productions past.

That is, if those “Expiring Minds” ever do expire.