THEATER AND FILM : SCR Granted $64,000 in Program to Spark New Plays

South Coast Repertory is the big winner in what has been termed “a nationwide experiment” to help finance artistically ambitious productions of new plays.

The Costa Mesa theater company, one of two Southern California organizations selected by the Fund for New American Plays, has received $64,000 to produce Ellen McLaughlin’s “Infinity’s House.” The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles was awarded $56,000 toward a staging of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Dutch Landscape.” The plays are scheduled for their world premieres in early 1989.

Both grants--the largest of eight totaling $336,000--come from the joint project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and the American Express Co.

“This is the only program I know of that marries plays with producing organizations,” Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Taper, said by telephone. “You have to have more than a script to get one of these grants. You have to have a passion for doing the script.”

A third California troupe, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, has received $17,000 toward a production of Lynne Kaufman’s “Speaking in Tongues.”

SCR artistic director Martin Benson and Davidson are scheduled to attend a luncheon today in New York, where the grants will be officially announced.

Kennedy Center Chairman Roger Stevens, who heads the fund, is co-host of the luncheon with Andrew Heiskell, chairman of the New York Public Library, who heads the President’s Committee, and James D. Robinson III, chairman of American Express, which has donated more than $300,000. The luncheon will be at the Library’s main branch in Manhattan.

“We’re making these grants because the theater badly needs new material and new playwrights,” Stevens said in a telephone interview from Washington. “Everyone admits there’s a shortage. I’m talking about theater in the whole country, not just the commercial world of Broadway.

“These regional companies may not have enough money for rehearsals or hiring a director of choice,” he added. “They may want to spend time afterward analyzing what went right or what went wrong. We’re giving money for specific things like that.”

The other grant recipients are:

-- Playwrights Horizons Theatre in New York ($54,000) for “The Heidi Chronicles” by Wendy Wasserstein.

-- The New York Theatre Workshop ($50,000) for “The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador” by Charles L. Mee Jr.

-- The Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia ($40,000) for “Incommunicado” by Tom Dulack

-- The Philadelphia Drama Guild ($30,000) for “Rocky and Diego” by Roger Kornish.

-- The Hip Pocket Theater in Ft. Worth, Tex., ($25,000) for “Widows” by Ariel Dorfman.

“A lot of playwrights have greatly reduced the size and scope of their projects because they don’t think there’s money to produce them,” said SCR’s Benson. “This is true of everything but musicals, which seem to grow bigger by the year. In fact, we couldn’t do Ellen’s play without this help.”

“Infinity’s Choice” has a cast of 36 characters and needs an extended rehearsal period, he said. The scenic design also makes it expensive. The play takes place in the desert, leaping back and forth in time between construction of the railroads and testing of the atom bomb. An SCR Mainstage production is scheduled in April as part of the theater’s first California Play Festival.

“Dutch Landscape,” though it has a small cast, requires “developmental work” and extensive rehearsals, Davidson said. It is about a liberal American family living in South Africa and the difficulties it faces there. A Taper production is scheduled in January.

Grant recipients were chosen from about 200 applicants, fund spokeswoman Marian Decker said. “This is a nationwide experiment,” she added. “It’s only a year old, but the hope is it will continue indefinitely.”

Last October, seven other regional theaters received $235,000. Of the plays they produced, only one did not have a successful premiere, Decker said. Three--Michael Weller’s “The Spoils of War,” Allan Havis’ “Morocco” and Dennis McIntyre’s “Established Price”--have since been optioned by commercial producers.

“The whole project is Roger’s baby,” Davidson said. “He thought it up. He talked it up. He went out and raised the money. Over the years Roger has taken a lot of chances with artists. This is another of his amazing gambles.”

The panel that chose this round of grants included historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., producers Robert Whitehead and Roger Berlind, scenic designer Ben Edwards and Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien.

BACKSTAGE NOTES: One little-publicized aspect of the Fund for New American Plays is that this year, for the first time, theaters receiving grants have been asked to make sure the playwright gets $10,000.

“I don’t believe in commissions,” Stevens said, “but we may do some of those, too, before we’re through.

“Comparatively unknown people get big sums of money from movies and television,” he continued. “You can’t blame a person who has a family to support for accepting an offer of $50,000 to do a TV show, which he knows he will get. A playwright has no way of knowing whether his play will last a week.”

Although the SCR season isn’t over, it looks like Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The School for Scandal” will be the biggest box office hit of the year.

In addition to subscriptions sales, “Scandal” grossed $85,500 on single ticket sales, eclipsing George Bernard Shaw’s “Misalliance,” which did $80,000 last September. “Golden Girls,” currently on the Mainstage, is said to be “doing well” but doesn’t constitute a threat.

Contrary to a report in the New York Times, 2,000 SCR subscribers did not defect because of Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon.” If as many as 200 turned in their tickets over that play, it would have been a lot, SCR officials said.

The company simply scaled back subscriptions--to 23,000--because the Mainstage season was oversubscribed.