Mark Taper, South Coast Rep Get Grants for New Plays

The Mark Taper Forum and South Coast Repertory are major beneficiaries of what has been termed “a nationwide experiment” to help finance artistically ambitious productions of new plays.

The Taper has been awarded $56,000 toward a staging of Jon Robin Baitz’s “Dutch Landscape.” South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa has received $64,000 for Ellen McLaughlin’s “Infinity’s House.” The plays are scheduled for their world premieres in early 1989.

Both grants--the largest of eight totaling $336,000--come from the Fund for New American Plays, a joint project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and 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 organization, the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, has received $17,000 toward a production of Lynne Kaufman’s “Speaking in Tongues.”

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

Kennedy Center chairman Roger Stevens, who heads the fund, is co-host of the luncheon with Andrew Heiskell, the 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.

“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; and the Hip Pocket Theater in Ft. Worth, Texas, ($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 South Coast’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.

“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. 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.