Globe’s O’Brien Invited to Direct in Soviet Union

Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre, has been asked to direct an as-yet-undetermined show in Tbilisi in the Soviet Union sometime during the next calendar year.

Mark Lamos, artistic director of the Hartford Stage Company, made history as the first American to direct a play in the Soviet Union when he did Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” at Moscow’s Pushkin Theatre in March. A handful of American directors, including Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, have also been issued invitations by Soviet theaters. McAnuff is scheduled to direct a play, also undetermined, at Moscow’s Sovremennik Theater in October.

O’Brien’s invitation came from a group of Soviet designers who toured the Old Globe and other American theaters as part of the American-Soviet Initiative, a group that promotes cultural exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. According to Thomas Hall, managing director of the Old Globe, the Soviets were familiar with O’Brien’s work because of his direction of the internationally touring production of “Porgy and Bess.”

While the offer is firm, the details are not.

“It is going to happen,” O’Brien said. “But we don’t know when or what or any of the particulars. Everybody has talked to everybody but me.”

O’Brien and McAnuff will both be attending the Association for Theater in Higher Education convention next week at the Horton Grand Hotel. Among other leading theater figures attending the convention will be Marsha Norman, a 1983 Pulitzer Prize winner for her play, “ ‘night, Mother”; Judith Molina and Joseph Chaikin, two of the founders of The Living Theatre in New York; and John Simon, the acerbic critic for New York Magazine, whose scheduled Friday morning address--if a typical “Simon says”--ought to shake up the session.

The Women and Theatre Program Pre-Conference precedes the ATHE confab by a few days, running Sunday through Tuesday, also at the Horton Grand. The centerpiece of the pre-conference is a one-woman piece that will premiere at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Monday.

“Chlorophyll, Post-Modernism and the Mother-Goddess: A Converse-Ation,” a one-woman show by Anna Deavere Smith, is an oral history project about the organization and commissioned by it. (It is open to the public at $7.50 per person.)

If “Chlorophyll” seems a curious choice for the Hahn, it is. Jim Strait, who booked the show for the theater, did a double take when told the name of the show. It turns out he wasn’t even aware he had booked it.

“I thought they were having a meeting here,” he said, then laughed. “But I wish them luck.”

Stage notes: Thomas Hall, the Old Globe Theatre’s managing director, is in the process of raising money to bring in Soviet director Lev Dodin’s “Brothers and Sisters.” The play, which is now touring Japan, was to have had its American debut at the New York Arts Festival in June, but that run was canceled due to lack of subscriber interest. If Hall does raise the necessary money in the next two weeks, the show will be part of Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s Soviet Arts Festival in October, 1989.

Now that San Diego restaurateur Leon Singer has wrapped up his role in the upcoming miniseries “Lonesome Dove” and is awaiting the premiere of his TV pilot “Ft. Figueroa” (Tuesday, 8 p.m., Channel 8), he is back at work at his two El Tecolote restaurants. It is only a temporary acting reprieve, however.

In mid-September, Singer will go into rehearsal for the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s production of “Burning Patience.” The Mexican-born actor plays the Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda in a Cyrano de Bergerac-like story in which the older poet uses his poetry to help a young man woo a woman.

“Burning Patience” will mark the first bilingual production on the main stage of a major San Diego theater. After the English run is concluded, the cast will perform the show in Spanish.

A.R. Gurney Jr.’s “The Cocktail Hour,” which recently concluded its world premiere run at the Old Globe, will head to the Kennedy Center in Washington with its original cast in August. According to the Old Globe’s Hall, a New York production is also being negotiated. Jack O’Brien, who directed “The Cocktail Hour,” will travel with the show right after Neil Simon’s Broadway-bound “Rumors” opens, rounding out the Globe’s extended summer season.