Smaller Venues Are Less Likely to Have Rights Stuff

Minerva Marquis, artistic director of the Marquis Public Theatre, got a call this week from the Dramatists Play Service in New York, telling her to cease and desist in her plans to produce Christopher Durang’s “The Marriage of Bette and Boo.”

It seems the San Diego Repertory Theatre wants Durang’s hot black comedy about a Catholic couple’s marriage and divorce for its upcoming season. The Rep wanted and obtained exclusive rights for a 50-mile radius. That meant the Marquis’ non-Equity rights--which could be revoked at any time--were.

“I walked around all day with my stomach in my mouth,” Marquis said, describing her reaction to the call. “I was going to audition for it this Sunday and put it on as soon as possible. Now, I’ll have to find something else that will fit in the set that’s already been built.”

As the handful of large theaters in San Diego have grown in stature over the past five years, they’ve become increasingly attractive to those playwrights who choose large theaters as the debut venue for a work every time. Call it the importance of good impressions on a blind date; when a playwright wants the public to see his play for the first time, he wants it to be seen and reviewed in what he thinks is the best setting.

That means that if a well-known show has not been done in San Diego before, it will probably become more and more unusual to see smaller theaters do it first.

When the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre announced plans to produce Lee Blessing’s “Eleeomosynary” this season, it had not counted on Blessing making the play exclusively available to the La Jolla Playhouse for the 1989 season. The Gaslamp has since replaced the Blessing play with “The Business of Murder.”

Similarly, the Gaslamp was surprised to find that the Pine Hills Lodge Dinner Theater was doing the San Diego premiere of Larry Shue’s “The Nerd,” to which the Gaslamp had obtained exclusive rights. It turned out the Julian-based dinner theater, which did an excellent job with the show, escaped the exclusive-rights clause by being 3 miles past the 50-mile limit.

Sam Woodhouse, producing director of the San Diego Repertory Theatre, recalls a time when the Rep used to find itself at the losing end of the battle for first rights. As recently as the past season, the Rep had to wait for the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to complete its scheduled run of “The Colored Museum” before the Rep run could begin. (The Taper’s extension of the show, which overlapped the Rep’s opening, didn’t count.)

Even now, as Woodhouse prepares the upcoming Rep season that begins this spring, he’s waiting to see if he can nail down rights to plays that other large theaters are pursuing.

The system makes sense to him, not only as a producer of plays but as someone in the position of granting rights for productions of the Rep hit “Six Women With Brain Death, or Expiring Minds Want to Know.”

“There’s a Bay Area community theater that wants to do ‘Six Women,’ and we’re not letting them,” Woodhouse said. “That’s because there’s a commercial theater in San Francisco that’s also interested.”

Of course, some theaters are just not as touchy about rights. According to Leon Drew, retiring managing director of San Diego Civic Light Opera (Starlight), the theater didn’t mind producing “42nd Street” after the Lawrence Welk Dinner Theatre and United States International University had their cracks at it.

“The issue was never raised,” Drew said. “We have a lot of confidence in our company. We knew they (the other companies) weren’t doing the full-blown ‘42nd Street’ we did with all the numbers intact. We felt we were playing for different audiences.”

Evidently, Drew was right. Starlight just ended the most successful year in its 43-year history, with ticket sales exceeding $1.8 million. And the just-closed “42nd Street” was the single highest-grossing jewel in that crown, bringing in more than $425,000 in ticket sales.

It didn’t surprise the man in the concession stand to see Los Angeles Lakers superstar Magic Johnson and Olympic hurdler Edwin Moses in the audience of “Fences” at the James A. Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood on Sunday night.

“Every night we have a Who’s Who of black athletes in the audience,” the candy man said.

That’s not the only reason to catch August Wilson’s searing drama about an aging black ex-baseball player (James Earl Jones repeats his Tony award-winning performance) who had to settle for becoming an embittered garbage collector because he had the misfortune of being great before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in the major leagues.

Another reason to catch it is that for those who loved Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Old Globe this past season, “Fences” is even better. Wilson fleshes out the poetic imagery of a Tennessee Williams with the moral bite of Arthur Miller and a touch of O’Neill to capture a story that speaks not only to the black athletes who show up night after night, but to everyone. But hurry. According to the production’s managers, after it closes Dec. 4, it leaves the West Coast for good.