Diversionary Is Garnering Some Deserved Credibility

Three years ago, when Thomas Vegh founded Diversionary Theatre, there was a question of whether San Diego would support a theater troupe presenting works by and for the gay-lesbian community.

Diversionary may be nothing more than a floating theater that struggles to pull money together from one show to the next. Even so, it’s beginning to gather the kind of public credibility and critical esteem that translate into staying power.

It’s also doing some very good shows along the way.

This year, Diversionary received a California Arts Council grant of $1,000 that covered the bulk of the $200 stipends it paid each performer for its current hit, “Life of the Party,” playing through Saturday at the Roosevelt Theatre at 3366 Park Blvd.

“Disappearing Act,” the Michael Oster musical that Diversionary premiered last December at the West Coast Production Company, has been optioned for an off-Broadway production in the spring of 1989.

This December, Diversionary plans to adapt “Conversations With My Elders” into a staged reading at the Progressive Stage Company. Retitled “Celebrity Gaze,” the show will re-create journalist Boze Hadleigh’s interviews with some of his gay subjects: Sal Mineo, George Cukor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rock Hudson and Sir Cecil Beaton, photographer of the rich and famous, whose works will be on display at the San Diego Museum of Art from Feb. 4 to March 26.

The bulk of the audience at “Life of the Party” is gay, according to Vegh and playwright Doug Holsclaw, who traveled here from San Francisco to check out the production.

If that’s so, the heterosexual crowd is missing out on a good thing. Holsclaw’s story about gay friends dealing with the complications of life and love in the age of AIDS is a poignant and funny reminder of the importance of friends--of whatever persuasion--in these fragile times.

Holsclaw said he began the play as a dramatized pamphlet urging the gay community to have safe sex. Then the characters started blossoming into independent life. It’s a fullness that’s reflected in sparkling performances by James Fagerle, Jessie Haywood, David Whitney Johnson, Tim Poor, Elizabeth Lyon-Boutelle and Vegh.

The saddest part of the play, Holsclaw said, is that even safe sex doesn’t mean safety anymore. Holsclaw, who is gay, said he has been having safe sex for six years, but he still worries.

“The painful reality is that the incubation period for AIDS may be 10 years. You could be having safe sex for six years and it’s already too late,” he said.

Holsclaw is the literary manager of the largest gay theater in the United States, Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco. Theatre Rhinoceros has a 112-seat main stage, a 60-seat studio theater and a large subscription base for its eight-play season. It’s enough to make Vegh envious.

“He’s a leader, and we’re followers right now,” Vegh said of Holsclaw. “I hope Diversionary can become a leader through careful maturation some day.”

Kit Goldman, managing director of the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre, is finding the television miniseries “War and Remembrance” good preparation for her performance in the staged reading of Donald Freed’s “The White Crow” on Monday.

The two-person play is a fictionalized encounter between Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s chief executioner, and a Jewish woman named “Baum” who represents Hannah Arendt, the German-born philosopher who studied Eichmann when he was tried in Israel for war crimes.

“Watching the expressions on the German faces as the people are marching into the gas chambers, I imagined the pain the Germans must have felt as executioners,” Goldman said. “That’s the pain Arendt tries to get Eichmann to acknowledge as a way of redeeming himself.”

“War and Remembrance” also gets part of the credit for the nearly full houses the Gaslamp is managing with its Monday night Festival of New Jewish Plays, sponsored by the Streisand Center for Jewish Cultural Arts. The troubled situation in the Middle East and the anniversary of Kristallnacht are also contributing to interest in the program, Goldman said.

Deborah Salzer, founding director of the California Young Playwrights Project, doesn’t know why the project’s annual contest for California playwrights under 19 received nearly three times as many scripts from girls as boys.

The result is the second consecutive year of plays by all-female authors in the fourth year of the project.

“I’m mystified,” Salzer said. “I don’t know where all the male writers are. I’m concerned.”

A San Diego girl from Crawford High School is one of three playwrights whose works were selected for full productions by the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre. Beckie Andersen’s one-act play, “Searching for the Big Dipper,” shares the honors with one-acts “Runner’s High” by Michele Mitchell of Yorba Linda in Orange County and “A Toast to Leslie,” by two-time winner Pamela Mariva Mshana of Los Angeles.

The Gaslamp Quarter Theatre will present the plays Jan. 11-22, and staged readings of “Broads,” a musical by Holly C. Frenzel of El Capitan High School in Lakeside and “Not What the Doctor Ordered” by Lisa Kirazian of Patrick Henry High School on Jan. 25-29.

In a new special under-14 category, five writers have been offered a one-day reading at the Gaslamp. To no one’s surprise, all are girls.

PROGRAM NOTES: Hal Holbrook will present the one-man show that launched his career when “Mark Twain Tonight!” plays tonight at the Civic Theatre. Now in his 34th year of portraying the writer and social satirist, Holbrook is known for updating the material to suit the times . . . The Progressive Stage Company will present “Black Nativity: A Gospel Song Play” by Langston Hughes, under the direction of Floyd Gaffney Nov. 26 through Dec. 18. Gaffney, a professor at UC San Diego, directed the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of “The Colored Museum” . . . James Kirkwood, author of “A Chorus Line” and “P.S. Your Cat is Dead,” will speak at the San Diego Museum of Art, Dec. 1. Kirkwood’s first novel, “There Must Be A Pony!” was drawn from a childhood in which he weathered his parents’ combined total of nine marriages and discovered five bodies--the first of which was that of his mother’s fiance.