SCR Cancels Premiere of Much-Awaited New Play ‘Infinity’s House’

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa has called off the world premiere of Ellen McLaughlin’s “Infinity’s House,” an ambitious drama that was to have been the centerpiece of the theater’s first California Play Festival in the spring.

“We had hoped the script would be ready to go into rehearsal, but it has not evolved to that point,” SCR artistic director David Emmes said Thursday. “This will not affect the festival. We are hopeful that we may be able to find a new play, preferably a California play, from the manuscripts submitted to our play competition.”

When SCR announced its 1988-89 season in July, hopes for “Infinity’s House” were extraordinarily high. It was described as a 36-character drama about the nation’s destiny, taking place in the desert and leaping back and forth in time between the building of the railroads and the testing of the atomic bomb.

McLaughlin’s script was considered to have such promise that SCR received a pre-production grant of $64,000 from the Fund for New American Plays--the largest of eight grants given to regional nonprofit theaters across the country--to help underwrite the staging costs. Now it appears that the grant must be returned.

The production, which had been scheduled to run April 21 to May 25, would have been the largest ever undertaken in the Tony-winning company’s 25-year history. The play was ballyhooed, moreover, as a major coup in a continuing effort to launch significant work by contemporary U.S. playwrights.

McLaughlin, a San Francisco playwright and actress, could not be reached for comment on the decision to drop the production. But, Emmes said, “I don’t know that she would concur with our judgment.”

He said difficulties with “Infinity’s House” arose during the rewrite process that new plays generally undergo.

“It certainly was not the initial script that caused the problem,” he said, “but we were certainly very aware that this was a play that needed to travel some distance to get to the point that it was ready to be produced. It just didn’t move forward as quickly as we would have liked.”

Deborah Dixon, the project director of the Fund for New American Plays, said from Washington that SCR would have to return the grant for “Infinity’s House” unless it decides to produce the play at a later date, in which case it could request an extension.

Dixon said extensions were unusual but had been requested and received twice among the 15 grants made so far by the fund--a joint project of the John F. Kennedy Center, the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities and the American Express Co.

But Emmes seemed to rule out a production in the future: “Anything is possible. At this point, however, we have not considered that option.”

A challenge grant of $43,500 from the California Arts Council for the play festival does not appear to be threatened. “That money was not specifically linked to any property,” Emmes said.

The council could not be reached for confirmation.

McLaughlin has also written “The Narrow Bed,” which was produced off-Broadway in New York in 1985 and received the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. The Eureka Theatre in San Francisco staged the play in 1986.

As an actress, McLaughlin has starred in Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of “Hedda Gabler,” which opened that company’s season in September.