La Jolla Playhouse Expands Season to 6 Plays; Actress Almost Had to Fly ‘Road to Mecca’

The La Jolla Playhouse is flexing its muscles.

A summer season expanded to six shows, lengthened by a month and consisting of an import, two new plays, a Shakespeare, a new musical and a classic comedy, is what artistic director Des McAnuff is promising audiences for his seventh year at the controls of the revived and revitalized theater on the UC San Diego campus.

To kick off the season in the Mandell Weiss Theatre May 14-June 17, McAnuff is importing Chicago’s much-lauded Steppenwolf Theatre Company, the home of such actors as John Malkovich and Joan Allen. The group will bring a revised version of its staging of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” Adapter-director Frank Galati will restage it in La Jolla after a full rehearsal period with the 35-member cast.

“I don’t really consider this an import,” McAnuff said. “It will be very much a new version or second step in the development of the production. The cast will change somewhat. It’s an important piece. We’ve shared projects with other companies before.” (He cited the 1986 collaboration with the American National Theatre over the production of “Ajax.”)

“We have close friends in the (Steppenwolf) company,” McAnuff continued. “It’s an opportunity to collaborate. (The Mandell Weiss) should be a terrific stage for this epic production. And (the play) has so much to do with the history of California--even current history in this day of the homeless and of migrant farm workers.”

Following its La Jolla engagement, “Grapes of Wrath” is going to Britain’s National Theatre (June 22-July 1). “This is the production London will see,” McAnuff said. “It’s the National Theatre that will really be importing it.”

The second La Jolla staging will be of a new piece by Keith Reddin called “Nebraska,” described in a press release as “a contemporary tale of men and women on a Strategic Air Command missile base . . . the kind of place where there may be love in the afternoon and Armageddon in the air.”

“Nebraska” sets up residence at the Warren Theatre June 25-July 30, followed by a new play commissioned from Lee Blessing (who wrote “A Walk in the Woods” and “Two Rooms,” both staged earlier at La Jolla), which will take up the fourth season slot, Aug. 13-Sept. 17, also at the Warren. This new drama, titled “Down the Road,” deals with the compulsions of a serial killer, and, like the previous Blessing plays, will be directed by McAnuff.

For his Shakespeare this year, McAnuff will tackle “Macbeth,” Shakespeare’s so-called unlucky play. It will cap the season in the Mandell Weiss Oct. 25-Nov. 26.

“I did a version of it six years ago at Stratford (Ontario),” he said, “and the imagery has haunted me since. The play is bottomless. I’m very interested in the whole notion of a childless couple where the husband’s career becomes the child. Being 36 now and not having a child, I relate to that.”

“Macbeth,” McAnuff believes, “is a domestic tragedy, a keeping up with the Joneses tragedy, sandwiched between two great battles.” For him, it evokes connections with the John Kennedy assassination, “a festering wound that won’t heal because you can never get to the truth. How one event, the murder of Duncan, can bring eternal darkness to a nation.”

Still to be announced are the new musical and the classic comedy that will complete the season. The new musical, McAnuff said, “will continue an important tradition here,” noting in passing that last season’s new musical, “Around the World in Eighty Days,” is still humming on a back burner. (“We’re reworking the book,” he said, “and will probably workshop it once more.”)

“It’s time for us to move forward with real conviction,” he concluded. “Construction begins in less than 60 days on the new theater,” he added, talking about the 350-seat Studio Theatre, for which major plans were outlined last year. “It will be ready for the 1990 season, when we’ll be expanding our production schedule again.”

GOING IN STYLE: Nan Martin, who plays Miss Helen in the South Coast Repertory production of “The Road to Mecca” in Costa Mesa, almost ran afoul of some delayed Hollywood scheduling when the much-postponed shooting schedule of a two-hour “Columbo” TV movie she had begun working on in November clashed with “Mecca’s” opening last Thursday.

Martin was trapped by commitments to be in two places at once. Telling studio officials that she couldn’t miss her theater opening cut no ice. They cited their need to protect their $3-million investment. Angry words were traded and Martin issued an ultimatum: At 6 p.m. she would walk off the set and be flown to Costa Mesa at her own expense by helicopter, whether the studio approved or not.

The producers made it clear they wouldn’t approve--not unless the daily shoot was through.

But, said Martin’s husband, Harry Gefner, in charge of the wrangling, “Columbo” producer Stan Kallis is “an old friend” and sanity--or friendship--ultimately prevailed.

Martin was released at 5 p.m. last Thursday and at 5:30 p.m. the next day, Friday--in time to call off the helicopter and drive to South Coast Rep for her 8 p.m. show. So all’s well that ends well or, as they say in these parts, that’s Hollywood.

ON THE OUTS AGAIN: Charles Marowitz, associate director in charge of dramaturgy for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, and editor of its newsletter, Alarums & Excursions, has resigned in a clash with LATC artistic producing director Bill Bushnell. Marowitz attributed his resignation to Bushnell’s interference with “contractually delegated” aspects of the theater operation.

This translates to a dispute over the composition of a panel for a symposium titled “State of the Art” examining the Los Angeles theater from an international perspective. Bushnell objected to Marowitz’s all-Caucasian selection of panelists. “I don’t see how you can discuss the 21st Century in theater,” Bushnell said, “without including an ethnic mix of people.”

The symposium is expected to go on as scheduled Feb. 25.

‘SYMPATHY’ FOR ATLAS: The transfer of Burbank Theatre Guild’s staging of “Sympathy” to the Matrix Theatre on Wednesday was derailed by the ongoing dispute between Actors’ Equity and ATLAS, the organization of theater operators opposed to the union’s new 99-Seat Plan. The Guild, a hotbed of sympathy for ATLAS, is trying to decide how to do the show without using Equity’s plan.

THE BIG DEFECTION?: Are the LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Dept.) and the Actors Gang defecting to San Francisco?

The answer is no.

The two ensemble groups are merely opening their newest productions there at the invitation of San Francisco’s Intersection for the Arts, which is presenting a month of theater from Los Angeles.

According to the Intersection’s Margaret Crane, the LAPD will be in residence with a new piece called “Jupiter 35” on Feb. 1-11 and the Gang will follow with “The Big Show” on Feb. 15-25.

“(We’re opening up there) strictly because of the time factor,” said Gang member Mark Seldis by way of reassurance. “The Big Show,” which is a depiction of Central American/Northern American relations in the format of a game show, “wouldn’t be ready to open here first,” Seldis said. “We’ll come back, take a month or so to restage it and then do it down here.”

LAPD’s “Jupiter 35” is a true story about a member of the company waking up one morning at County-USC Medical Center with a new name, to find out (eventually) that he was thrown out of a window in Skid Row. “It ‘s about his recuperation and the unraveling of what happened,” said artistic director John Malpede, explaining that the piece, which will also be done in Los Angeles later this spring, is still in development.

NEW SHINGLE: The Company of Angels, dispossessed by an arson fire that stormed through its Waring Avenue theater in Hollywood last April, has finally found a home.

The new address for this 28-year-old Los Angeles membership company is the former Frog Pond Restaurant at 2106 Hyperion Ave. in Silver Lake. The new quarters expect to accommodate about 70 seats in about 2,000 square feet of space when the new Angels Theatre opens in a couple of months. Short-term production plans include the world premiere of Sandy Clarke’s “Looking for the North Star” and a revival of Clifford Odets” “Waiting for Lefty.”

Don Shirley also contributed to this column.