Artful Chairman of the Boards : Young Director Offers Up Premiere of ‘Abundance’ at SCR Tonight

Ron Lagomarsino didn’t seem to think that the silver, five-pointed star in his left earlobe violated the dress code any more than his rumpled green shirt, faded jeans or scuffed, white high tops.

Of medium height with curly brown hair and an unassuming manner, he sauntered past the large brass plate that read “Proper Attire Please” at the entrance to the sedate guest club of a businessman’s hotel in Santa Ana without giving the words a glance.

“They’ve got great coffee,” he said, and headed straight for the serve-yourself urn set out by the bar one morning last week.

Here to direct the world premiere of Beth Henley’s “Abundance,” which launches the California Play Festival tonight on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory, Lagomarsino is regarded at the Costa Mesa theater as one of the nation’s best young stage directors. “He’s particularly good with new plays,” said David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director.

Certainly, the 37-year-old San Francisco native is among the busiest, working not only with major playwrights on both coasts but also in television and soon, he hopes, in movies.

A New Yorker for the past 15 years, Lagomarsino moved to Los Angeles in September under contract to direct regularly for the Emmy Award-winning “thirtysomething,” now in its second season on ABC. He has helmed half a dozen episodes of the widely acclaimed baby-boomer series since it began airing last year.

“I’m still a novice at it,” he said modestly, settling into a straight-backed chair. “It’s quite different from stage, and there is so much I don’t know. I guess they like stage directors because of their ability to work with actors.”

(Lagomarsino guessed right. When “thirtysomething” added a Peabody Award to its collection of prizes the day after this interview, the judges praised the series for, among other things, “exceptional performance.”)

His television work notwithstanding, Lagomarsino has hardly neglected the theater. In 1987 alone, he directed three world premieres in New York: Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Driving Miss Daisy”--which he restaged for the national touring version now at the Henry Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles--Christopher Durang’s “Laughing Wild” and Timothy Mason’s “Only You.”

“What I look for in a play is if it seems new to me,” he said. “I want to be surprised by it. I want the dialogue and the ideas to be fresh. That was unquestionably the case with Beth’s play. People who have known her work in the past will recognize her voice in it. But there is something new.”

Henley, who won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for “Crimes of the Heart,” has had her work mounted at SCR before. The theater produced her fourth play, “The Debutante Ball,” in 1985. Lagomarsino also has worked at SCR before. He staged Larry Shue’s “The Foreigner” on the Mainstage and Lisa Loomer’s “Birds” on the Second Stage, both in 1986. But “Abundance” is the first time Henley and Lagomarsino have worked together.

They had met only once, when Henley came to see “Laughing Wild.” Although they knew and admired each other’s work, Lagomarsino said, their collaboration might not have come about except for the fact that they share the same agent at William Morris. He sent Lagomarsino the script of “Abundance.”

“At the time, there were several theaters that wanted to produce it,” the director recalled, ticking off Seattle Repertory, Steppenwolf in Chicago and the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego. “But in terms of my TV schedule and everything else, the only slot that made sense was this one. Since I had a prior relationship at South Coast and Beth did too, it all came together.”

For SCR, it was not a moment too soon. Emmes and artistic director Martin Benson had scheduled Ellen McLaughlin’s commissioned play, “Infinity’s House,” for CalFest but decided at the 11th hour that it wasn’t ready for production. Desperate for a replacement, they landed Henley’s play in December.

Emmes said it was “pure chance” that both plays were written by women and that both take place in the Old West.

“Abundance” tells the stories of Bess Johnson and Macon Hill, who arrive in the Wyoming Territory during the late 1860s as mail-order brides with visions of adventure dancing in their heads. They have, as Macon puts it, “Western fever.” The play takes the temperature of that fever over a period of 25 years, chronicling the fate of their marriages and their reversals of fortune. It is Henley’s sixth, full-length play and the first to be set outside the South.

“What’s exciting for me at South Coast,” Lagomarsino said, “is to be able to prepare a play with a rehearsal period that doesn’t have the pressure of opening smack in New York. And Beth has really done her work. There’s been a lot of rewriting during this process in terms of line changes, but there have been no structural overhauls. None. This play was on firm ground when we started.”

Henley, who lives in Los Angeles, declined to be interviewed. Despite the quirky brashness of many of her characters in such plays as “The Wake of Jamie Foster” and “The Miss Firecracker Contest,” the 36-year-old, Mississippi-born writer is said by SCR staffers to be extremely shy and prefers to let her work speak for itself.

Lagomarsino said he found Henley “very accessible,” nonetheless. “She has a wonderful sense of humor and yet is very strong,” he noted. “She knows what she wants--to the word and to the punctuation.” He said he believed Henley began writing “Abundance” several years ago but only managed to get down “a little bit” until last summer, when she wrote “90% of it in a sort of flurry.”

What drew him to the play was “the richness” of the scenes. “I’m just trying to bring out the juice in them,” he said. “This is a play that could be done in all kinds of ways. You could go for the out-and-out comedy and play it very broadly. Or it could be very sinister and dark. The characters have a lot of secrets. They could be interpreted any number of ways by a different cast in a different production.”

Because of the play’s episodic nature, Lagomarsino said, he focused on trying to make it “seamless.” Thus, two mechanized turntables are used for the 17 scene changes. “I didn’t want stagehands running out every 5 minutes to change the sets,” the director said.

“We’ve worked out a complicated system that we hope will look very simple to an audience. The show should move cinematically. I don’t like it when you’re taken out of a play for great periods of time, or when you’re made aware that you’re sitting in a theater.”

Ever since casting began in February, the show has generated considerable interest from producers, who wonder if it will have a life beyond SCR.

“People have already approached me,” Lagomarsino said. “The theater community is hungry enough that potential producers will come flocking. That’s partly because of Beth’s reputation and partly because it’s a new play.”

In the meantime, he will begin pre-production on his next episode of “thirtysomething” right after “Abundance” opens. And while he won’t get to direct Uhry’s screen version of “Driving Miss Daisy”--the producers didn’t want to go with a first-time movie director, he said--he hopes to do another Uhry movie.

“All I can say about it is that it has the working title ‘Charm’ and it’s a beautiful job,” he said.

“Abundance” by Beth Henley opens today and continues through May 25 at South Coast Repertory Theatre, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Curtain times: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Matinees at 2:30 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. Tickets: $19 to $26. Information: (714) 957-4033.