SCR Talent Scout Finds Himself on Firing Line Patch Debuts as Director With ‘Dragon Lady’

Between phone calls from writers, scenic designers, agents, directors and all the other backstage voices competing for his attention, Jerry Patch reigns over the controlled chaos of his South Coast Repertory office like an air-traffic controller keeping track of a dozen landings at once.

If he seems busier than usual it is because that after 13 years as SCR’s resident talent scout, whose chief task is to find promising playwrights and help improve their scripts, he is also directing his first production at the theater in Costa Mesa. Titled “Dragon Lady,” it was written by Robert Daseler and opened Friday on the Second Stage as part of the California Play Festival.

“Now my fannie is on the line,” Patch says. “Being a dramaturg (his official title) is a lot more dilettantish.”

The lanky, red-haired Burbank native is sitting behind his desk, quietly fielding a reporter’s questions with breezy but thoughtful answers full of eclectic allusions. Thinking aloud, he tends to become a homespun philosopher pinning bright ideas on an invisible bulletin board like somebody clipping New Yorker cartoons to the refrigerator door. His conversation leaps from Kierkegaard to Japanese culture, photorealist painters to TV writing, the Pacific Rim to audience demographics.

“What attracted me to Daseler’s play,” Patch says, “is that it is in, of and about California as much any play I’ve ever read. The beauty of California is that it’s a land of constant possibility. Instant possibility. As I kept telling my cast, it’s the only place in the country where a 61-year-old guy who has failed all his life can walk into a cocktail party and say, ‘I’ve decided to become an astrophysicist.’ And everybody says, ‘Great.’ ‘Wonderful.’

“ ‘Dragon Lady’ is about the proposition that life in California is unformed,” he continues. “It is always being reinvented. There is no tradition, no religion that ties us together. There’s a kind of freedom in that. And that is the world of Daseler’s people. They live without the usual constraints. The flip side is that there is no foundation, no bottom. And that can be worrisome, of course. It can lead you to fear, as Kierkegaard tells us.”

The play--Daseler’s first--unfolds in a suburban tract house where Alex and Margo have come to a turning point in their childless, 16-year marriage. Dulled by the ease and predictability of their routine lives, Alex has begun to drink and Margo has begun to flirt with Alex’s best friend, Paul. When Alex gets a job offer that would require leaving California, it precipitates a marital conflict.

The script won second prize ($3,000) in a statewide CalFest competition that SCR sponsored for unproduced plays. Daseler, 43, is the director of public relations for Claremont McKenna College in Claremont and a short-story writer who has published in magazines. He previously worked as a reporter, cab driver and librarian.

Because of the psychological quicksand of Daseler’s suburban paradise, Patch says, he asked his cast to take a look at the pop art of David Hockney, who frequently deals with poolside life in Southern California, as well as the photorealist works of D.J. Hall, Philip Pearlstein and other contemporary painters.

“The interesting thing is how much irony there is in those pictures,” he recounts. “I remember one, ‘Toweling Off,’ that shows a woman in a tennis dress with her face buried in a towel. For all we know, she could be sobbing. It almost looks like grief. But it’s probably 3-to-2 in the second set and all she is doing is toweling off on the changeover.

“It is that kind of irony,” says Patch, an avid tennis player himself, “that tells us we don’t understand who anybody really is, which is a facet of modern life and theater as well. We know who Hedda Gabler was and why she killed herself. We don’t know that about anybody now. You have to make an assessment--and it’s a guess, even for people you work with.”

Although the monthlong festival has no explicit theme, a common thread has emerged among the three plays receiving full CalFest productions.

Different as they are from “Dragon Lady,” Beth Henley’s “Abundance” (currently on the Mainstage) and Marlane Meyer’s “The Geography of Luck” (which won the $5,000 first prize and opens May 16 on the Second Stage) also examine the fate of rootless people who face the daily choice of remaking their lives.

“All of them have found their own metaphors for the experience of change,” Patch asserts.

Daseler’s play was so appealing to him, he says, that after recommending it to SCR artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson from almost 600 submissions, he agreed to direct it when Benson decided he needed time off and couldn’t do it himself.

Patch cast two founding members of the company, Richard Doyle as Alex and Hal Landon Jr. as Paul; Robin Pearson Rose, who is making her SCR debut, as Margo, and Julie Fulton, seen in last season’s “Dog Logic,” as Paul’s wife, Nan.

“I know how to direct and I loved the script, so it made sense to put me on it,” says Patch, 46. He has staged plays before at Long Beach City College, where he has taught for 20 years and is a tenured professor in the theater department.

“Probably the only reason I haven’t directed here before is that I’ve already got plenty to do,” he explains. “One of the ways David and Martin have always run this theater is not to give people half-jobs that leave them hungry for more. Everybody here has a job and a half. I am engaged constantly.”

Nonetheless, Patch says his directorial experience with “Dragon Lady” has been such an enjoyable extension of his dramaturgical work on new plays that he “would like to do it again” if time permits.

When not analyzing scripts, he can be found writing essays for the theater’s playbill, meeting with playwrights, hosting one of the SCR NewScript readings or penning children’s plays. Over the past 8 years, he has turned out seven of them for SCR.

“The only way I get down to writing is if somebody commissions me and gives me a deadline,” he says.

Originally a newspaper reporter, Patch recalls that he tried his hand at scripting TV Westerns and sitcoms during the 1960s. Three were produced on “Death Valley Days,” he says. A deal with “The Dick Van Dyke Show” fell through when the series was canceled. One script he wrote for “Bonanza” might have led to greater things had it not run into a problem with a censorious sponsor.

“Program Practices nixed it,” Patch explains with an amused smile. “They gave me constraints. I fulfilled every one of them. But then the guy from Chevrolet said--and this is a direct quote--’We are not putting smallpox on Sunday night for Chevrolet.’ It cost me pretty good money at the time.”

So high were his artistic principles, he quips, that he refused to change the disease to chicken pox. “I went back to graduate school at that point.”

Looking back, Patch seems content. At SCR, “the opportunity for self-expression” has kept him that way, he says. His desk, piled with manuscripts awaiting his advice, bears the proof.