Arts Festival Likely to See Premiere of Soviet Play

For those getting ready to celebrate “Smirnova’s Birthday Party,” the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s tentative offering for the San Diego Arts Festival, put your plans on hold--at least for now. Roman Viktyuk, the Soviet director whom the Rep asked to direct for the festival, flew into town this week with a brand new script by Soviet playwright Nickolay Kolyada in hand.

The work, “Slingshot,” which has yet to be translated into English, was read Wednesday night at the Rep in simultaneous translation and now, the word is that “Slingshot” will have its world premiere Oct. 22-Nov. 11 at the Lyceum Stage.

Viktyuk will direct an American cast in English.

“Smirnova’s Birthday Party” will remain on the back burner in case plans for “Slingshot” don’t work out, said a representative from the Rep.

“Slingshot” tells the story of contemporary Soviet life--the problems of housing, food shortages, maintaining relationships--through the eyes of an embittered 33-year-old Soviet dockworker who has lost his legs in a work-related accident. His life begins to turn around as the result of a new friendship.

“Smirnova,” a one-act play by Ludmila Petrushevskaya, would be an American premiere of a popular Russian play about three Soviet women talking about life and love in contemporary times.

Viktyuk will fly back Saturday after auditioning actors here and in Los Angeles.

You don’t have to be rich, famous or powerful to call your own shots in the theater, according to actress Deborah Scott, who plays the part of the wife, Bonnie, in “Eden Court,” which opened at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre on Wednesday.

Scott, 28, said the only way she could be sure of playing the starring part was to produce it herself. So she and husband Robert Spera, 33, who’s directing, acquired the rights last year for their production company, “Fat Boy and Sticks.”

Spera, who came up with the name, is Fat Boy, and Scott is Sticks. Spera, however, was a bit chagrined when Scott seconded the name so enthusiastically, Scott reports:

“That’s pretty bad when your wife agrees on the title (fat boy) so easily,” he told her.

Spera was directing at the Humanas Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1983 when “Eden Court”--the story of a man going through a mid-life crisis in his trailer-park home--premiered there. Holly Hunter and the playwright, Murphy Guyer, co-starred. When Spera met his Kentucky-born wife-to-be a year later at the Actors Theatre, he thought the play, with Southern overtones, would be just right for her. But first the work moved Off-Broadway with Penny Marshall and Ellen Barkin. And then Spera and Scott became a team, professionally and personally.

Scott and Spera, who married last year, first produced the show at the Tamarind Theatre. The same tandem is co-producing the show with the Gaslamp and Kate Axelrod. This is the first of 20-plus shows the team has done in four years to be moved to a second location.

The best part about having one’s own company, said Scott, is that she and Spera are never out of work.

“Actors spend 85% to 90% of their time trying to find work,” she said. “The turn that the business is taking is that it is not OK just to be an actor anymore. We’re creating opportunities for ourselves. I think that’s the best way to go, because otherwise you’re at the mercy of so many people telling you, ‘Yes, you can,’ or, ‘No, you can’t.’ ”

In June, when it was first announced that Adrian Hall would replace John Hirsch as director of “Measure for Measure” at the Old Globe Theatre because of Hirsch’s bout with tuberculosis, it seemed like a temporary setback for the peripatetic director.

Hirsch was sorry to miss the “Measure for Measure” assignment after enjoying his work on the Contra gate-inspired “Coriolanus” at the Old Globe last year, he said recently from his home in Toronto. There, he had used his experience as a child orphaned by the Holocaust to fuel his loathing of fascism in any form.

The show went on to sweep the San Diego Critics Circle awards.

“I was really looking forward to going back to the Old Globe,” he said. “I had one of the best times I ever had with Jack (O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe) and the other people there.”

He also talked about coming to work at the La Jolla Playhouse someday.

But Hirsch never recovered. He died Tuesday night.

“We have lost our ‘rabbi,’ our teacher our friend,” said O’Brien Wednesday. “Although John Hirsch’s association with the Old Globe was deplorably brief, his stunning vision of ‘Coriolanus’ lingers in the memory. . . . As we mourn his passing, we admit with pride and enormous gratitude that each and every one of us privileged to know him and to work with him are changed forever, and for the better.”

PROGRAM NOTES: The Progressive Stage Company is workshopping a new musical, “A Few Hours in Hell,” beginning Monday and running Monday-Wednesday at 8 p.m. . . . The Marquis Public Theatre will present David Mamet’s “Edmond” Aug. 25-Oct. 12. . . . Where can you find Prince Charming nowadays? Chuck Wagner, who originated the role of Prince Charming in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” at the Old Globe Theatre and on Broadway, is now playing the part at Dallas’ State Fair Music Hall. And he’s as charming as ever. . . . A little more than a month after the San Diego Rep’s fine production of “The Marriage of Bette and Boo” closed here, playwright Christopher Durang opens in his semi-autobiographical play at the Los Angeles Theatre Center Aug. 11-Sept. 17. . . . Proceeds from the Aug. 12 matinee of of “Thin Air” at the San Diego Rep will go the the AIDS Assistance Fund and the San Diego AIDS Project. Tickets are $25. . . . “Meet Me in Saint Louis,” the new musical by septuagenarian composers Hugh Martin--of Encinitas--and Ralph Blane has moved its Broadway opening to Nov. 2. . . . Sales are up at the new Times Arts Tix center in its first month of operation at Horton Plaza. There was a 53% increase in July over its July record a year ago in the Spreckels Theatre.