STAGE NOTES : ‘Aftershock’ Registers at Way Off Broadway

Coming from Cleveland, Allison Gappa always knew about tornadoes. “I’ve lived through some real disasters,” she said. “I remember seeing trees fly past my window.” But earthquakes? Never.

It wasn’t until she moved to California a decade ago that she felt the ground sway for the first time. “It scared me half to death,” said Gappa, who lives in Orange and recently was named playwright-in-residence at the Way Off Broadway Playhouse in Santa Ana.

Now Gappa has written a full-length drama about the consequences of a major earthquake, one of a magnitude of between 8 and 9. Titled “Aftershock,” it opened this weekend at the Way Off Broadway where it runs Thursdays to Saturdays through Sept. 9.

“I wanted to write something that would encourage people to appreciate each other,” she says. “For some people it takes a disaster to get them to do that.”

The play unfolds in the basement of Mort and Hilda McNamara’s Southern California home just after the quake has struck, on the day they are celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary with their three children.

McNamara, a neurotically organized former Navy man, has spent years constructing a bomb-cum-earthquake shelter where the family takes refuge beneath their collapsed house. But the one thing the shelter cannot provide is protection from the pressures of family conflict.

Gappa, 34, has written slice-of-life traumas before. “Temporary Sanity,” a recent series of vignettes, portrayed domestic violence among military families and was presented in April at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

The playwright traces her interest in writing to Edgar Allen Poe, whose stories she was drawn to as a child. “I want the next thing I write to be something macabre,” she says, “not disgusting but sort of strange.”

THE NAME GAME: Officials of the Irvine Theatre, which is now under construction, have released an artist’s drawing that shows for the first time what the interior of the auditorium will look like when the $17.6-million theater is completed next summer.

The drawing, entitled “Five Minutes to Curtain,” does not show the name of the auditorium, however. Theater officials were scheduled to meet in July with an unidentified, potential contributor to ask for a $1-million contribution in exchange for naming the auditorium after the donor.

Douglas Rankin, general manager of the Irvine Theatre Operating Co., declined to comment on that meeting or even whether it took place. “I’m not going to discuss it,” he said this week. The theater trustees have vowed to raise $4.8 million in private funds by the end of 1989. They have raised about $1.9 million so far.

EAT UP: Whatever the future brings at the troubled Harlequin Dinner Theatre in Santa Ana, which as of tonight drops Broadway-style musicals in favor of revues with singing-and-dancing waiters, it is more likely to depend on food and renovation than on the new entertainment format.

No matter how good “Jubilee” may turn out to be, it is hard to conceive of theatergoers putting up with the sort of unappetizing food--to say nothing of the Harlequin’s grim decor--that accompanied the closing performance of “Annie Get Your Gun” on Sunday.

“We are going to renovate,” Barbara Hampton, who co-owns the 450-seat, buffet-style dinner theater, said this week. “And we will be serving sit-down dinners from now on.”

But, she said, the Harlequin won’t be renovated until “the grand opening,” to come sometime in the fall. Hampton would not name a date, nor would she indicate the extent of the renovations. And while the food will be served differently, Hampton said it will still be prepared in-house by the same people preparing the food now.

The irony is that management chose to eliminate the only aspect of the Harlequin with any class, to judge from the final performance of the Irving Berlin musical. The cast had so much charm Sunday that the incoming troupe of Young Americans will have to go a long way to match it.

Indeed, as a cure for dwindling business, the Harlequin might have been better off simply eliminating the dinner and keeping the theater--instead of the other way around.