Director Allison Liddi on Her Way to ‘Cloud Nine’

Allison R. Liddi was working as an agent’s assistant when the TV and film writers went on strike last year.

“Suddenly we were on half-time, there was no money, everybody was going crazy, selling flowers on the street,” she recalled. “Then a woman I’d met at a UCLA Extension class said she wanted to produce a play--and wanted me to direct.”

The project, a revival of Eve Merriam’s “The Club,” opened at West Coast Ensemble; Times critic Ray Loynd dubbed it “sublime.” Said Liddi: “It reminded me that this is what I wanted to do.”

A year later, Liddi has directed one of the most acclaimed productions of the season: Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud Nine,” also at West Coast Ensemble.

After the success of “The Club,” Liddi (who has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in directing from UC Irvine) quit her job and started pursuing the directing full-time. Earlier, she had spent six months assisting Allan Miller at the Back Alley. Now she worked for director John Nicolella on a movie for cable: For her public relations services, she was allowed to observe his work on the set. “Believe me, I’ve done worse,” Liddi, 30, said wryly. “One director--no, not Allan--made me walk his dog.”

Such is the ignominious nature of breaking into directing. But in the last few months, Liddi has compiled a healthy trio of credits: “The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940” (just closed at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton), the recent musical “Roleplay” at Group Rep, and now “Cloud Nine.”

“Churchill is so seductive,” she said of the play’s author, who busies her seven actors in a merry-go-round of character quick-changes, juxtaposing a rowdy farce in 1889 Africa with a modern-day tale set in London. The story of Clive and Betty (the latter played by a man in Act I, a woman in Act II), their offspring and various lovers is both arch and tender, rambunctious and elegant; it is not for the theatrically or sexually squeamish.

Although Liddi had seen the play three times before, Don Amendolia’s well-received 1983 production at the L.A. Stage Company West remains a blur. “It was a proscenium theater and I think we were in the cheap seats,” she said vaguely. “It was just so far away; I didn’t feel like anybody got inside me.”

Proximity is hardly a factor in her staging at West Coast, where the stage is flanked on each side by audience seats--and stairs leading to additional playing space on two balconies. Liddi’s original blocking had to be scrapped two weeks before opening when she discovered the sightlines were faulty. A new plan was devised, every sight-line corrected, all the blocking redone. The cast tried gamely to adjust. “They kept saying, ‘Where’s the lake now?’ ”

Eventually, Liddi hopes to move “Cloud Nine” and “Roleplay” to a mid-size house and run them in repertory. (Both shows have had to accommodate their runs to the set production schedules in company-run houses.) She also hopes to start moving into film work. Last year, Liddi observed Lee Shallat (who had spoken with her master’s class at UCI) directing a few episodes of the Fox TV series “Duet.”

Liddi (born on Catalina, reared in Long Beach) came to directing via acting.

“We all try to act,” she said cheerfully, “but it never happened for me. I never felt whatever that rush is that actors must feel. I think that one of the reasons I’m so good around actors is because I never say to myself, ‘ I could do that.’ ”

As for her agency detour, Liddi offers no apologies: “I never doubted that I wanted to direct. I think I just forgot it for a while.”

With “Cloud Nine,” she and seven other UCI grads formed Singular Productions; four of them are in the cast.

“The difference in working with people you know is you get trust--immediately,” Liddi said bluntly. “The most challenging, difficult part of rehearsal is not the last couple of weeks before you open. It’s when you first sit down with people and say, ‘Welcome to the first rehearsal. This is how I feel about the play.’ And they’re thinking, ‘Who is she? Can I trust her? What has she done, anyway?’

“Having a strong sense of yourself isn’t easy when you’re young,” she shrugged. “Sometimes I’m like Clive: I want to dominate and take control of everything, everybody. Sometimes I’m like Betty: ‘Please like me.’ That’s what’s so great about theater--it brings up these feelings about ourselves. It’s like Betty at the end; the only thing you can do is embrace her. It’s part of who you are. Inexperience is part of who I was. But now I’m getting better and better and better.”

She laughed out loud. “Five years from now we’ll talk again and I’ll be so cool. . . .”