The New Season: Big as All L.A. : Let’s just say that it begins with ‘Virginia Woolf’ and much of it looks intriguing

“We do have seasons out here,” someone once observed when I was complaining about the lack of them, “but they’re subtle as hell.”

That certainly applies to the arts. In New York at this time of year, you know you’re at the top of a new theater season. The summer lull is over; the newspaper stories have started to appear about how this is going to be the best (or worst) Broadway season in 20 years; the starters are at the gate. . . .

It doesn’t work that way in Southern California. We don’t have a summer lull. Our theater goes full blast all the time. The Taper and South Coast Repertory slipped into new seasons this month without missing a beat. LATC and the Old Globe Theatre now have two official seasons, summer and winter.

Any official marking of the opening of the new Southern California theater season is therefore wholly arbitrary. Still, we have definitely come to the end of one cycle of shows and the start of another. So I hereby proclaim Oct. 5, the opening of the new season--the night that “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” opens at the Doolittle.

This is a Center Theatre Group/Ahmanson production, starring Glenda Jackson and John Lithgow, and directed by Albee himself. It all sounds like a good idea. “Virginia Woolf” hasn’t had a revival with actors of Lithgow’s and Jackson’s cutting edge for years, and it will be exciting to see them face off at close range, which wouldn’t have been possible at the Ahmanson. With luck, “The Phantom of the Opera” will keep that house out of mischief for years.

Two powerfully imagined new plays will follow “Virginia Woolf” into the Doolittle: August Wilson’s earthy, eerie “The Piano Lesson” (Jan. 18-April 1) and Alan Ayckbourn’s disquieting “Henceforward” (April 19-July 1). For dessert CTG/Ahmanson subscribers will get Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” July 12-Sept. 23. Just coffee for me, thanks.

“Virginia Woolf” can be thought of as a 1960s version of Strindberg’s “Dance of Death.” We’ll be able to see which is the tougher portrait of marriage when the Los Angeles Theatre Center revives Strindberg’s play Dec. 11-Feb. 11, starring Mitchell Ryan and Marian Mercer, and staged by Alan Mandell.

We’re also looking forward to Philip Baker Hall’s Willy Loman in LATC’s “Death of a Salesman” Oct. 28, Hall having portrayed Joe Keller in LATC’s revival of Miller’s “All My Sons.” LATC is also taking on a small theater production--the Cast Theatre’s production of Raymond J. Barry’s “Once in Doubt” (Nov. 11-Jan. 7). Its present show is a Jo Carson’s comedy about Alzheimer’s disease, “Day Trips.” Of the big theaters in L.A., LATC is the scrappiest.

We’ll be getting New York shows too. “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding” is a you-are-there piece, like “Tamara,” but set at an Italian wedding. Originally it was played in a Greenwich Village church and a local restaurant, but here it will be “a traditional Los Angeles garden wedding” at the Park Plaza Hotel, with everyone in shades. Nice kids, Tony ‘n’ Tina, but you do wonder about their uncles. The show opens Oct. 15.

“Durante” is a wanna-be New York show. It’s a musical based on the life and times of Jimmy Durante, and it will open at the Shubert Nov. 1. “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” is, alas, a non-starter for the Shubert this season. Maybe “Durante” will take up some of the slack. Jimmy’s widow seems to like it.

The Mark Taper Forum opened its season last week with Timberlake Wertenbaker’s civilized but rather expectable “Our Country’s Good.” Anne Bancroft and Jane Alexander will follow in Manuel Puig’s “Mystery of the Rose Bouquet,” Jan. 18-March 4.

March 11-May 13 the Taper will look at “Plays and Playwrights That Changed the Theatre” at the turn of the 1960s--including plays by Genet, Ionesco, Beckett and Albee. Ariel Dorfman’s “Widows” (May 31-July 1) and Arthur Kopit’s “Discovery of America” (July 19-Sept. 2) complete the season.

South Coast Repertory has also started its season, with a dolefully funny version of one of the great backstage plays, Alan Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval,” starring Joe Spano. SCR will end its season with a backlot play that, oddly, no Hollywood theater made a bid for--David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” (June 8-July 15).

Between these will come the usual SCR mix of classics, titles from the recent past and plays you’ve absolutely never heard of, with the emphasis on the latter--scripts like Sharman MacDonald’s “When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout” (Nov. 10-Dec. 10) and Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy” (Jan. 12-Feb. 18). SCR will also do “A Christmas Carol” for the zillionth time; one must live. (Dec. 5-Dec. 24).

At the Pasadena Playhouse we’re high on “The Downside,” Richard Dresser’s satire of how a big pharmaceutical company goes about marketing its latest miracle drug (Dec. 10-Jan. 14). The Play house is also doing the musical that made Liza Minnelli a Broadway star--”Flora the Red Menace.” (Feb. 11-March 18).

San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre has an authentic theater event coming up: the U.S. premiere of “Brothers and Sisters,” a six-hour epic of World War II, presented by the Maly Theatre of Leningrad. Presented as part of San Diego’s Soviet Arts Festival, this piece has been compared to “Nicholas Nickleby.” We’re not sure that we would want to hear “Nicholas Nickleby” in Russian, but there will be earphones. (Oct 22-Nov. 19).

The Old Globe will also offer the world premiere of Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women” (March 8-April 5). Artistic director Jack O’Brien calls it a return to the autobiographical Simon of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

With the Old Globe’s summer season done, the La Jolla Playhouse will offer the only major Shakespeare production before the first of the year--”Macbeth” (Oct. 25-Nov. 26). Des MacAnuff directs, which probably means fireworks.

Back in Los Angeles, the Odyssey Theatre has opened its new space at 2055 S. Sepulveda with a quiet but acute reading of Brian Friel’s “Faith Healer.” The Back Alley Theatre has introduced us to a tough-minded young playwright named Matt Witten, his play entitled “The Deal,” and the Matrix Theatre has an intriguing repertory of Iron Curtain plays--Larry Shue’s “Wenceslas Square” and Alexander Gelman’s “A Man With Connections.”

The Inner City Cultural Center is about to open a new play by Samm-Art Williams, “Woman From the Town.” Stages is preparing its version of Ariane Mnouchkine’s “1789” for the Las Palmas Theatre on Oct. 19. The Cast Theatre is prepping something called “Zombie Attack” (Oct.15-Nov. 19) and the East West Players are rehearsing Sondheim’s “Company”--which it will be good to see in a small theater. (Remember East-West’s “Pacific Overtures”?) (Oct. 18-Dec. 10).

We’re also looking forward to East-West’s “The Chairman’s Wife,” in which playwright Wakako Yamauchi examines certain “facts and rumors” about Mao Tse-tung’s wife, Chiang Ching (Jan. 17-Feb. 25).

Southern California theater looks far and wide; now if we could only get it to slow down.