Orange County 1980s : Thanks to SCR, the Stage Came of Age in the County in ‘80s

Whatever else the decade of the ‘80s meant for Orange County, in theater it signified the coming of age of South Coast Repertory.

The maturation process for the county’s most accomplished troupe--and its only professional resident theater--began in 1978 with the opening of a $3.5-million complex in Costa Mesa and culminated in 1988 with the nation’s most coveted theatrical accolade, a Tony Award for distinguished achievement.

Nothing in the history of Orange County theater--including the birth and growth of the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, which is the second-most important theatrical development of the ‘80s--can compare with the astonishing arc that SCR has traced in terms of artistic accomplishment.

Not the construction of the mammoth Orange County Performing Arts Center, which, when it comes to theater, is essentially an import house for Broadway antiques. Not the sporadic bursts of creativity at the Laguna Playhouse, which is chiefly a dowager that sometimes surprises with an original musical.

Not the blossoming of the theater department at UC Irvine into one of the more widely respected university drama programs. Not the commendable devotion of community troupes that continue to thrive across the county. And certainly not the intermittent hope for a storefront-theater scene, nor the lagging fortunes of the dinner-theater circuit.

But what about the decade’s plays and playwrights?

Of all the dramatists who made their marks in the ‘80s, it was David Mamet who seemed to soar above the rest with a body of work that excoriated the brutalizing materialism of the American Dream.

Whether Mamet’s characters were the real estate hustlers of “Glengarry Glen Ross” (the 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play that appeared at SCR in 1987) or the sleazy Hollywood operators of “Speed-the-Plow” (the 1988 play that will appear at SCR in 1990), they exemplify the crisis of values in a dog-eat-dog world.

Perhaps more than any other playwright, Mamet probes the ugly underbelly of the Reagan years. In a scabrous idiom of four-letter words that glorify the language of the street, his plays scrutinize the macho ethos of male bonding, sexist posturing and vicious careerism that characterized much of the yuppified ‘80s at various levels of society.

There were, of course, many other urgent voices of conscience:

* South African playwright Athol Fugard brought his message about the moral disaster of racism to the American theater time and again with powerful dramas such as his autobiographical “Master Harold . . . and the Boys,” then shifted his focus to the quest for personal salvation in “The Road to Mecca.”

* British playwright Caryl Churchill drew a bead on sexual hypocrisy in “Cloud 9” and turned her scathing satirical eye on feminism in “Top Girls,” both times catching the aura of the decade with brilliant theatricality.

* American playwright Wallace Shawn confronted the long-term psychic aftermath of the Vietnam War in “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” stirring controversy by drawing a parallel between the United States and Nazi Germany, and suggesting that an evil ideology of lies had insinuated itself into our seemingly civilized daily lives.

SCR presented all of these works and scores of others by such playwrights as Sam Shepard (“Fool for Love,” “Buried Child,” “True West”) and Tom Stoppard (“The Real Thing”), keeping local playgoers current with the most provocative contemporary fare being offered at professional resident theaters elsewhere.

Conspicuous by its absence, however, was the work of August Wilson, whose ambitious cycle of plays about the experience of black Americans in this century has been the major theatrical discovery of the ‘80s. Somehow, SCR has managed not to produce any of his plays--”Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson”--most of which have been widely presented at theaters around the country.

Still, SCR has offered plenty of its own discoveries of the ‘80s--world premieres of three plays by Keith Reddin, two by Craig Lucas and two by Beth Henley, among others--as well as many highly acclaimed revivals of classics from Shakespeare to Shaw, Sheridan to Synge, Wilde to Brecht.

SCR took a special pride in its close collaboration with Lucas, who was named an associate artist of the theater earlier this year. Between 1985 and 1988, SCR launched his “Three Postcards” and “Prelude to a Kiss” and has produced the West Coast premieres of two others, “Reckless” and “Blue Window.”

What connects each of these very different plays is Lucas’ poetic evocation of urban Angst and isolation. He writes about characters who discover that they are forever separate, unable to know each other as deeply as they know themselves. The only way to bear such terrible knowledge--according to the playwright’s message, if you will--is to love others as they are.

Like any theater catering to a large subscription audience, SCR has also offered a considerable amount of moderately cultured fare. Over the past decade it presented such variants in this category as Hugh Leonard’s “Da,” Michael Frayn’s “Benefactors” and Hugh Whitemore’s “Breaking the Code.”

But none was more notable than Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” which was to the ‘80s what his “Equus” had been to the ‘70s: a “masterpiece of middlebrow theater,” as one SCR staffer put it, attributing the description to critic John Simon.

Meanwhile, the single greatest contribution that SCR has made to the dramatic arts over the past decade probably had less to do with particular productions than with behind-the-scenes support for the writing of new plays through its Collaboration Laboratory.

Colab, begun in 1985, has commissioned work from about two dozen playwrights--David Henry Hwang, Richard Greenberg and Thomas Babe, to name only a few--which as often as not can result in full productions being mounted elsewhere.

Many arts institutions have undertaken all sorts of programs to foster the creation of original work during the ‘80s. But Colab’s independent SCR endowment of more than $1 million--the interest on which is devoted exclusively to new-play development--may well be unique among professional resident theaters.