THEATER : Selections for the New Season Show Plenty of Ambition

Just when you thought the post-holiday winter doldrums had arrived, the month of January shows up with a newly minted theater season packing a wallop to rival September’s.

The biggest production on the horizon--or at least the one with the most to prove--is Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy.” It begins previews Friday and has its world premiere Jan. 12 on the Mainstage at South Coast Repertory.

The Costa Mesa theater is touting the play, about a man who turns to the movie industry to fulfill a spiritual quest, as everything from “an offbeat comic epic” to “storm warnings for the American dream.” Since that covers an awful lot of ground, much of it mutually exclusive, SCR artistic director Martin Benson was good enough to explain:

“The play is about greed. It’s a sort of Horatio Alger story gone insane. The central character succeeds, but at what cost? The decade of the ‘80s has led us to a succeed-at-all-costs frame of mind. The hell with how many bodies you leave strewn on your path because, finally, the bottom line has become the only line. Korder has struck a note for the ‘90s. He has written the play out of a profound passion regarding the disintegration of American values.”

If, on the other hand, you hanker for “an uplifting American play about personal strength and renewal set against the harsh realities of the Dust Bowl”--that is the daunting official blurb--you need only look to the SCR Second Stage for Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days.” Her four-character drama bows there Jan. 26 in a U.S. premiere, with previews beginning Jan. 23.

“It’s really a very delicate play,” Benson said. “I like to think of it as done in watercolors.”

Over at the Grove Shakespeare Festival, the Bard is about to get what artistic director Thomas F. Bradac calls the “non-concept concept” treatment with a backstage-style “Twelfth Night.” The comedy begins previews Jan. 17 and opens two days later at Garden Grove’s Gem Theatre.

“The basic idea of presenting Shakespeare in the Gem is to emphasize the text and not to get caught up in the conceit of time and place,” Bradac explained between rehearsals. “We will use the theatrical device of a group of actors coming together to present the play.

“You’ll see them getting into their costumes, for instance. And the costumes will date from different periods--all the way from Elizabethan times to the present. We’ll assist the audience with simple sets and lighting, but it will have to use more of its own imagination than usual to become involved.”

Meanwhile, the Alternative Repertory Theatre in Santa Ana is about to stage what is likely to be the first memorial production anywhere of “Waiting for Godot” after the recent death of its author. Samuel Beckett died last month in Paris at age 83.

Judging from the jaunty description in the ART press release--”an offbeat comedy of two quirky men alone at a crossroads”--the production sounds as if it may also be the first done like a buddy movie (sort of Neil Simon meets Bertolt Brecht?). Previews, beginning Jan. 12, should tell. The opening is Jan. 19.

If you want to honor Beckett a few days earlier, you can pop over to the Newport Beach Public Library, where Steve Mellow will read from some of Beckett’s radio pieces as well as from “Godot” and “Krapp’s Last Tape” on Jan. 9. It’s free.

Also coming in January will be Vaclav Havel’s “Largo Desolato,” as a tribute to its author, the dissident Czechoslovak playwright who went from being a political prisoner to president of his country after its so-called “velvet revolution.”

“Havel wrote this play in four days, after he was released from an earlier prison term,” said producer James Breslin, who has been in telephone contact with Civic Forum, the political opposition group that Havel led.

“He had been sentenced to four years hard labor for writing Charter 77, an international human-rights document,” Breslin said. “They wouldn’t allow him to write in jail. He was permitted to correspond once a week with his wife, but only about family matters. From my point of view, ‘Largo Desolato’ is the play that is most directly representative of him and his own case. It is painfully close.”

The premiere Jan. 27 at the Fullerton College Studio Theatre will be an invitation-only benefit to raise funds for Amnesty International. An open-ended run will begin Feb. 2.

As for other college campuses, UC Irvine will present a production of Jean Racine’s “Phaedra” (beginning Jan. 25 at the Fine Arts Concert Hall); Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana will mount Moliere’s “Tartuffe” (beginning Jan. 19 at the Phillips Hall Theatre) and Caryl Churchill’s “Fen” (beginning Jan. 26 at the Phillips Hall Little Theatre West).

In the musicals department, Pam Dawber (of “Mork and Mindy” fame and “My Sister Sam” obscurity) will make her debut at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in “She Loves Me,” co-starring Joel Higgins.

The show, a 1963 Tony-nominated collaboration by Jerry Bock (music), Sheldon Harnick (lyrics) and Joe Masteroff (libretto), tells the boy-meets-girl story of two lonely co-workers in a Viennese boutique who don’t get along but who fall for each other through anonymous love letters. It will run Jan. 23 through 28.

“She Loves Me” is based on “Parfumerie,” the Miklos Laszlo play that also inspired Ernst Lubitsch’s “The Shop Around the Corner,” the 1940 movie starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. The Harnick-Bock team went on to greater fame with “Fiddler on the Roof,” but some Broadway aficionados believe this show has some of their loveliest tunes.

The Laguna Playhouse is bringing back another Harnick musical as well. His “A Wonderful Life,” an adaptation of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” turned out to be such a huge hit in its limited run at the Moulton Theatre in December that artistic director Douglas Rowe decided to remount it (with new sets) as a regular subscription offering, beginning Jan. 16.

“A Wonderful Life” was co-written with Joe Raposo, who composed the music. It will replace the previously announced “Night of Illusion” by Arthur Lewis and Lawrence Alexander, a mystery thriller that wasn’t ready to be staged anyway.

(Mystery fans will get their thrills a few months hence. The Playhouse has just obtained rights to Jeffrey Archer’s “Beyond Reasonable Doubt,” which will fill the fourth slot of the season, March 13 to April 8. “We believe it will be an American premiere,” general manager Jody Davidson said.)

Finally, in the high-school division, you can catch Gina Bowman’s “Someday”--if you don’t mind traveling to San Diego. Bowman, who lives in Anaheim, is one of four winners of the 1989 California Young Playwrights Project competition. Her play will be produced along with three others at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Elizabeth North Theatre begining Jan. 10.

Closer to home, the Southern California Educational Theatre Assn. will present the three winning productions from its 19th annual High School Theatre Festival, beginning Jan. 20 at Plummer Auditorium in Fullerton.

They are of Bill Johnson’s “Dirty Work at the Crossroads” (California High, Whittier); Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” (Arlington High); Jim Leonard Jr.’s “And They Dance Real Slow in Jackson” (La Jolla High).

As part of the program, two Orange County high schools will present excerpts from their productions, which were runners-up: Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” (Mission Viejo High) and Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth (Dana Hills High).