‘Uncle Vanya’ Stirs Memories for O’Brien : Theater: The Old Globe’s artistic director is fulfilling a longtime dream by directing a Chekhov play, but it is a sweet and sour feeling.

Remembering sadness in the happiest of times. If it seems like a Chekhovian concept, so be it.

Jack O’Brien, artistic director of the Old Globe, is fulfilling a longtime dream of directing Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” on the main stage of his theater.

The playwright is new to O’Brien’s repertoire, and anticipation of the run, which begins Thursday with several of his favorite actors, fills the 50-year-old director with unmitigated delight. But the sad and silly characters in “Uncle Vanya” also evoke memories of a dark time, when O’Brien turned his back on Broadway to take up the reins of the Old Globe, at a time when San Diego theater was the kind of credit that no respectable New York theater artist would deign to put on his resume.

“When I came to San Diego in 1981, with a few exceptions, it was still worth a laugh to my friends from the East Coast,” O’Brien recalled in his Old Globe office.

“ ‘You’re going where?’ they said. ‘To do what?’ And then they’d apologize. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I guess they do good Shakespeare there. But if you want to do some serious theater, why not go to L.A.?’ ”

The Old Globe, then under the artistic leadership of Craig Noel (now continuing as executive producer), beckoned invitingly to O’Brien as a relatively unpressured environment where art could be nurtured, away from the glare of New York critics. O’Brien had had his directorial successes, most notably with the acclaimed revival of “Porgy and Bess.” But in 1980, his musical, “Most Happy Fella,” closed after just six weeks on Broadway, and he

was fired from the Los Angeles and Broadway productions of “I Ought to Be in Pictures” by Neil Simon himself.

His “altercation” with Simon, as he calls it, prompts him into a comparison of himself with Astrov in “Uncle Vanya.” He suggested that some of the differences between him and Simon resulted from the two being at critically different stages of life then. The rift has since been reconciled, and the Old Globe is presenting its second Simon world premiere, “Jake’s Women,” in March.

“In ‘Uncle Vanya,’ Astrov is approaching his 40s and Vanya is approaching his 50s,” O’Brien said. “This is not a small and insignificant detail in the life of these characters. The 40s is a career crisis--a crisis of belief. The 50s crisis is a mortality crisis--will she love me again? Will anyone love me again? When I came to the Globe, I was in Astrov’s shoes. I was asking myself, ‘Do I want to be Hal Prince, Tyrone Guthrie or Craig Noel?’--all very different people. And if I don’t choose to be any of these people, how do I let the person within out? Maybe somebody will sincerely want to be Jack O’Brien someday. I pity him, but there you have it,” he said with a wry half-smile.

O’Brien sidestepped any attempts to identify Simon with Vanya. Simon, however, was at an interesting stage in his life at the time of the firing. “I Ought to Be in Pictures” was the last play by the old, flip Simon, before he produced the darker, harder-hitting comedy of his semi-autobiographical trilogy, “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound.” It was also not long before he separated from and later divorced Marsha Mason, his second wife, who had been one of O’Brien’s closest friends for 20 years at that point.

“When Neil and I had our altercation, it was as boring as you might imagine,” O’Brien said. “He was digging in. I was digging out. Neil is enormously successful because he has perfected a code of ethics, a modus vivendi that practically no one else in the world can use. He’s unique. The best way of dealing with Neil is on his terms. He has a 25-year track record. I was a family friend, and, subsequent to my success in ‘Porgy and Bess,’ he was fascinated to find a man with such sensibilities sitting across from him at his breakfast table.

“I believe in my heart right now that Neil loves me as a colleague but doesn’t think I can play his music. As a director, I believe I can direct anything. To be successful, you’ve got to have enough chutzpah to say, ‘I can do anything.’ ”

But until Simon agrees with O’Brien’s assessment, you will see guest directors handling the Simon repertoire at the Old Globe: Gene Saks did “Rumors,” the 1988 Globe premiere that went on to Broadway; Ron Link will direct “Jake’s Women.”

And O’Brien seems happy to see the relationship between Simon and his theater continue on those terms.

“In spite of the scar, I’ve always adored him. Even when he was firing me, I found him artistically fascinating. And now we are growing closer together. His trilogy is closer to my dimension than ‘I Ought to Be in Pictures’ was. After 10 years of collective growth, we find ourselves over dinner and I see him as the preeminent playwright of his generation, growing and taking chances. He sees me as someone running one of the most successful regional theaters in the nation.”

In the meantime, at the helm of that successful regional theater, O’Brien is flexing his muscles with new challenges like “Uncle Vanya.” Part of what attracted him was the opportunity to work with actors he admires; he refers to the ones in this ensemble--Jonathan McMurtry, Katherine McGrath, Byron Jennings, Lynne Griffin, Richard Easton, Richard Kneeland, Caroline McCormick and Patricia Fraser--as “the best American actors extant right now.”

He is grateful to the actors for taking supporting roles; all of them have been headliners for the theater in the past. Watching them in rehearsal has been cathartic for O’Brien, reminding him why he wanted to work at the Old Globe in the first place. At one recent rehearsal he found himself crying, he said.

“The tears started to pour down my face because I thought, ‘This is what you wanted all your life,’ ” O’Brien said. “What I wanted was not fame or money, but the people. I wanted the society of artists. I wanted to be able to mix it up with the greatest jazz musicians of the stage in a riotous improvisation, which is what I’m doing. So how could I possibly not feel at home?”

The Old Globe has come a long way under the triumvirate leadership of O’Brien, Noel and Managing Director Thomas Hall, which began in 1981. The theater that O’Brien’s friends laughed at nine years ago, the theater that couldn’t get Broadway producers to come out and take a look at Stephen Metcalfe’s “Emily” in 1986, now has what New York producer Thomas Viertel two years ago called “the hot theater hand” in the country.

In 1988, the Old Globe originated four plays that went to New York--”Rumors,” “Into the Woods,” “The Cocktail Hour” and “Suds.” In recent years it has also presented the West Coast premiere of Broadway-bound shows such as “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson.” Even “The Kathy & Mo Show” played here before it went off-Broadway, where it’s still running.

Shakespeare continues to be a summer presence even as new work percolates. Director Lloyd Richards is coming to town to direct the West Coast premiere of Lee Blessing’s “Cobb,” sometime after Richards directs August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” for Broadway in April. Recently the Old Globe had an in-house reading of a new Stephen Metcalfe play. On the horizon is a new musical being commissioned based on “Death and the Blacksmith,” a discovery of the Globe’s Teatro Meta Latino Play Discovery Series, directed in 1989 by Noel, and the English translation of the sequel to “Brothers and Sisters,” a Maly State Drama Theatre production to be produced by the Globe in 1990-91.

But with success comes problems, and they threaten to bring regional theater full circle to the pressures that spurred O’Brien to escape New York in 1981. Government grants are shrinking. Competing theaters “are breathing down our necks and we’re breathing down theirs,” O’Brien said.

The opening of the La Jolla Playhouse and the San Diego Repertory Theatre seasons in May have caused the Old Globe to push its summer season back a full month to June. (“It’s cold out here in May,” he explained.)

“We have to keep making hits. People expect it,” O’Brien said. But when the theater gets hits, the pressure increases for other groups to get a piece of a pie that O’Brien argues looks bigger than it is.

The Dramatists Guild asked for a contract last year that would deny regional theaters the right to profit from future New York runs of the shows they premiere. (The Old Globe refused to go along.) The Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers argued for more money. The Old Globe budget may have jumped from $1.2 million for 13 plays in 1981 (when O’Brien’s tenure began) to $8.2 million in 1990 for a 12-play season, but how much money is left when the season is said and done?

On the books, it is about $100,000, O’Brien acknowledged, but it exists more as “a trick of the ledger” than as money in the hand, he said.

“ I can’t find it anywhere. Can you?” he asked.

“These are the good old days,” O’Brien said, sounding mournfully Chekhovian again, as though he were a character in “The Cherry Orchard,” hearing the sounds of trees being felled in the distance.

“Like any resource, we have a limited time span here. We must all be grateful that we are here now, but it’s going to get caught up very quickly with the economics that follow success. When the lawyers come in and the arbitrators, it is the beginning of the end. There is no doubt about it. It’s not about the passion and enthusiasm anymore; it becomes about the bottom line and the deal. If I have sleepless nights, that’s what causes them.