London Director Has Little Use for Southland Theater

Esteemed writer, producer, lecturer and physician Jonathan Miller, 59, might be in San Diego to lecture on theater tonight, but that doesn’t mean he has to like San Diego theater.

But the artistic director of London’s Old Vic Theatre doesn’t single out San Diego for approbation. What is his take on Southern California theater in general?

“I haven’t noticed any,” he said on the phone from his Toronto hotel room.

The title of Miller’s talk, “Survival of the Fittest,” will be the keynote address for a three-day international symposium at UC San Diego titled “Classics in Contemporary Theatre.” It is open to the public and will be held at UCSD’s Price Center Ballroom at 8 p.m.

Among the participants are Des McAnuff, artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, designers Robert Israel and John Arnone, director Martha Clarke, artistic directors Robert Falls (Goodman Theatre), Mark Lamos (Hartford Stage Company) and Sharon Ott (Berkeley Repertory Theatre) and director Charles Marowitz.

Miller said his talk will deal with how plays survive through the passage of time, but he hasn’t written it yet.

Is he concerned that the rising cost of producing shows with large casts may imperil the classics? Miller, who has developed a reputation for his sometimes controversial staging of the classics (as in a “Mikado,” described by one critic as being “full of Marx brothers shtick”), doesn’t worry about the finance issue but about the intelligence of audiences.

“The classics are at risk, but they are at risk because modern audiences are dwindling, there’s less and less interest, the audience is becoming more ignorant and suburbanized,” said Miller. “Eventually, everything will come to the level of Southern California.”

Miller doesn’t have much use for the critics either. He has never worked in San Diego and doesn’t plan to, but after directing “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” at the Music Center Opera in Los Angeles in September, 1988, he doesn’t expect to work there again, either.

“You’ve got such idiotic critics there,” he said. “It’s casting pearls before swine. They are completely provincial and don’t know anything.”

Does he have any advice for anyone in the theater?

“I never give advice to anyone.”

Miller, a veteran opera director who co-authored and performed in the satirical review “Beyond the Fringe,” presented in London in 1959, is now in Toronto working on a film about the psychology of language for BBC and CBC television.

His last journey to San Diego was a scant two weeks ago. His destination was the Salk Institute, but his mission there had to do with science and the brain.

Theater only takes up about 30% of his time, he said. Clearly, there isn’t enough brain work in theatrical enterprises--certainly not in Southern California anyway.

The Bowery Theatre’s decision to rent the Kingston Playhouse on the dark nights of “Teibele and Her Demon” is a laudable one. Too bad the choice of work in this debut falls short of the Bowery’s usually high standards.

The first part of the double bill, Mack Owen’s monologue “Coyotes,” is a clever if slight piece about visitors from outer space, nicely performed by Bowery favorite Erin Kelly (the sizzling star of “Teibele and Her Demon”).

But the second one-act, “Forecast,” a confusing story of a romance between an astronaut and a potato farmer after an environmental holocaust, is hopelessly and self-consciously arty. In one scene the couple--earnestly played by Dorrie Board and Kirk Ellis--serenade each other with animal and plane sounds. From that point on, the only surprise in Elizabeth Wray’s dialogue is that something that starts at such a low level can still crash with a thud. The show plays Tuesday and Wednesday nights through March 14. Sad to say, it does not merit missing “thirtysomething” or “China Beach.”

“Where’s Oscar?” a new play at the Progressive Stage Company through March 1 fares better. It is hampered at the outset when playwright Mark Melden subscribes to his own peculiar brand of confusion which comes, in part, from borrowing too heavily from other writers.

The fantasy child shared by the central characters Doug and his girlfriend, Marisa, is right out of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The search for Oscar, a missing cat, is reminiscent of the search for the dog, Sheba, in “Come Back Little Sheba.”

But when Melden relies on his own voice and leaves the world of the relationship--which the playwright doesn’t seem to have a handle on anyway--and travels into Doug’s inner fantasy world, the play heats up. Lost in a drug trip, Doug encounters a girl who is tied to a chair and fears that, if released, she will fly away, and a clown who keeps trying to paint a happy face on his mouth but can’t find the right makeup.

A commandant asks him a life-or-death question that is a letdown in its sophomoric wording, especially in the light of today’s cataclysmic social changes: What is a perfect society? But there’s a fair share of emotional hits among the misses; Melden’s work is raw, but worth watching. And the play is well-served by the talented Marc Wong as the troubled Doug, Anne Victoria as “Z,” the girl who thinks she can fly, and Ron Teller as Bubbles, the sad-faced clown.

PROGRAM NOTES: The Lamb’s Players Theatre production of “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” will continue amazing San Diego audiences Wednesday-Sunday, through March 18, at the Lyceum Space. In anticipation of this second extension at the Lyceum, artistic director Robert Smyth wisely divided up his repertory company cast between “Joseph” and “The Nerd,” which will go up against “Joseph” when it opens March 2 in the theater’s home in National City. Because of the expense of producing in the Lyceum, which Smyth described as “scary,” the company is doing “just a little better” than breaking even. But that’s just gravy if his primary purpose for the Lyceum run is achieved: the development of new audiences. The real test of the experiment will be if he succeeds in “nudging” those audiences to National City on March 2. . . .

Starlight Musical Theatre will hold its Equity and non-Equity auditions March 18-22. Call 544-7800 for information.