Old Globe Actors Adapt to Small-Screen Audience

If you care to catch a glimpse of how actors from the Old Globe Theatre translate from the stage to the small screen, don’t miss the riveting and lavishly reviewed American Playhouse production of “An Enemy of the People.”

The show airs from 9 to 11 p.m. Wednesday and 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. June 22 on KPBS-TV (Channel 15).

Jack O’Brien, the Globe’s artistic director, directed Arthur Miller’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Enemy” in his fifth production for American Playhouse, and all but two of the actors in the show--Nina Siemazko and Robert Symonds--are Globe veterans. That also includes actors in the mob scene (Mike Genovese, Ellen Crawford, Jeff Chandler, Anne Gee Byrd, Mitchell Edmonds and Tom Oleniacz).

John Glover, who dates back to the 1981 Globe season (“King Lear,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Measure for Measure”) plays Dr. Stockman, who thinks he is going be hailed as a hero when he discovers pollutants in the spa waters of his small town and ends up being reviled as an enemy by the townspeople, who fear that the truth, if it comes out, is going to ruin the tourist trade.

George Grizzard (“Another Antigone”) plays Stockman’s brother, the mayor. Byron Jennings (“Coriolanus,” “Uncle Vanya”) plays the newspaper editor who lionizes, then turns on Stockman; Richard Easton (“Uncle Vanya” and upcoming roles in “As You Like It” and “Hamlet”) plays the publisher who urges “moderation” in the interests of the small businessmen he represents, and William Anton (“Intimate Exchanges,” “Driving Miss Daisy”) plays the journalist with a weakness for politics.

It all fits in with O’Brien’s continuing desire to bring back a closer collaboration between stage and film artists. That’s a goal shared by American Playhouse executive producer Lindsay Law, who said on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., that he would like O’Brien to direct an American Playhouse feature film.

“We just haven’t found the right property for him yet,” said Law, whose organization just backed the recently released “Longtime Companion.”

Law and O’Brien have come a long way since 1979 when both were unemployed and Law was staying in O’Brien’s New York apartment for six months while trying to decide if he wanted to settle in Los Angeles or New York.

“I was writing a play, Lindsay was writing a book,” O’Brien recalled. “The Christmas we were the poorest, he decided to make some bread for gifts and I decided to make Christmas cookies. Thank God we had a sense of humor, because we didn’t have any money.”

They finished neither play nor book, but in 1983, Law, then at American Playhouse, asked O’Brien, then in his current role at the Old Globe, to do a live broadcast of “The Skin of Our Teeth” from the Old Globe Theatre for American Playhouse. That proved a success, and Law asked O’Brien to direct “Painting Churches,” “All My Sons” and “I Never Sang for my Father.”

But it hasn’t been since “The Skin of Our Teeth” that O’Brien got the chance to direct television with an Old Globe cast. He said he relished the chance to work with this pool of actors again.

“It’s no secret that my hidden agenda is to perpetrate a version of the American BBC, in which actors can move from the stage to the camera,” said O’Brien, who turns 51 on Monday.

O’Brien, talking by phone from his Old Globe office, acknowledged that he had felt obliged to try for stars at the outset, but that he had known all along he had the best actors for the job in his own company.

“In the event we fail, don’t worry. I’ll just bring my kids with me,” O’Brien said he told the playhouse producers about his initial star search.

O’Brien not only brought along the actors that he refers to as “the Old Globe stable,” but he brought along Old Globe composer Bob James and costume designer Lewis Brown, both of whom he will work with again on the Old Globe’s upcoming “Hamlet,” which O’Brien will direct.

The show is timely, not just because playwright Miller was encouraged by O’Brien to move the locale of the play from Norway to a Maine village in 1893. In a telling interview with O’Brien that airs after the play, Miller relates a recent incident in a Swiss town where residents kept mum about poisonous spa waters because they feared for their economy.

O’Brien also sees a connection with the imperiled National Endowment for the Arts funding, a subject he will address in a KPBS-TV telecast Sunday at 5:30 p.m., when he replaces guest John Frohnmayer, chairman of the NEA, who dropped out of the interview Tuesday night.

“The pollution here is taking away the NEA funding. Public funding for the arts is what makes this society a glorious place in which to live. To take it away is to damage the plant at its root,” O’Brien said.

PROGRAM NOTES: Sushi Performance Gallery will conclude its 10th anniversary season with local performance artist and UC San Diego administrator and writing instructor David Keevil presenting his latest work, “Sherman Speaks, Herbert Dreams,” at the gallery through Saturday. . . .

Coming back in the 11th season will be performance artist Leonard Pitt and the recently departed Latino comedy troupe “Culture Clash.” . . .

More Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre rentals: Gordon Jump will star in a new play, “I Am a Lion” by Reid Baer, Aug. 1-Sept. 16. Nehemiah Persoff will star in his one-man show, “Sholom Aleichem,” Oct. 14-23. . . .

Local playwright Charles Maynard will perform in his own one-man show, “Henry Miles,” a story about an 86-year-old widower, Aug. 13. Admission is free; donations at the door will go to Kiva House, a residential treatment house where women can go with their children to recover from alcohol and other problems. . . .

The Project Theater will remount “Striptease” and “Drowning” at the Big Kitchen Dessert Theatre tonight. . . .

San Diego Repertory Theatre’s WordWorks continues with “History Man” by Bill Corbett, the story of the life of an ex-politician charged with drug abuse, Monday. . . .

The Naked Theatre Club will present “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” June 23 at 5 p.m. in Zorro Gardens in Balboa Park, continuing Saturdays and Sundays throughout the summer.