Six New Works to Highlight Globe Season : DIEGO COUNTY

The West Coast premiere of a new play bR Gurney and a California premiere by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson will highlight San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre’s 1991 winter season of six new works, theater officials announced this week.

All of the plays are by contemporary authors.

The season marks a departure for the Old Globe, which is known for balancing a handful of new plays with more familiar, classical works.

“This is the kind of season we would not have deemed possible eight years ago. It would have seemed foolhardy,” Old Globe Artistic Director Jack O’Brien said.

The familiarity of the authors to San Diego audiences made a season of all new plays possible this year, O’Brien said.

“People trust these writers. They want to see the new work,” he said.

The presentation of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” will mark the playwright’s third West Coast premiere in four years at the Old Globe, and Gurney’s “The Snow Ball” will be his third world premiere here in three years.

Two additional world premieres on the schedule, Lillian Garrett’s “The White Rose” and Larry Ketron’s “Sun Bearing Down,” have already been presented in staged readings here earlier this year as part of the Old Globe’s Play Discovery Series.

The Globe is co-producing Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” with the Yale Repertory Theatre where the play debuted earlier this year.

Like Wilson’s two earlier Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, “Fences” and “The Piano Lesson,” “Two Trains Running” looks at another decade of African-American life in the 20th Century; it takes place in a Pittsburgh diner in 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Tony-award winning director Lloyd Richards, who directed all of Wilson’s previous works in this series, will direct the play which runs from March 14 to April 21.

The Old Globe will co-produce A. R. Gurney’s “The Snow Ball” with the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Conn., where O’Brien will stage the world premiere in mid-February.

“The Snow Ball,” running here May 9 though June 16, is a 15-character play adapted from Gurney’s novel of the same name. It focuses on the author’s familiar world of genteel but disenfranchised American WASPs. Graciela Daniele will choreograph the story of a couple who, 40 years after the fact, try to recreate the romance of their first meeting a dance called the Snow Ball.

Gurney’s last world premiere at the Old Globe, “The Cocktail Hour,” went on to a successful off-Broadway run under O’Brien’s direction.

The season at the Globe’s two indoor theaters kicks off with two world premieres, “The White Rose” on the Old Globe main stage Jan. 17 to Feb. 24, and “Sun Bearing Down” at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage Jan. 12 to Feb. 24.

“The White Rose,” directed by Old Globe executive director Craig Noel, will run Jan. 17 through Feb. 24. It is based on the true story of a band of German students who were martyred fighting against Hitler.

“Sun Bearing Down,” a story about life in a seafood restaurant along the South Carolina coast, will be followed by the San Diego premiere of “Other People’s Money,” Jerry Sterner’s Off-Broadway comedy hit about a sleazy corporate raider who tries to take over a New England town, running March 9 to April 21.

The Cassius Carter season concludes with “La Fiaca,” May 9 though June 16, the latest offering by the Old Globe’s Teatro Meta project. The director of the theater’s Teatro Meta arm, Raul Moncada, provides the new translation of Ricardo Talesnik’s black comedy about what happens when a man wakes up one morning to find that he simply can’t face another day at the office--and just stays home.

Directors for the plays at the Cassius Carter Centre Stage have yet to be announced.

O’Brien called the season “the year of the writer” and referred to it as “a season about brand new work with a lot of old friends.”

The Old Globe previously produced Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” and “The Piano Lesson,” both of which went on to Broadway, where “The Piano Lesson is still playing. The theater previously produced Gurney’s “Another Antigone” as well as “The Cocktail Hour.”

Garrett, author of “The White Rose,” has appeared at the Old Globe both as an actress, in “Love’s Labor’s Lost” and “The Fanlights,” and worked as a director, in a successful run of “The Granny” this January.

And the Old Globe produced “La Fiaca” in a small-scale workshop production at the Marquis Public Theatre in 1987.

O’Brien cautioned against seeing the season of all-new work as a trend.

“I just go down to the market and see what’s fresh. Then I say come on over,” he said.