THEATER : SCR’s ‘Holy Days’ Points Out Holes in System : The critics circle found the production worthy of seven major nominations, but not good enough for its overall-excellence vote.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, is it a duck? You’d think so.

But if you ask a committee, especially a committee of drama critics, it has a pretty good chance of being a non-duck.

I’m thinking of South Coast Repertory’s production of “Holy Days” by Sally Nemeth, and the recent nominations for the 1990 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards. Nemeth’s Dust Bowl play about a Depression-era farm family was named seven times in the nine major categories by which a production is judged for distinguished individual achievement.

Yet it was not nominated for overall excellence.

“Holy Days,” which appeared on the SCR Second Stage early in 1990, received one nomination for the director (Martin Benson), three for the performers out of a cast of four (Richard Doyle, Jeanne Paulsen, Devon Raymond), and one each for the scenic designer (John Iacovelli), the lighting designer (Tom Ruzika) and the costume designer (Anne Bruice).

In fact, only the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s “The Illusion” by Tony Kushner received more nominations--eight--but that includes its nod in the category for overall excellence.

Moreover, each of the five other productions in that category received fewer individual nominations, and a couple were barely cited.

By the LADCC’s own definition, therefore--even if not by its mysterious nominating process--”Holy Days” would seem to have possessed as much “duckness” as the competition. Perhaps more.

“I was a little puzzled myself by the omission,” Benson says.

The critics circle is not unaware of the peculiar inconsistencies that tend to crop up in its annual nominations.

“We go through this (confusion) every year ourselves,” said LADCC president T. H. McCulloh, a free-lance critic who reviews regularly for The Times.

“We have a voting process that is very complicated,” McCulloh notes.

How complicated? He is not at liberty to say: “That’s privileged and has been since the beginning of time.”

Inconsistencies probably are inevitable, given the diverse makeup of the LADCC. It consists of 18 theater writers (this one not among them) from a dozen publications of strikingly different size and scope, including The Times, the Antelope Valley Press, the Orange County Register, the B’nai B’rith Messenger, Daily Variety, the Daily Breeze and the Daily News.

Meanwhile, Benson is further puzzled by the lack of a nomination for the fourth actor in the “Holy Days” cast, John Linton, and by the failure to recognize Michael Roth, the sound designer who also composed original incidental music for the play.

“I certainly don’t want to grouse,” Benson says, “but if I were handing out nominations, I would have given it to ‘Holy Days’ for best ensemble. I don’t think the play works without an ensemble performance. John Linton was an essential part of that.

“And I must say I thought Michael Roth’s sound was absolutely brilliant. I liked it so much I keep a tape of it in my car. The fact that he has been consistently overlooked amazes me.”

Given Benson’s unwillingness to grouse, I decided not to ask him about the most glaring inconsistency of the nominations:

The LADCC saw fit to give its first Ted Schmitt Award for outstanding new play to Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy,” which had a 1990 world premiere at SCR, but at the same time failed to nominate the script for distinguished writing.

Indeed, “Search and Destroy” went unmentioned altogether. Out of 60 separate nominations, it came up with exactly zero. Which makes you wonder, again, what the LADCC was thinking.

Could winning the special award have eliminated the play from consideration in the regular categories? Not at all.

“Nothing would have precluded it,” says McCulloh.

In any case, Benson is not surprised that the script of “Holy Days” was overlooked in the writing category.

“I myself love it,” he says, “and I’ve been talking it up all over. But I’ve gotten nowhere. I don’t understand why. The sole explanation I can think of is that Sally is a miniaturist. You might miss the play when you read it because it’s so subtle. Her canvas is tiny.”

Nemeth, who believes SCR’s production was “basically flawless,” agrees with Benson about the script: “That play is a hard read. It’s so spare that it is very easy to miss. What’s going on is much more than what the characters say, which is actually very little.”

The postscript to “Holy Days” is that mutual admiration between theater and playwright goes just so far. SCR has decided not to do Nemeth’s most recent play, the large-cast “Spinning into Blue,” which it commissioned.

The postscript to the postscript is that after SCR’s no-go, “Spinning” was taken by the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco and was set to open in January. That production fell through, however, not because of too few words but because of too few dollars.

“The theater had a financial crunch,” Nemeth says, “and I’ve been hit by the slump.”