A Plan Comes Together at La Jolla Playhouse

For starters, some name dropping:

Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire and Mel Ferrer started the La Jolla Playhouse in 1947 with a summer production of “Night Must Fall.” Zsa Zsa Gabor helped close the place 17 years later in “Blithe Spirit.”

The playhouse got started again in 1983 with a 25-year-old director and a 31-year-old artistic director, Peter Sellars and Des McAnuff, respectively, staging Bertolt Brecht’s “The Visions of Simone Machard.”

Ah, what a difference a vision and a few years make.

The La Jolla Playhouse might have started as a summer thing--after all, the turf meets the surf at nearby Del Mar during the summer and Hollywood is only 100 miles away and Torrey Pines and the Pacific are just one kick over the next sand dune--but the theater folks and UC San Diego have developed a live-in arrangement possibly unmatched anywhere else.

Shared space, shared skills, shared talents, a professional regional theater and an academic institution. But two distinct organizations with two different purposes. Landlord and tenant on the boards together.

It’s a good use of money. Tight budgets go right where they can do the most: into learning, into productions.

In eight years, this partnership has become a model of how a public-private program can work . . . if the right stuff and the right people are there. It may also become a model for organizations squeezed for money.

On Sunday, when McAnuff stages the premiere of Lee Blessing’s “Fortinbras,” the second of a hoped-for three theaters officially opens: the new 400-seat Mandell Weiss Forum.

Architect Antoine Predock has designed a theater gem, inside and out, its soon-to-be landmark mirror wall reflecting and revealing the campus’ eucalyptus groves and the nearby companion 492-seat Mandell Weiss Theatre. This modest-scale complex is a theater district in the making. It’s called the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts in honor of the 100-year-old retired businessman, theater enthusiast and principal donor who gave more than $1 million both times that the playhouse and the university talked construction.

Other universities may have informal arrangements with theaters or intern programs, but few have a working professional theater on campus. (The Music Center’s Center Theatre Group got its start at UCLA nearly 30 years ago with professionals performing in available spaces.)

But in La Jolla, it’s a careful blending of the academic spirit and professional realities. Many senior members of the playhouse staff teach in the theater department. Graduate students work in all phases of the professional productions. Not only are the two stages shared at various times of the year, but the rehearsal spaces, the technical staff, the shops and the equipment are also shared. While the playhouse originally ran during summer break, it now works from May through November, its performances carefully worked out to fit into the theater department’s schedules and needs.

The program works because the two sides want it to work, and because the two sides have codified their arrangement in a contract that covers everything from play dates to light-bulb replacement. Nothing is left to handshakes or good intentions. The original agreement was blessed by the state attorney general’s office, just to make sure no legal terms had been unstoned regarding finances and use.

That contract is almost biblical in its strength. And like bibles everywhere, it comes up for periodic readings and re-interpretations. No season, no production, no activity for the playhouse or the university is planned without some meeting of all minds.

Working it out in advance is easier to take than picking up pieces regretfully.

Douglas Cook, a senior professor of theater at Penn State and producing artistic director of the Utah Shakespearean Festival, has studied attempts at coexistence between campuses and professional theater organizations. It’s that contract and the review procedure, in his mind, that have made the La Jolla experience workable and even singular.

“Most colleges give degrees along with a fond adieu,” Cook says. “And in most professional theaters getting started is like getting into a closed organization. At La Jolla, it’s a blending of resources on both sides.”

The partnership has another generally unseen value, according to Arthur Wagner, the founding chair of the university’s theater program. The on-campus professional theater helps the university when it goes out every February to recruit its future MFA candidates. Like Broadway producers, the university conducts auditions for student actors and interviews undergraduates in all areas: directing, dramaturgy, writing, design, stage management and now Hispanic theater. A La Jolla Playhouse representative goes on the auditions to explain the role of the professional theater.

With the new theater, Alan Levey, for the past 10 years the playhouse’s managing director, sees a possible turning in financial matters. An extra 1,200 tickets a week might be sold now at the new Forum. At an average of $20 a ticket, that’s like found gold for the playhouse, which like most nonprofit theaters often sees deficits clouding its horizons.

Now there’s talk of a future third theater and year-round schedules. The first Weiss Theater developed when the university provided the land and the playhouse the funds. The new Forum was financed largely by the university as it replaced its old Warren Theater. And of course, there was a second $1-million gift from Mandell Weiss. The next step: The university still has some land. The playhouse hopes to get the dollars.

For the past three years, the final production of the playhouse season, nudging into the university’s fall quarter, has been done in association with the theater department and its third-year students in a 10-week residency with the playhouse. This October it will be the musical “Elmer Gantry” at the Weiss Theatre through Nov. 24. The Forum also in November will be offering the department’s production of “Dr. Faustus Lights the Light.”

That’s how it works in La Jolla. One night Gantry, same night Faustus.