STAGE : New Voice at Yale : With his hands-on style and dedication to artists and teaching, Stan Wojewodski Jr. will change priorities at the drama school

Stan Wojewodski Jr. is full of questions this afternoon.

“Why are you here? What do you want from him? Why is he necessary? Is he rewriting history so that he becomes the artist and you become the schmo?”

Wojewodski paces back and forth across the gray and black high-tech, high-ceilinged interior of the spanking-new rehearsal room. Sleeves rolled and baseball-patterned necktie in hand, he rattles off the queries to actors John Cothran Jr. and Victor Mack, who play the respective title roles in Eric Overmyer’s “The Heliotrope Bouquet by Scott Joplin & Louis Chauvin,” having its West Coast premiere tonight at the La Jolla Playhouse.

It isn’t just another opening, another show, for the longtime artistic director of Baltimore’s Center Stage. This outing--part two of the play’s journey after its Baltimore premiere last February--is his first since assuming his dual titles of artistic director of the Yale Repertory Theatre and dean of the Yale School of Drama, arguably the most influential post in American theater today.

Officially Dean Wojewodski since July, he is set to take up residence in New Haven after La Jolla, although his work at the university has already begun. There he follows in the steps of Lloyd Richards, the director who shepherded August Wilson and Lorraine Hansberry to fame, and before him, Yale Rep founder and current American Repertory Theater head Robert Brustein.

Yet even without these larger-than-life personas in the background, Wojewodski would have his work cut out for him. With regional theaters strapped for cash, Broadway increasingly subservient to Japanese capital, recessionary woes and political conservatism putting a chill on arts funding and the imperatives of multiculturalism knocking at the door, nurturing the next generation of theater professionals won’t be easy.

But Stan’s the man for the job--or so say many in the theater community. Acclaimed for his intelligence as a director and his dedication to artists, Wojewodski’s 14-year reign at Center Stage was marked by a combination of classics redux and the development of contemporary playwrights such as Overmyer, with whom this is his fifth collaboration.

A quiet but impassioned man, Wojewodski promises no revolutions at Yale--and is loath to be specific about plans--but signs point to change from the internally criticized but outwardly heralded reign of Dean Richards. If Wojewodski’s directing style is any indication, his, unlike the last, will be a hands-on regime.

“He’ll be very present at the school,” predicts La Jolla Playhouse Literary Manager James Magruder, a 1988 graduate of the Yale School of Drama and one of two dramaturgs on “Heliotrope.” “He knows the students. The school will become more of a teaching institution again. Standards will improve.”

Of course, it isn’t only the school that will have to live up to high expectations, but also one of the most important regional stages in the United States.

“The biggest challenge he’s going to face--and it’s one I face, but not as often--is that what’s good for the students isn’t always good for creating the best in theater,” says La Jolla Playhouse Artistic Director Des McAnuff, whose theater serves as “master teacher” for UC San Diego’s graduate students. “You may want to create situations for students where they can fall on their faces, but the expectations are different for professional theater.

“He’s going to have to turn those contradictions into paradoxes,” McAnuff continues. “It’s an awfully big job for one person, putting a season together that close to New York where you’re under the microscope. But he’s a seasoned artistic director. His focus can go into the school and that’s important with that job.”

Born in Scranton, Pa., the first of two sons of a Department of Defense employee and a homemaker, Wojewodski (voy-uh-VUD-ski) attended the Jesuit-run University of Scranton. He was president of its dramatic society, as later was his younger brother, Robert, now a successful stage designer.

Wojewodski went on to earn his M.F.A. in directing from Catholic University. He became the artistic director of the university’s touring rep company for a year, went back and finished his degree, and then, lacking other plans, signed on to the touring gig for a second year.

When he came back--a little more focused about career goals and other postsecondary concerns--Wojewodski heard about a theater that had burned to the ground. It was Baltimore’s Center Stage, which was looking for a few good folks to keep the theater’s profile going while it rebuilt.

He took a job as the assistant to then-Artistic Director Jacques Cartier and, when Cartier retired in 1976, became Center Stage’s new chief, at 29.

“I had reservations,” Wojewodski, now 43, recalls of his sudden ascent. “I thought if I become an artistic director, what does that mean about getting to direct plays and how much of my energy is going to be diverted?”

As it turns out, he’s had time to wear both hats, although he did let his acting career wane and hasn’t appeared onstage since a 1976 production of “The Cherry Orchard.”

As a director, Wojewodski’s projects have ranged far and wide. He’s tackled a range of Shakespeares--including “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Measure for Measure,” “All’s Well That Ends Well,” “The Tempest” and “Hamlet”--and Ibsens such as “The Lady From the Sea.”

Wojewodski won’t be hanging up his director’s hat when he settles in at Yale. He plans to direct and teach--not to mention running the 200-student, eight-department, three-year graduate conservatory and the Yale Rep.

Among the structural changes that Wojewodski has already instituted is a reduction in the number of Rep productions per season, down from 10 to seven.

“That makes it possible for me to increase the rehearsal and the technical periods,” Wojewodski explains. “The kind of play I’m interested in needs more time than that schedule provided.”

The downside of the plan is that fewer shows may mean fewer chances for students to garner one of the coveted Rep casting slots, considered essential to the properly endowed acting graduate resume.

If he can do all he plans, Wojewodski’s level of participation in the day-to-day activities of the school will be quite a change from Richards’ tenure. Frequently the object of student complaints for his absence from campus and failure to have a working association with the student body, Richards spent the majority of his time developing August Wilson’s plays and shepherding them to Broadway.

While roundly praised throughout the theater community, Wojewodski’s appointment is not without its critics, though they are admittedly few.

Because of the power that goes with the post, financially vulnerable theater artists aren’t about to go public with their gripes. Yet off the record they cite Wilson’s achievements during Richards’ tenure and the need for more such inroads to be made, bemoaning that Wojewodski represents yet another white male at the helm of a major institution.

“He’s probably as sympathetic as you’ll get,” says one emerging African-American director. “But it would have been important to have a person of color, and the same kinds of priorities (of advancing the work of an African-American writer) probably won’t hold.”

In fact, you need look no further than the promotional photo for the AT&T;: OnStage program that sponsored the Baltimore and La Jolla stagings of “Heliotrope” to get a sense of what this director is talking about. A granting program, AT&T;: OnStage will sponsor six productions this year, of which two concern themselves with the experiences of people of color: “Heliotrope” and “Back to the Blanket” by Gary Leon Hill, a play about the Wounded Knee massacre to be done at the Denver Center Theater Company.

In the photo, though, are the AT&T; honchos and the artistic directors--including McAnuff and Wojewodski--who call the shots. Eleven people . . . all white guys.

That lack of representation is something Wojewodski would like to see change, yet he doesn’t think the hard-line tribalist aversion to the classical canon is the answer.

As a man whose artistic career has long been connected with the European-based repertory, Wojewodski maintains a belief in the accessibility and relevance of those works.

“The plays that magnetize me are the plays that have a truth, that when expressed speak to lots of kinds of people,” he says. “I think contemporary audiences should have a relationship with some of the most thrillingly poetically charged events that are possible. I mean, would you throw out ‘The Winter’s Tale’?

“I’ve never felt that when I did Shakespeare, I was responsible for creating a mini-(Royal Shakespeare Company) or something,” he continues. “We’re talking about Americans doing this work. We come to it as Americans because we’re magnetized by the idea, the characters, the language and situations.”

While unwavering in his praise for “Heliotrope,” Wojewodski acknowledges that most portrayals of African-Americans onstage these days tend to be musicals--or, in this case, plays with music--set in the jazz age.

“When I bristle, it’s because I’m in sympathy with that question,” he says, referring to why there isn’t more of a range. “What is it about getting stories out of the Afro-American condition that aren’t about boxing or dancing?

“I don’t want to get on a soapbox on some high moral horse about what some theaters could be doing. You have to just establish a strong point of view about the kind of contemporary writing you’re going to try to support.”

If anything, Wojewodski’s politics are more of class than race. “What is essential? For me, it’s support of the individual artists,” he says. “No artist has ever escaped the question of patronage.”

Financial pressures impinge on the other side of the proscenium as well. “What chance do you have of creating as dynamic an audience as you want when you have no resources?” he asks. “There are obstacles to the box office, some of which are economic, many of which are sociological. What you have to do is remove all the obstacles.”

These hurdles aren’t new, says Wojewodski, just higher lately. “When theaters were made, they were undercapitalized artistically and financially most of the time,” he says. “I don’t think people understood--because it’s such a new thing--just what resources it’s really going to take to make a difference as far as the artistic climate.

“People were initially optimistic that theaters could prove that they could make theater, people would come see it and funding would follow,” he says. “It never followed. Now to come to understand that it’s going to happen even less is pretty hard.”

At Yale, Wojewodski also plans to institute an associate artists program that will bring from three to seven writers to the Rep to work and pay them a stipend with the possibility of productions down the line.

“They are at different points in their careers, people whose work I’ve seen and I find important and necessary,” says Wojewodski, declining to name names.

The emphasis on playwrighting is expected from Wojewodski, who has been involved with developing writers--including Overmyer, Grace McKeaney, James Yoshimura and Russell Davis--and commissioning fresh translations of both classic and 20th-Century plays.

“I wasn’t interested in ‘script search,’ ” says Wojewodski of his Baltimore tenure. “I was interested in finding and supporting writers as opposed to looking for the next play to produce. I was looking for a writer with whom to have an ongoing relationship--(one who writes) plays that tend not to be realistic, to be poetically charged, to have a relatively broad social dimension and not to be linear.”

“I don’t think I’d have a career without Stan,” says Overmyer, whose plays fit Wojewodski’s specs and who will teach playwriting part time at Yale. “He’s conscious of the pitfalls that occur between writers and directors, but I never feel that he’s pushing an agenda of his own. I feel like I’m smarter for hanging around with Stan, and--this never gets into interviews--he’s a funny guy.”

At Center Stage, Wojewodski also orchestrated the U.S. premieres of works by Howard Brenton, Edward Bond, Odon von Horvath and Antonio Buero-Vallejo. Wojewodski has also directed and taught at theaters and schools across the country.

“What I’m most proud of during my time at Center Stage was that all the planning was artistically driven,” Wojewodski says. “It wasn’t about becoming a better producing organization. It was about trying to make a better place for artists.”

It was also an ongoing challenge. “The thing that kept my hand in is that there was no problem that we had as a theater that, when we discussed it for more than 10 minutes, we didn’t come up against the largest cultural problems,” he says. “ ‘How do you pay an actor?’ Suddenly, you’re talking about the economy and how this society looks at artists.”

His taste--as evidenced by the Center Stage years--is as eclectic as his style, which features an affinity for painterly imagery and complex, rich texts--”theater that stimulates both sides of the brain,” he says.

“Heliotrope,” for instance, uses a tripartite dream play structure to tell the tale of the last hours of a pensive Scott Joplin, the famed ragtime pianist, and Louis Chauvin, a reputedly brilliant musician who died an untimely death.

Joplin and Chauvin co-wrote only one work--the titular “Heliotrope Bouquet”--and the moral dilemmas of the drama center on reputation, fame and the mortality of art. All this is draped in Overmyer’s seductive way with words--a prose style as marked by a complex intelligence as it is by lyricism.

Much as Wojewodski is a playwright’s director, though, he calls on his own thespian experiences to get the most from his casts. “He’s generous about the collaborative process,” says Judyann Elder, who plays the three main women in Joplin’s life in “Heliotrope.” “He’s willing to let an actor take chances. That is not to say that he’s not clear about what he wants, but he gives you room to find it.”

“He’s the only person in the American theater that I know who uses the word technique ,” says La Jolla Playhouse’s Magruder. “As a director, he’s able to articulate for actors how he understands their process. It bodes well for the drama school.”

On the other hand, Wojewodski’s penchant for learning and intelligence makes him slow to indulge.

“He knows what he needs from actors,” Magruder says. “He tries to break them of naturalistic choices. He’s edgy about (actors relying on) psychological motivation and back story.”

“If actors are mired in their neurosis, he can be caustic,” Overmyer says. “But his patience has grown since I’ve known him. He’s maturing in a way that the Yale job is just right for him: less short-tempered and kinder with stupid people. He’s a pedagogue, but a natural teacher and a good one.”

The pedagogue surfaces when Wojewodski returns to “Heliotrope” to illustrate why he thinks theater matters. It’s a mistake, he believes, to view the arts apart from the social milieu.

“Often we think about arts education as a way of creating artists,” he says. “It’s about making a society. ‘Heliotrope’ is really a play about art, and, therefore, it’s a very political play. It’s about how art gets made and why and whose art counts.

“What I find so discouraging is that art becomes increasingly marginal in American society, that it’s something we can do without, or that other people should pay for,” says Wojewodski, waxing philosophical for the moment. “But then, is it all that surprising that there’s no arts policy when there’s no domestic policy?”