Previously Produced ‘Dog Logic’ Wins New-Play Grant

A play that had its world premiere more than two years ago at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa was cited as a never-produced “new work” earlier this week and singled out for a grant by the prestigious Fund for New American Plays. The grant will help finance a New York staging in 1992.

Tom Strelich’s “Dog Logic,” produced by SCR on the Second Stage in May, 1988, was declared one of seven national grant winners. The American Place Theatre will receive $32,000 to offset production costs, and Strelich will receive $10,000 for writing the play.

Deborah Dixon, the director of the prestigious, Washington-based fund, on Friday defended the logic of making the award to Strelich and the theater by noting that “the play had been substantially rewritten, at least a third of it. Based on that, we are considering it a new play.”

Dixon said she could not think of another instance in which a previously produced play had won a grant from the fund. “But,” she added, “if a play has received a production in Kansas, for example, and the author was unhappy with it and rewrote it, I would consider it a new play.”

When “Dog Logic” premiered at SCR in Costa Mesa, a Times theater critic praised the production and faulted the script “about a mildly goofy ex-hippie with all kinds of theories about how the human race got disconnected from itself and how it might repair the connection.”

The Fund for New American Plays operates as a joint project of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the American Express Co., in association with the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.