STAGE NOTES : SCR Will Produce Ayckbourn’s ‘Woman in Mind’

South Coast Repertory will mount British playwright Alan Ayckbourn’s “Woman in Mind,” a domestic comedy with surreal overtones about a repressed housewife married to a pompous vicar, as the final offering of the 1991-92 season on the SCR Mainstage.

“Woman in Mind,” to run May 22 through June 28, had its original production in London in 1986. “We’ve wanted to do it for a number of years,” SCR producing artistic director David Emmes said Wednesday. The play had its American premiere in 1988 at the Manhattan Theater Club in New York with Stockard Channing as the lead. San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company staged the play’s Southern California premiere in 1991.

“It’s a marvelous piece of theater,” said Emmes, who directed the prolific Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval” two seasons ago on the SCR Mainstage. “We think it’s atypical of his work. Without losing any of its kinetic strengths it charts the progress of the main character toward a very moving, dramatic end.”

SCR officials also announced Wednesday that the world premiere of “Hospitality Suite” by Roger Rueff, 35, a little-known Chicago-based playwright, will be the final offering of the season on the Second Stage. It is said to be about the three-man marketing department of a Midwest manufacturing company and was described in a press release as a “heart-warmingly funny look at saving one’s skin or saving one’s soul in a bearish America.”

“Hospitality Suite,” to run April 21 through May 24, will be the fifth world premiere of a new play at SCR this season, a record matched only once before, during the 1982-83 season. Rueff’s play was offered to the theater by his New York-based agent, Helen Merrill.

“It’s not uncommon for us to get a first look at a play by a new writer,” Emmes said. “We were generally taken with the script, but what was equally attractive to us is that it has some wonderful roles for our founding artists.”

Stephen Albrezzi, who previously directed “At Long Last Leo” and “The Ramp” at SCR, will direct Richard Doyle, Art Koustik and Don Took in “Hospitality Suite.” Emmes will stage “Woman in Mind” with a cast yet to be named.

SCR VIA NYC: Not since it won a 1988 Tony Award has SCR received as much East Coast attention as it’s getting now--all because of three SCR-commissioned plays that premiered in Costa Mesa.

One seen earlier this season on the SCR Second Stage--Donald Margulies’ “Sight Unseen”--has already opened in a new production in New York at the Manhattan Theater Club’s 150-seat Stage 2.

“The reviews have been so good and sales have gone so well,” said MTC press director Helen Davis, “that we’re looking to move it to a different theater at the end of March.”

Another play staged on the SCR Mainstage two seasons ago--Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy”--begins previews Friday on Broadway at the 700-seat Circle in the Square. The opening is set for Feb. 28. Griffin Dunne of movie fame--”My Girl,” “Once Around” and “After Hours”--will star with an entirely new cast.

“Because we’re doing the production in the round, we’ve had to redesign it,” said director David Chambers, who also staged the SCR original. “Instead of all the inky black glass we had at South Coast, we’re setting it on asphalt like an American journey on an American highway--really gritty.”

The third play--Richard Greenberg’s “The Extra Man,” which closed at SCR in November--goes into rehearsal March 31 and begins previews April 28 at the Manhattan Theater Club’s 299-seat Mainstage. It, too, will be recast and, apparently, rewritten.

“Richard has said he wants to do work on it,” said MTC’s Davis. “But you never know what that means. Sometimes all he does is change two words.”

Little wonder that New York Times theater columnist Alex Witchel--writing recently of “The Extra Man”--seems to think SCR puts on out-of-town tryouts. “The play landed at Manhattan Theater Club after its tryout last fall” at SCR, Witchel reported. It’s a point of view that Emmes regards as “part of the provincialism of New York.”

“The idea that we did a tryout is preposterous,” he said. “I had to laugh when I read that. New York likes to think the theatrical world rises and sets there. But it’s years behind the times. It’s just not the reality any more.”

SCR-EAMING KIDS: “The Right Self” by Jerry Patch and Diane King Vann, a musical children’s play about self-esteem, is one unheralded SCR production that will be seen by an estimated 70,000 kids. It has just gone on the road to schools in Orange and Los Angeles Counties.

“We’ve replaced the whimsy of earlier shows with real issues,” director John-David Keller notes of the show, which features Myrona Delaney, Felipe Galvez, Craig George and Laura Woolery.

The show has been underwritten in part by a two-year $65,000 grant from Mervyn’s / Dayton Hudson Foundation, the largest grant to SCR’s Educational Touring Production program since it began 14 years ago.

THE SECRET GARDEN: The Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, expected to name a new artistic director later this month, is keeping the process so hush-hush that even the names of the interviewing committee to select a candidate are not being revealed.

“I can’t tell you who they are,” spokeswoman Dede Ginter said. “The theater wants them kept private.” What’s the reasoning behind the secrecy? “It’s a personnel matter,” Ginter explained.

Ginter did say that acting artistic director Jules Aaron is not on the committee, however, and does not have a role in picking his successor. Anyway he’d rather be in Philadelphia, where he’s directing a show.