Fictional Vocal Group From 1960s, Comedy From 1806 Take the Stage

Every year for his birthday, Martin Magner dusts off his director’s cap and goes to work on a local stage. This year’s offering is Heinrich von Kleist’s 1806 comedy, “The Broken Jug,” at the Burbage Theatre in West Los Angeles. It is also Magner’s 92nd birthday.

“I had thought of this play for a long time,” said the German-born director, who will celebrate his birthday the day before Friday’s opening. “I was already planning it last May when all of that Clarence Thomas business came up.” The story--in a new translation by Carl Mueller--centers on a young girl in 18th-Century Netherlands who is sexually harassed by the village judge.

“It’s reminiscent of that horrible thing we watched on television,” Magner said, referring to Thomas’ Senate hearings, “except that mine comes with a chuckle.” The director, who regards Thomas’ confirmation as “the saddest day for the progress of women,” believes the period piece is immediately contemporary: “There’s no dust gathered. It’s a comedy with a deep moral base--not knockabout humor, though it is physically funny.”

Magner, who co-produces with the local Goethe Institute, has a long list of European revivals to his credit, most recently “La Ronde” (1989), “Woyzeck” (1990) and “The Beaver Coat” (1991). “I am getting older,” admits the 1989 L. A. Drama Critics Circle Award recipient, “and I feel it. I don’t like this recent rain; I can’t go down to the ocean and walk. I don’t walk on the water, you know--I leave that for someone else. I walk next to it.”

Also opening this month:

Tuesday: Quebec playwright Rene-Daniel Dubois comes to Hollywood’s Stages Theatre in French- and English-language readings of “Don’t Ever Blame the Bedouins,” and a full staging (in English) of “Being at Home with Claude.”

Tuesday: Steve McGraw’s hit “Forever Plaid,” about a ‘60s singing group, arrives at Beverly Hills’ Canon Theatre after a run last year at the Pasadena Playhouse.

Tuesday: Mary Stark’s one-woman show, “White Ashes--The Life and Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe,” will play two performances at Group Repertory Theatre in North Hollywood.

Wednesday: It’s sanity versus madness in Don DeLillo’s black comedy “The Day Room,” at the Fountainhead Theatre in Hollywood.

Thursday: Two senior citizens find romance in M. J. Appleman’s “Foxtrot on Gardiner’s Bay,” bowing at Beverly Hills’ Theatre 40.

Friday: The last day of a death row convict is the subject of Tim Boland’s “In the Name of the People,” postponed from last fall at the new Road Theatre in Burbank.

Friday: A couple encounters a friend they haven’t seen in 20 years in Harold Pinter’s prickly drama “Old Times” at West Coast Ensemble in Hollywood.

March 9: Yuppie New Yorkers confront relationships, AIDS and homelessness at a summer beach house in Richard Greenberg’s comedy “Eastern Standard” at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills.

March 12: A 19th-Century woman is committed to an insane asylum by her husband--for the crime of infidelity--in Lanie Robertson’s “The Insanity of Mary Girard” at The Complex in Hollywood.

March 12: Two writers hole up in a hotel room to try to write an epic movie about ancient Egypt in Anne Taylor’s comedy “Up the Nile,” making its world premiere at the Victory Theatre in Burbank.

March 14: Two one-acts, Patty Gideon Sloan’s “Beginnings” and Luigi Jannuzzi’s “A Bench at the Edge,” bow at Studio City’s Two Roads Theatre under the umbrella title “Affection and Angst.”

March 16: Two short plays by George Bernard Shaw, “Village Wooing” and “Passion, Poison and Petrifaction,” come to the Tamarind Theatre in Hollywood.

March 18: In Hollywood, East West Players presents a multicultural staging of Luigi Pirandello’s classic comedy “Six Characters in Search of an Author.”

March 20: David Vowell’s “The Home Front Blues,” a nostalgic musical set on a summer afternoon during World War II, opens at the Center Stage in Studio City.

March 27: A Pennsylvania mining town circa 1864 is the setting for Jason Miller’s story of two Irish immigrant miners, “Nobody Hears a Broken Drum,” at the Westside Theatre Group in West L.A.