Work by UCSD Playwright Finally Gets Local Reading

Playwright Allan Havis has been much produced. But not in San Diego, where he has lived and worked as a UC San Diego professor for the past four years.

His plays have been presented at the South Coast Repertory Theatre (which has commissioned his work) in Costa Mesa, the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., and the WPA Theatre in New York, among others. He has received National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim, Rockefeller and McKnight grants. Still, he has never had a show produced here.

“It’s a little perverse to be out in San Diego and not work locally,” Havis said on the phone. “It’s one of those ironies not to have a relationship with a theater.”

At 7 p.m. Monday, however, San Diego can get a peek at Havis’ work, something it hasn’t been seeing until now.

A staged reading of “Heaven and Earth,” an as yet unproduced Havis play, will be presented as part of the Fourth Annual Streisand Festival of New Jewish Plays at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre.

The play is about a Jewish boy who marries the daughter of a Christian television evangelist. Each of their fathers, however, tries to win his new in-law over to his side.

“I wanted to explore salesmanship in a comic way, just as David Mamet explored salesmanship (with “Glengarry Glen Ross”) in a cynical way,” Havis said.

Havis describes the play as a stylistic departure for him.

“It’s different from the other work I do because it’s a commercial comedy. My work is usually darker, Pinteresque, political and cryptic. This is more accessible, a play for people to enjoy and not be polarized.”

One fan of the play is veteran writer-comedian Shelley Berman, who played the part of the father in the show’s first staged reading at L.A. Theatre Works in Santa Monica last year. Berman is traveling to San Diego to re-create his part, even though he has a play of his own opening Off Broadway this week--”First Is Supper.”

Tickets are $8 with group discounts available. For information, call the box office at 234-9583.

Amy Shock and Brenda Schumacher started Fresh Dish last November as an experiment. They were hopeful, but unsure, of whether they would find a large enough audience for a four-show “Homo Genius” series featuring lesbian and gay performance artists.

After selling out the Sushi Performance Gallery for their last three shows, the only thing they are still unsure of is what artists they will present in their next series.

The final show in the current series, “Homegrown Revue,” will be presented Friday and Saturday at Sushi. It features a variety of original material by local women performers doing such pieces as “Emerging Goddess,” “Lesbian Vampire Love Story,” “The Unknown” and “And Then She Kissed Me.”

Tickets are $8-$12 and are available at Paradigm Women’s Bookstore and the Blue Door Bookstore. For more information, call 296-0306.

Audiences have been growing for the San Diego Theatre League’s Interpreted Series for the hearing impaired, reports the league’s executive director Alan Ziter.

“When we first started it, we would get a half dozen people for each performance. Now we are getting 35-100 for each show,” Ziter said. But he’s not surprised that it has taken time for audiences to build.

“It’s something new. There was not a theatergoing tradition.”

Ten theaters pick one night (or matinee) during a run to present a show with interpreters using using sign language to translate the show.

The series began Wednesday with the San Diego Junior Theatre’s “Comedy of Errors.” It continues through Oct. 8 with shows at Blackfriars Theatre, Lamb’s Players Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Old Globe Theatre, Starlight Musical Theatre and others.

The hearing impaired can obtain a brochure listing performances and can purchase reduced-price tickets through the San Diego Theatre League at 238-0700. The best bargain of the series, however, will be San Diego Comic Opera’s “Princess Ida” at 8 p.m. June 27. The show will be free for the hearing impaired.

San Diego actress Bryna Weiss still remembers the terror she felt when she tried to reach her daughter, her son-in-law and her grandchildren in Israel during the Persian Gulf War and the Scud missile attacks.

With the help of Los Angeles television writer Hindi Brooks, Weiss said she will call up some of those feelings in “Lily,” a one-woman piece about a middle-aged Israeli woman.

In the play, which will be performed March 28 at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla, Weiss will portray a woman reliving events in her life in the context of a television interview following scud-missile attacks in the recent Gulf War. For information, call 457-3030.

PROGRAM NOTES: The North Coast Repertory Theatre has hired Phyllis Diller to headline a May 8 fund-raiser at 6:30 p.m. at the La Jolla Marriott Hotel in La Jolla. There will be an auction as well, with the top item being a trip for two to Australia. Call 481-1055 for information. . . .

Longtime San Diego improvisational comedian Don Victor is back with a new show. This time, Victor and Lee J. Conavay will satirize the workplace--with the help of the audience--at the Insomniac Gallery at 820 5th Ave. The show, “Works of Progress,” opens Friday and runs through April 25. Call 239-5320. . . .

Some may have forgotten that John Goodman, star of the TV series “Roseanne” and the upcoming film “Babe,” was first a star on the La Jolla Playhouse stage. He performed in the company’s “War Babies,” “As You Like It” and “Big River,” re-creating his part in that last show on Broadway. But Goodman himself hasn’t forgotten those days. He made a gift of $50,000 to help the Playhouse meet operating costs for the 1992 season. . . .

Theresa M. Carilli, author of the current Diversionary Theatre production, “Dolores Street,” will participate in two post-show symposiums after performances Friday and Saturday.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

PLAY BY CHICANA TEEN IS REVIVED

The talented Los Angeles-born Josefina Lopez got her professional start as a playwright here in San Diego as a teen-age winner of the locally based Playwrights Project in 1987.

Her winning play, “Simply Maria,” a touching semi-autobiographical account of a young Chicana struggling to meld the best of her Mexican heritage with the best of what America has to offer, has been much produced and worked on in the intervening years.

Now, “Simply Maria” comes back in an El Teatro Campesino production co-presented with Teatro Mascara Magica from Friday through Sunday at the Educational Cultural Complex. Performances are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets are $10 general admission, $25 for special patron seating and $5 for seniors and students. At the Educational Cultural Complex, 4343 Ocean View Blvd., San Diego, 475-5270 or 527-5256.