SCR Plans a Classic-Heavy ‘92-93 Season

South Coast Repertory has announced a 1992-93 season heavy with nostalgia for stage classics but also flecked with new plays and recent imports.

SCR Mainstage subscription offerings will be dominated by revivals, commencing with the 1939 Broadway comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, which will open the theater’s 29th season on Sept. 4.

Other revivals in the six-play SCR Mainstage season include Timberlake Wertenbaker’s “Our Country’s Good,” a drama about Australian convicts and the liberating power of theater, which premiered in London in 1988 and opened the 1989 season at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; Moliere’s 1688 farce “The Miser,” a morality tale about greed and matrimony, and Noel Coward’s 1925 comedy “Hay Fever,” about naughty England.

The only announced new play on the SCR Mainstage will be the world premiere of Thomas Babe’s “Great Day in the Morning,” which had a reading last season in SCR’s Newscript Series.

The five-play SCR Second Stage season will also feature a revival of yet another classic, “Waiting for Godot,” Samuel Beckett’s bleakly comic 1955 play about the existential absurdity of life.

The Second Stage will provide most of next season’s contemporary offerings: the world premiere of Anthony Clarvoe’s “Let’s Play Two,” an SCR-commissioned comedy about the singles scene; Allan Cubitt’s “The Pool of Bethesda,” a 1991 British drama about a doctor with a brain tumor who imagines meeting 18th-Century painter Hogarth; and the West Coast premiere of Frank Moher’s “Odd Jobs,” a mid-’80s Canadian serio-comedy.

The final plays on both the Mainstage and Second Stage will be announced later, theater officials said.

“A Christmas Carol,” the customary holiday production on the SCR Mainstage, will be offered again on a non-subscription basis.