STAGE : Growing Pains : Des McAnuff’s La Jolla Playhouse, reborn 10 seasons ago with risk-taking young talent, fights a deficit and its ‘middle-age’ success

A towering African-American actor playing an angel declaims in a mellifluous basso voice from the heights of the overhead catwalk, dropping fake dollar bills into the laps of the well-heeled crowd.

A middle-aged woman playing a young girl who dreams she’s Joan of Arc scrambles down a ceiling-high ladder at stage left. The entire back wall slides aside to reveal the scene shop upstage. Floodlights blind the audience.

The year was 1983 and the tony opening-night attendees in the state-of-the-art theater in one of Southern California’s most affluent communities didn’t know what to make of the thespian antics. But they knew something was afoot.

The last time the La Jolla Playhouse had been open for business, it was Zsa Zsa Gabor in “Blithe Spirit.” But that had been 19 years before, and Peter Sellars’ inaugural production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Visions of Simone Machard” was a bird of a different feather. To say the least.

Founded by Gregory Peck, Mel Ferrer and Dorothy McGuire in 1947 as a summer retreat for Hollywood actors, the La Jolla Playhouse was reborn in the early ‘80s with director-playwright Des McAnuff at the helm. Brash, artistically adventurous and critically lauded from the get-go, it’s been one of the key additions to the American stage during the last decade.

The theater has racked up more than 125 artistic awards, sent three shows to Broadway--including “Big River,” which nabbed seven Tony Awards in 1986--and been a magnet for some of the most energetic talents the boards have to offer, McAnuff himself included.

“There are things that we’re willing to do that other theaters are not,” McAnuff says. “We’ll commit to a project before the play is written and just trust that it will develop. That’s true with directors too. Most theaters still pick projects before artists are attached, and that’s one of the things we very rarely do.”

Yet, as the theater enters its 10th season--with today’s opening of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie”--there are those who say this house of wunderkinder has lost its edge.

“What was distinctive about the early years is that we were a bunch of Young Turks from New York in this resort paradise,” says actor John Vickery, a frequent playhouse artist who has taken on key roles over the years, including Romeo and Macbeth. “It was this well-equipped facility in the middle of this wealthy community. People put you up in their beach houses; you did fairly wild theater that they didn’t like very much.”

Yet few playhouse productions in recent years have matched the in-your-face inventiveness of Sellars’ first-season Brecht. And there are some aspects of the programming that are conservative, such as the theater’s continuing relationship with playwright Lee Blessing. Forays into commercial theater have also drawn questions about the theater’s priorities.

“We’re all older and we have families now,” muses Vickery, who first worked with McAnuff in the late ‘70s. “In those days, Des ran the theater slightly differently than most repertory theaters. It strikes me that it’s getting more middle-of-the-road.”

“It’s definitely an established institution at this point,” says director Robert Woodruff, who, like Vickery, dates his association with McAnuff to Off Broadway in the late ‘70s. “I like the chaos of things beginning. The hard thing is, every institution fights the battle to keep fluid, to be project-oriented and not slot-oriented.”

Even more troubling, the playhouse must now confront the serious challenges facing all of American theater in the last decade of the 20th Century--a sizable deficit, changing cultural constituencies and an aging traditional patron base.

American theater has also experienced a major generational shift since McAnuff and crew first sketched their game plan. Many of the directors who flocked to La Jolla now--like McAnuff--have institutions of their own to run.

If the first decade was about making a mark on the national theater scene, few will dispute La Jolla’s success. They have gone from a three-play, one-theater season to this year’s eight-play, two-theater schedule and a base of 10,700 subscribers, with plans for further expansion in the works.

“We did grow up to be the institution we threatened to be,” says McAnuff, noting that nearly all of the directors on his original wish list have come to work at the playhouse.

The next 10 years, however, will require not only that the playhouse shore up its foundation but also that it resist the ossification that often strikes resident theaters. It also has to bring new groups of artists and audience into the fold.

“We’ve managed to survive the ‘80s,” says playhouse associate artistic director Robert Blacker, who’s been teamed with McAnuff for 12 years, since they worked together at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

“If our focus in the first 10 (years) has been on providing opportunities for our peers, the focus in the next 10 will be on identifying the leaders of the next generation and providing opportunities for them.”

McAnuff, who will turn 40 this year, was born in Illinois and raised in Toronto. He wrote a number of plays and musicals, early on making the mix of rock ‘n’ roll and theater one of his trademarks--a trait he carries into his work as artistic director today.

The 1988 season, for example, featured “80 Days,” with music and lyrics by the Kinks’ Ray Davies. This season Pete Townshend will collaborate with McAnuff on the first authorized stage version of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy.”

In 1981, while McAnuff was in residence at the New York Shakespeare Festival, San Diego philanthropist Mandell Weiss gave the playhouse a $1.4-million gift that secured the construction of a new theater, to be shared by the playhouse and UC San Diego.

That same year, the playhouse board hired Managing Director Alan Levey--who resigned in 1991 and will be replaced next month by Terrence Dwyer--and the next year, it hired Artistic Director McAnuff. In 1983, the premiere season included not only Sellars’ brash Brecht but also McAnuff’s own iconoclastic staging of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” as well as Barrie Keeffe’s satire “A Mad World, My Masters.”

Since then, the playhouse has featured an eclectic combination of musicals (both new and revival), new American plays and reinterpretations of such classics of the Euro-canon as the Bard, Chekhov and Moliere.

It has also been notable for attracting the hottest talents. “This theater has been a forum for artists in their 30s or late 20s. It’s important that we carry on being a place where prominent young artists can congregate,” says McAnuff, who this week named 31-year-old Lisa Peterson as the company’s new associate director. Peterson, a graduate of Yale University, won a 1991 Obie Award for her direction of Caryl Churchill’s “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire” at New York Theatre Workshop.

McAnuff’s rap on his theater’s mission has remained pretty much the same over the years--stressing a commitment to an artist-driven agenda. “The thing that continues to work is going to artists and asking them what they want to do,” he says.

While McAnuff emphasizes this ideal approach, however, there is a consistent variety within the seasons that suggests a certain amount of top-down artistic direction. Critics also charge that there’s less artist-driven choice than there used to be.

“Des just matches up good people and lets them go--when he’s smart,” says director Woodruff, who is to direct his longtime collaborators, the Flying Karamazov Brothers, in “Le Petomane” in June.

However, Woodruff says, “they do seem to be going in a different direction. Obviously some of the work they’re doing is not as director-generated and (is) more script-oriented.”

“(The season) is certainly not ‘Shout Up a Morning,’ ‘Figaro Gets a Divorce’ and ‘Ajax’--titles that don’t readily come to mind,” continues Woodruff, referring to works staged in 1986, when he last worked at La Jolla.

McAnuff, though, denies any trends or schematizing. “Most of it is luck,” he says.

“My take over the years is that it’s become more ‘Let’s fish for a hit we can take to Broadway,’ ” actor Vickery says. “Things get plotted so far in advance that there’s less room for the kind of explorations we did in the early days, even before La Jolla.”

Because the new La Jolla Playhouse started later than some of the country’s flagship theaters (including the Mark Taper Forum), it had the chance to learn from others’ mistakes. In terms of programming, that means trying to avoid the pitfalls of season “slots.”

“It’s easy to fall into these producing patterns, this habit of having six slots with so many weeks where you need to put your comedy at the end so you can extend it--the regional-theater blues,” McAnuff says. “Before you know it, you’re in a formula.”

Yet there is formula even to the La Jolla anti-formula. Typically, a season contains a big musical, a classic and several new dramas, at least one of which is on the light and funny side. The theater has also continued to innovate, this year splitting one slot to produce two new works in repertory.

The playhouse hasn’t become bogged down by administration. The permanent staff numbers only 25, and it still has its offices in a trailer near the theater.

“They’ve avoided getting top-heavy,” Woodruff says. “You don’t get the sense that you do when you walk into the Guthrie or other theaters that there are a lot of people who aren’t directly involved with the production.”

“We were not going to let the institution departmentalize,” McAnuff says. “I remember touring a big theater that’s not in California--and that will remain nameless--and realizing that their marketing department was larger than our entire administrative staff. The most important thing to us is what goes on the stage.”

The regional-theater trap that La Jolla hasn’t avoided--in a big way--is a looming deficit, although its officials won’t say exactly how much it is. “Most regional theaters have some kind of debt,” says Dwyer, the incoming managing director, who’s currently managing New York’s Circle Repertory Company. “Ours is above average, but there are people who have more.”

In 1989, in the wake of scuttlebutt about shaky finances, playhouse officials first admitted their money troubles. They announced in September, 1989, that the 1990 season was in danger unless they could raise $500,000 quickly, plus another $500,000 by June, to offset an accumulated deficit of $703,000.

Money was raised, but not enough to wipe out the red ink.

McAnuff blames the deficit on the playhouse’s limited producing calendar, due to its shared-space arrangement with UCSD. “It was clear from early on that we didn’t have the operating window to make it a healthy institution,” he says. “The old board only negotiated a 90-day agreement with the university for this space, even though they put $3.2 million into building the theater.”

The deficit began in the third season and increased dramatically, by $500,000, in 1987. “We didn’t solve the space problems quickly enough,” McAnuff continues. “The deficit is the money that we were unable to raise from ’87 through ’92.”

Others, however, point to often-extravagant production values, suggesting that McAnuff refuses to budget within means--a situation that may have contributed to Levey’s decision to leave.

“After 10 extremely tough years--I call them ‘dog years’ because they felt like 70--I had to do something different,” Levey says of his decision to leave. “I remember saying, ‘This is a man of very large vision, who’s going to produce on enormous scale.’ We butted heads constantly about what we could and could not do.”

“Des is more spectacle-oriented than is my taste,” says Vickery, currently onstage in the Taper’s “Richard II.” “I would say there’s too much stuff happening onstage. So much of the work is fussy, with things flying in and out through the air. ’80 Days’ we called ‘Around the World in 80 Sets.’ ”

There are also similarities between McAnuff’s reportedly headstrong administrative ways and his methods as a director. “The last time we worked together the relationship was a little testy,” Vickery recalls of the 1989 playhouse “Macbeth,” a text that McAnuff had directed previously. “We did have one blowup. I said, ‘You can’t do a major Shakespeare play and have an actor do that role without it being his own.’

“Des plots things out well in advance and is prepared, in case actors come up with ideas. Woodruff has always been the other extreme. Des drives everybody crazy. Robert drives everybody crazy. But you come back around to them because they’re still the best.”

The playhouse’s future is far from secure. Like any theater, it has to find ways to bring in new faces, as the traditional theater audience wanes and Southern California’s demographics continue to transfigure.

Making headway on the multicultural front, however, hasn’t been this theater’s strong suit. While it does have a relationship with UCSD’s graduate department--which has an emphasis available in Latino theater--the playhouse has none of the ethnically based labs or groups one finds at such theaters as San Diego’s Old Globe and the late Los Angeles Theatre Center. Nor has it gone as far as it might with non-traditional casting.

McAnuff, however, doesn’t think labs and such are the panacea: “You can get yourself in the frame of mind that a certain kind of institutional program is going to solve this. Really, there’s only two places you look: in the audience and on the stage. That’s the bottom line.”

His answer to this array of needs is twofold. “It’s critical to get young people in, and I don’t exclude young white kids because I think we’re in danger of losing everybody, not just the folks we may not be reaching now,” he says.

“On another level, it has to do with programming,” McAnuff continues. “If you’re going to do nothing but Shavian drama, there’s a chance that you’re going to miss out on attracting a Hispanic audience. If you do (playwright and author of this season’s ‘Marisol’) Jose Rivera, then you’ve got a better chance.”

The money situation may ultimately be easier to solve. “Now that we have the second theater, we can start to operate with a balanced budget,” says McAnuff. “We need that third space, though.”

If someone comes along with a large donation, the playhouse could have a building up on campus within two years.

“But it might be more realistic to say the capital campaign would take a couple of years,” says McAnuff, as characteristically cautious with his words as he is daring in his ambitions.

‘This theater has been a forum for artists in their 30s or late 20s. It’s important that we carry on being a place where prominent young artists can congregate.’--Des McAnuff