Social Unrest Reflected Under the Footlights

Theater as catharsis. That’s what art can be. And that’s the job it’s doing right now on most San Diego stages.

The recession is rocking the country, the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings have piqued women’s anger, and the Rodney King case has aggravated racial tensions. It’s all reflected under the footlights: stories about women, powerlessness, hard times and anger about discrimination.

“A . . . My Name is Still Alice,” an all-woman show at the Old Globe Theatre, is a new revue specifically about contemporary issues affecting women. This is a show that makes quips about Dan Quayle, Ted Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.

But other shows--older shows--are also making their points.

Consider “Gypsy,” Starlight Musical Theatre’s production of the classic story about stripper Gypsy Rose Lee and her stage-door mother, Rose, at the San Diego Civic Theatre. From “Gypsy,” it’s not as far as one might think to the world of “The Glass Menagerie” at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Theatre.

Both shows are set in times of extreme want, and the possibilities for escape are extremely limited. What are the choices for Madame Rose, who pushes her daughters to become stars until they scream for release? It’s not just a case of wanting to be famous rather than “humdrum,” as her character sings in the song “Some People.” What jobs were there for women such as Rose, who were born before women in this country even got the vote? She couldn’t run a company or the country--so she ran her daughters’ lives instead, making sure that at least one of them would be so powerful she would be able to call the shots in her own life.

And what choices does Amanda Wingfield have in “The Glass Menagerie” except, as she tells her daughter, “dependency our whole lives.” With a husband who has walked out on her, all her prodigious energy is also centered on her children--to ends that are more genteel but also, undeniably, more tragic than those in “Gypsy.” And that, in part, may be because Amanda accepts that she is dependent on the men in her life--the husband who deserted her, the son who will desert her, the Gentlemen Caller who endlessly disappoints. Madame Rose will not relinquish her dream no matter how many men--husbands, lovers, agents--walk out on her.

At first glance, “The Women,” the Clare Booth Luce play at the San Diego Repertory Theatre’s Lyceum Stage, may seem to have nothing in common with these two. Its New York high society setting is opulent, while “Gypsy” and “The Glass Menagerie” have their roots in poverty.

But the issue, again, is powerlessness. The women in “The Women”--16 in this all-female cast--derive their stature from their husbands. The viciousness with which some of them tear up each other’s reputations and marriages is the only way they know to “get ahead.”

For stories that offer insight into the racial unrest highlighted by the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King verdict, one need look no further than that famous theatrical trial, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” at Lamb’s Players Theatre, or the bitter, passionate debates playwright Ed Schmidt imagines preceded the integration of Major League baseball in “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting,” at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage.

Both shows have added performances in response to their extremely strong ticket sales, suggesting that theater, in these instances, is giving its patrons a much-valued forum in order to explore the questions troubling the country.

George C. Wolfe, writer of “The Colored Museum” and writer and director of the highly acclaimed “Jelly’s Last Jam,” now on Broadway, said he wanted to direct “Marisol” for the La Jolla Playhouse this year but was simply too exhausted from the pre-Tony “Jelly” publicity to take the job.

“It’s a brilliant, extraordinary but difficult play,” said Wolfe, who will instead direct the show for the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theatre, where he is resident director.

The La Jolla Playhouse “kept on trying to be accommodating to my schedule and I wanted to do it, but I need to take two weeks to breathe. I want to be fresh when I do make my debut there,” he said.

Wolfe’s agent, Wiley Hausam of International Creative Management, has said that offers to Wolfe from the playhouse and the Actors Theater of Louisville to direct the play may have influenced the New York Shakespeare Festival’s artistic director, JoAnne Akalaitis, to include the play in her event after her initial rejection when Wolfe suggested it.

“Marisol,” Jose Rivera’s comedy about a young woman and her guardian angel on the streets of the Bronx, opens Sept. 16 in the Mandell Weiss Forum. It is the only play of the La Jolla season for which a director has not yet been named.

PROGRAM NOTES: The price is always right at “pay what you can” Bargain Arts Day--because patrons set the ticket prices. The San Diego Theatre League and Wells Fargo Bank will sponsor Bargain Arts Day on Wednesday at the Times Arts Tix booth in Horton Plaza, 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Nearly 5,000 tickets will be available on a first-come, first-served, cash-only basis to such shows as Starlight Musical Theatre’s “No, No, Nanette” and “Chess”; the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Tommy” and “Le Petomane”; the Old Globe Theatre’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” “A . . . My Name Is Still Alice” and “Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting”; the Theatre in Old Town’s “Beehive,” and the North Coast Repertory Theatre’s “Rumors” and “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” A complete catalogue of available productions can be found at the Times Arts Tix booth. . . .

Novelist Sherley Anne Williams, who wrote the best-selling “Dessa Rose” while teaching at UC San Diego, will have the world premiere of her first play, “Letters From a New England Negro,” produced by Rites & Reason, a theater company emanating from the Afro-American Studies Program at Brown University, as part of the International Theatre Festival of Chicago, Tuesday-June 14 in Chicago. It’s a one-woman show about a free-born black woman who goes south after the Civil War to preach the gospel of education and literacy.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

‘BEEHIVE’ IS BACK AT THEATRE IN OLD TOWN

The beat goes on at the Theatre in Old Town’s “Beehive,” a rollicking, lighthearted romp through the 1960s, featuring six women moving from beehive hairdos and “The Name Game” to such selections as “Downtown,” “Where the Boys Are,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Wishin’ and Hopin’ ” and “Respect.”

The show was a much-extended hit when it opened in February. Now, after a month and a half breather, it reopens tonight with the same fine cast doing sendups of everyone who was anyone back then.

Performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday for a run that may last through Labor Day. Tickets are $15-$20. At The Theatre in Old Town, 4040 Twiggs St. Call 688-2494.