STAGE / NANCY CHURNIN : Old Farce at Playhouse Gives Insight Into Today’s Politics : Play: Director Michael Greif says 25-year-old script remains relevant in 1992.

“What the Butler Saw” is a farce--Joe Orton’s fast-paced story of a psychiatrist who, while trying to seduce a prospective secretary, gets caught in the swirling center of a plot in which his wife is being blackmailed by a page boy she accuses of having raped her. The page boy and the prospective secretary end up switching clothes, and everyone is trying to elude the state psychiatrist, Dr. Rance, who could end up putting the whole lot of them in prison.

But the reason Michael Greif, known more for his serious work, chose it as the play he wanted to direct at the La Jolla Playhouse this season has more to do with politics than comedy. Especially in this political year, when the question of just what “family values” are seems to be a key point of contention between the Democratic and Republican parties.

“There are questions (about) whose prerogative it is to set the labels,” Greif said over lunch in San Carlos. “Is the perspective of the majority and the status quo always to be respected, accepted and adhered to? That applies to everything from sexual identity and sexual preference to socialist governments vs. capitalist governments. That’s the basic notion.

“The play was written in 1967, and it’s set in 1967. But, when Rance attacks the avant garde and says society needs to be protected from avant-garde artists, I think we all came to the discovery of the parallels,” Greif continued, referring to the current NEA controversy.

The director also said that other aspects of the play remain quite relevant:

“It questions what is a family unit, How do we define a family unit? I think the play addresses these issues in an extremely entertaining and provocative way.”

“What the Butler Saw” opens Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Forum.

Greif, a 33-year-old Brooklyn native, developed his reputation for sensitivity to political issues when his Obie-award winning “Machinal” marked his debut at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1990. Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 “Machinal” loosely adapted the story of the Snyder-Gray murder trial, a love triangle that led to the first execution of a woman in an electric chair. Greif’s direction emphasized the way in which the woman’s life was primed for the tragedy that was to ensue.

In the New York Times, Frank Rich called Greif’s revival of the work “an imaginative, unpatronizing production that would befit a play written only yesterday . . . a startling collision of past and present.”

Greif’s direction of “Machinal” also impressed Des McAnuff, who had known and liked Greif since he was a graduate student. McAnuff became artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse not long after Greif became an MFA candidate in directing at UCSD in 1982.

Greif had become an assistant director to McAnuff in the first year of the revival of the Playhouse, with “Romeo and Juliet.” Later he was McAnuff’s assistant director on the Playhouse’s “Big River” and directed the touring production. He also co-directed the company’s “Three Cuckolds” with Bill Irwin.

Greif credits McAnuff as being a significant influence on his work: “The things that were most impressive to me were the research he and (associate artistic director) Robert Blacker do, the painstaking examination of individual words, of what resonance the words had then, and what they have now.”

McAnuff, in turn, is impressed with Greif’s approach to people.

“One of his great strengths is that he has tremendous humanity and compassion,” McAnuff said. “Not only is his work always thoughtful, I think it has a lot of heart, and that is the reason that actors are so fond of him. He has a tremendous reputation with actors, he’s very articulate and very thoughtful, and he has the ability to get tremendous performances out of people.”

Greif, who now lives in Greenwich Village, is entering his third year as a resident director at the Public Theater--the home of the New York Shakespeare Festival.

While known for serious works rather than comedies, he thinks his background could bring the right touch to Orton’s comic vision, revealing the emotional underbelly of the last play Orton wrote before he was slain by his lover at age 34.

“I’m drawn to plays that have strong themes that tell a good dramatic story with interesting characters in the most theatrical way that they can,” he said. “All of this so-called craziness is ways of covering up real pain and real needs.

“My approach has always been to discover the truth of the situation, the urgency of the situation, the desperation and the humanity of the situation.”

PROGRAM NOTES: The Old Globe Theatre is selling half-price tickets for seniors 60 and over for this Sunday’s matinee performance of “Interior Decoration” at the Old Globe Theatre. Tickets are $8.50 apiece, only at the Clairemont Friendship Center at 4425 Bannock St.

Bryna Weiss will star in “Lily,” a one-woman show by Hindi Brooks at the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre on Aug. 8 and 10. Lily tells the story of a Holocaust survivor living in Israel who relives her past against the backdrop of the Scud missile attacks during the Persian Gulf War. Call 487-3551.

Mary Yarbrough, a veteran of the national tour of “Beehive,” is filling in for vacationing “Beehive” actress Yolanda Kelker through Aug. 1 at The Theatre in Old Town. Yarbrough, who also did “Little Shop of Horrors” Off Broadway, was last seen locally in “The Heidi Chronicles” at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company. “Beehive,” which is scheduled to continue through Sept. 5, continues to sell out on Friday and Saturday nights with an overall weekly capacity of 80%, according to managing director Jill Anthony. Call 688-2496.

The Insomniac, the host of several staged readings, will present a play, “Zombie Sex Mutants--An Environmental Love Story,” by local playwright Maureen Anderson from Aug. 14-Sept. 5. Tickets are $10. Call 239-5320.

The Ruse Theatre, 3737 India St., will present Eugene Ionesco’s “The Lesson” July 27-Aug. 15. Call 295-5654.

Diversionary Theatre, 2222 Broadway in Golden Hill, has extended “Healin’ Dirt Diner” through Aug. 8. Call 574-1060.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

REMEMBERING MAMA

Comedian Marga Gomez, one of the original members of Culture Clash, began to develop her first full-length performance monologue, “Memory Tricks,” as the result of an offer from the UC San Diego Multicultural Theatre Festival to present a solo piece that the festival sponsors assumed had already been written.

Two weeks later, the story of Gomez’s relationship with her mother, a one-time Puerto Rican mambo dancer who now has Alzheimer’s, debuted as a work-in-progress at the festival in 1990. A finished version of the work premiered to sold-out houses in San Francisco in 1991, gathering acclaim for a work that critics found both touching and funny, with such lines as: “I’m not trying to say my mother taught me every negative personality trait I have. Some I inherited.” Now “Memory Tricks” comes back, full circle, to San Diego. It will open at the Gaslamp’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre tonight as a Lynda Sterns production in association with Fresh Dish. It continues at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2 through Aug. 30. Tickets are $10-$20. At the Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave., San Diego, 234-9583.