THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Director Works, Plays on SCR’s Second Stage

Michael Bloom was starting back-to-back rehearsals of 12 hours each last week, but he didn’t seem to mind--even though he’d just made more than an hour’s drive from Los Angeles, where he lives in Laurel Canyon, and was facing an extra two days of “tech rehearsal” he’d tacked onto the company schedule.

“This is easily the most complicated show I’ve ever directed,” he said recently at South Coast Repertory, “and I’ve never had so much fun playing with all these toys before.” He pointed out what clearly was the zippiest of the toys: a movable, snub-nosed, fire-engine red Mustang convertible that is supposed to create the illusion of going from zero to 60 on the tiny set for “Let’s Play Two.”

Scenes from Anthony Clarvoe’s romantic comedy will unfold not only on various highways, dance floors and beaches but in baseball stadiums, drive-through restaurants, living rooms and bedrooms. And those are just some of the theatrical complications. “The number of costume changes is enormous,” Bloom said. “There are four weddings!”

But while “Let’s Play Two” may sound as huge as “Gone With the Wind,” it actually has only two characters--Phil and Grace, played by Arye Gross and Susan Cash--and an expected running time of less than two hours. The production, in previews today through Thursday, opens Friday in a world premiere on SCR’s Second Stage.

Clarvoe wrote the play on an SCR commission; it is his second production at the theater in as many years. The first, “Pick Up Ax,” premiered in September 1990, also as a Second Stage season opener, and served as a launching pad for his career. Clarvoe, 32, was named that year’s outstanding emerging playwright by the National Theatre Council. He also got an assortment of prestigious fellowships and several subsequent productions of the play.

Similarly, Bloom has directed one other play on the SCR Second Stage--last season’s opener, “Sight Unseen” by Donald Margulies, and has watched his career skyrocket. The bearded director, 42, was asked to restage “Sight Unseen” in New York, where it was such a big off-Broadway hit that it ran eight months. Moreover, the play itself--also written on an SCR commission--was a contender for the Pulitzer Prize.

There is little similarity, however, between Margulies’ play and Clarvoe’s latest. While “Sight Unseen” addressed serious issues with a full palette of ideas about art and artists, guilt and history, “Let’s Play Two” is comparatively unintellectual, even frivolous, in its light-hearted treatment of two lovers who will drive hundreds of miles just to see a baseball game.

Given such differences, what is it that attracted Bloom to Clarvoe’s play?

“First of all, I think it’s an intelligent romantic comedy, which you don’t see much of,” he said. “The territory of romantic comedy has been ceded to television sitcom by the theater. There’s nobody writing it any more, except for somebody like (A.R.) Gurney or William Hamilton. So I was impressed by the sophistication of the writing.

“The other thing that drew me to it was the challenge of finding a stage equivalent of a road movie. That’s what we’re trying to do. I’m interested in movies. And when I read this, it looked like a movie. That’s simply the way writers are writing now--episodically--probably because they’re influenced by television and film.”

The notion of trying to reconcile two very different genres--road movie with romantic comedy--doesn’t seem to faze Bloom at all, because of what he perceives to be the subject of “Let’s Play Two” and the contemporary manners it reflects.

“The play is about the risks one has to take in life,” he said, “no matter what one is doing, but especially (when) falling in love. It’s about the leap off the edge of the cliff that you have to make to have a relationship with another person. It’s also partly about roles that have been reversed so often and with such confusion that traditional roles don’t make sense anymore.”

Clarvoe’s title comes from a remark made by former baseball star Ernie (Mr. Chicago Cubs) Banks: “It’s a great day for a ballgame; let’s play two!” But the title can be understood in at least a couple of ways, Bloom noted. It connects “two great American sports”--sex and baseball--and refers to the larkish joy that draws Grace to Phil, as in “let’s play too.”

Anyone who remembers “Pick Up Ax,” about a couple of Silicon Valley computer whizzes--or who saw last year’s SCR reading of Clarvoe’s AIDS allegory, “The Living,” about a 17th-Century plague--is likely to be surprised by his latest play.

“Anthony doesn’t have any consistency of style,” Bloom said. “But he’s an enormously smart, Princeton-educated kid with a very sharp sense of theater, whether for wit or drama.”

Bloom, who has taught at Harvard and New York universities and teaches part time at UCLA, prides himself on the ability to tell good scripts from bad, a talent he attributes largely to his academic training in the classics and in contemporary drama but also to practical experience.

The Hartford, Conn., native earned a doctorate in theater at Stanford University during the mid-’70s and wrote his dissertation on playwright Sam Shepard. In 1978, after two years on the faculty at Scripps College in Claremont, he went to New York to work as a free-lance play reader. In the early ‘80s he became literary manager of the Manhattan Theater Club, a spawning ground for new plays.

“I had that job for four years,” Bloom recounted, “and during that time I came into contact with a lot of playwrights. Then I started peddling their scripts around to other small theaters. That’s how I got in the door as a director.”

A two-year stint followed at the Hartman Theatre Co. in Stamford, Conn., where he was the associate artistic director. The company folded in his second year, he said, due to fiscal problems engendered by an outmoded, 1,600-seat house.

Robert Brustein subsequently hired Bloom to stage three productions at the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard: “The Day Room” by Don Delillo (a 1986 world premiere); “The Road to Nirvana”Q by Arthur Kopit (1989); and “The Writing Game” by David Lodge (a 1990 world premiere).

Despite all that experience and more at various regional theaters--and notwithstanding his former staff job at the Manhattan Theater Club--Bloom never would have been hired by MTC to restage “Sight Unseen,” he said, had he not directed SCR’s successful first production.

Nevertheless, it was his resounding MTC triumph that gained him suddenly heightened visibility. After the play’s four-week run on SCR’s Second Stage, he remounted it in January at MTC’s Stage II for a three-month run. In April it transferred to the Orpheum Theater, a commercial house, where it finally closed earlier this month.

“When you have a hit show in New York, everybody sees it,” Bloom said. “People like (TV producer) Steven Bochco saw it. That’s the difference between doing something there and doing it here. But it’s a nightmare to work in New York. The irony is that, having moved to Los Angeles, my theater career has taken off.”

This past summer, as a direct result of his New York success, Bloom was hired to stage a major revival of Molnar’s “The Guardsman” with Christopher Reeve at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. And after the opening of “Let’s Play Two,” he will go straight into rehearsals of Jon Robin Baitz’s “The Substance of Fire” at Seattle Repertory.

So what does Bloom plan for an encore?

“Film and television,” he said. “I make no bones about it. I’m ready to learn a new technique.”

* “Let’s Play Two” opens Friday on the Second Stage at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, and will continue Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m.; Saturdays at 2:30 and 8 p.m.; and Sundays at 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. through Oct. 25. $23 to $32. Attendance at previews, tonight through Thursday, costs $15 to $18. A pay-what-you-will performance is scheduled for Sept. 26 at 2:30 p.m. (714) 957-4033.