STAGE / NANCY CHURNIN : Refined ‘David’s Mother’ to Take to Poway Stage : Play: Bob Randall has made many revisions in script since the production premiered in September.

The Pasadena Playhouse production of “David’s Mother” opening at the Poway Center for Performing Arts Sunday will be somewhat different from the show that premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena in September. But the story about a mother and her mentally disabled son is now “finished,” playwright Bob Randall said on the phone from his Connecticut home.

“I have written so many drafts to form and shape it--what you see is what you get. It took longer than anything I’ve ever written.”

Randall is best known for “6 RMS Riv Vu,” which brought him fame at 35. He followed that up with “The Magic Show,” starring Doug Henning, which played on Broadway five years. He also produced and was head writer for the “Kate & Allie” series.

“David’s Mother” was difficult for him to write because the emotions were so close to him, he said. While neither he nor his two children have developmental disabilities, he had a crippling, but not life-threatening case of polio as a child. And he had a very strong mother, not unlike the mother in the play.

“My mother was very loving, a tough cookie--very much like David’s mother--but unlike David’s mother she didn’t make the mistakes.”

The mistake made by David’s mother was that she used humor to keep anyone from getting close to her, except David.

“When her son was born, he became the entire focus of her life, to the detriment of her marriage and her relationships with her other kid, so that when when the play starts, we find them almost on a desert island together.”

Randall’s polio helped him become a writer. Because he couldn’t go out and play ball with the other kids, he turned to his imagination for entertainment. Later in school, he found he could entertain others as well--with his jokes.

“The thing about comedy coming out of pain is true,” he said quietly. “I’ve always used comedy as a means of survival. . . . I learned as a senior in high school that I could have friends and be paid attention to if I was really funny. And once I grabbed on to that, I never let go.”

Randall matured from a funny kid in the Bronx to a comic actor and later a stand-up comedian. He switched to writing when he found he liked the writing portion of his work more than performing.

After years of “Kate & Allie,” a story of two mothers rooming together, he finds that writing from a woman’s point of view in “David’s Mother” is not just easier--it’s more dramatically efficient.

“I like writing about women because they’re freer to expose themselves more than men. . . . With women, you don’t have the stumbling blocks of a man’s inability to get to where he feels. If this play were ‘David’s Father,’ I would have to spend a great deal more time getting him to face how he really feels.”

Randall is in the process of negotiating for other productions of the play in other cities with the aim of eventually bringing it to New York. He has also just completed a draft of the play for a television movie for CBS.

His next writing projects will be on lighter subjects, he said, as an antidote for the weight of “David’s Mother.” But he says he’s glad he tackled this. While “David’s Mother” made him relive the painful memories of his childhood, it also reconciled him with those early years.

“If I had to choose to have it all over, I would choose to have polio,” he said. “I had a dreary, crippled childhood, but it ended. And for the rest of my life, I have a craft that’s fun. It’s hard, but I enjoy it a lot.”

Blackfriars Theatre was notified Tuesday that it will receive $15,000 from the Trust for Mutual Understanding in New York toward its plans to mount a play in Russia’s Maxim Gorky Theatre, the major theater in Vladivostok--San Diego’s sister city--in the late spring of 1993.

The director of the Maxim Gorky Theatre, Efim Zvenyatsky, invited Blackfriars to present a show at his theater when he was visiting San Diego in late spring as part of a cultural delegation. That would make Blackfriars the first American troupe to perform in the previously closed city of Vladivostok.

“Our fondest hope is to take our production of ‘Abundance’ which we will remount here,” said Blackfriars Artistic Director Ralph Elias. “ ‘Glass Menagerie’ is under consideration, too, or another small project that will be newly mounted.”

But $15,000 more needs to be raised for the trip.

“We think we’ve gotten halfway here, but we’re hoping that local foundations and corporations and individuals will help us out,” Elias said.

Support for continued public funding for the arts seems to be coming mainly from the Democratic candidates, according to a survey released this month by the San Diego Arts and Culture Coalition.

Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein support continued federal funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and for other programs, but their opponents, Republicans Bruce Herschenson and John Seymour, did not respond.

The five local Democratic candidates for Congress also supported federal funds for the arts, but there was no response from the Republican incumbents--each of whom has voted to eliminate the NEA in the past.

But both Republican mayoral candidate Susan Golding and independent candidate Peter Navarro support increased Transient Occupancy Tax revenues being used to increase allocation for arts and cultural programs in San Diego.

PROGRAM NOTES: Guillermo Gomez-Pena, winner of the national McArthur Foundation Award for “genius,” will premiere his latest performance-art monologue, “New World (B)order” at San Diego Mesa College at 7 p.m. Nov. 7 in the campus’ Apolliad Theatre, 627-2873. . . .

You can Pay What You Can at the Saturday matinee of the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Tickets are available in person at the box office only. There will also be Wednesday student matinees Nov. 4 and Nov. 18 at 1 p.m. Tickets are $7 apiece for students. . . .

For a theatrical alternative to the haunted houses haunting San Diego this weekend, San Diego Junior Theatre is presenting “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” directed by actress Priscilla Allen at 7 p.m. today and Friday, at 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. Saturday and at 2 p.m. Sunday. The lobby on the way to your seats is “haunted” and the show is preceded by a dance based on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Call 239-8355 for additional ticket information.

CRITIC’S CHOICE

PLENTY OF ‘SPUNK’

The intoxicating production of “Spunk” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre has the effect of drawing one into the eye of a blues song.

On the surface, the show is simple: three theatricalized short stories by master African-American storyteller Zora Neale Hurston. But under the direction of Thomas Jones, superlative cast members seamlessly meld dance and song with otherwise natural performances.

They find the humor and the ache in the tale of an abusive husband who gets his comeuppance and a one-upmanship between two swaggering pimps who get theirs. But the most magically spun story is the last: A young wife makes a terrible mistake that ultimately takes her and her husband on a wondrous journey from tragedy to forgiveness.

The show has been extended through Nov. 8 at the company’s Lyceum Stage. Performances are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2. Tickets are $21 for weeknights and matinees and $24 for Friday-Saturday nights, 235-8025.