COVER STORY : TALES FROM THE FRONT : DENISE UYEHARA : Testing Her Survival Skills--On the Job

When the lead actor dropped out of her first play, UC Irvine student Denise Uyehara learned the role and performed it herself. “It was a double test of my skills. My writing skills and my performing skills.”

Now, at 26, Uyehara is testing her survival skills. Raised in Westminster, she’s been in Los Angeles for four years, performing her monologues at Highways, East West Players and elsewhere. In fall, 1991, she gave up teaching and other traditional jobs for office temping and housesitting in order to devote herself full time to writing and performing.

“I try to lead a very Zen life and work on my writing and performing,” she says. “My father used to quote from Goethe that when you commit to something, Providence moves also to help you in your endeavor. Once you’re able to make that jump of leaving your 9-to-5 job, something starts to happen.”

Uyehara also works hard at making things happen. She was involved with the Asian-American Theater Project at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, was a member of East West’s David Henry Hwang Writer’s Institute and is a member of the Taper’s Mentor Playwrights Program. She also works part time at Highways.

She starts each day by recording her dreams. (They are a “very big influence in my writing,” she says.) Then she works on her short stories, her one-person performance-art pieces--which she performs herself--and full-length plays.

She will read from “Sense of History,” a seriocomic short piece about an old woman, at the Japanese-American National Museum on March 20, then perform it June 1 at Highways; she hopes to expand it into a full-length play.

The young writer has both profited by and contributed to a growing pool of Asian-American writing. East West’s program has graduated about 24 people, primarily but not exclusively Asian-Americans, since it began in 1991, says literary manager Brian Nelson, and the theater itself receives about 110 plays annually for its one or two new play slots.

Uyehara has written two full-length plays. Characters in “Hobbies,” her first play, include a Japanese-American woman obsessed with going to Italy, an “ethnically mixed” male who is obsessed with Japan, and a Chinese/Japanese-American man into West African drumming.

“Hiro,” a tale of two sisters and their mother, never mentions the word “Asian,” Uyehara says, because “I think it is very important for Asian writers to write about their Asian identity and articulate it but also important to write about the whole expanse of life.

“Some theaters are willing to take risks and look at playwrights of color. (Although they may) worry that their audiences won’t be interested, quite a few theaters do want more diversity in their seasons. But there’s still a lot of conservatism, unfortunately, for financial reasons.”

JAMES GRAHAM BRONSON: One Play a Year, but He’s Not Going to Quit TV

It all started in September, 1986, when writers Erwin Washington, Sara Finney and James Graham Bronson met at Aunt Kizzy’s Back Porch in the Marina for Sunday brunch. They sat there for two hours eating soul food and talking theater.

Out of their conversation emerged Los Angeles Black Playwrights, a group of about 30 people who write, produce and promote black theater. They meet monthly in Mark Taper Forum rehearsal space and, says president Bronson, operate under the motto: “Seeking Truth, Demanding Excellence.”

Acknowledgment would also be nice. Bronson, 45, has received playwriting awards from Washington’s Kennedy Center and Los Angeles’ Inner City Cultural Center and has had four Los Angeles productions, one of them a hit. Yet, he says, “I’m one of those guys who’s been around a long time and nobody knows who I am.”

A full-time reporter with Copley newspapers until 1990, Bronson has been writing plays since high school and has already turned out a dozen full-length works. Three of his earlier projects--”Shakazulu,” “Invasion of Addis Ababa” and book and lyrics for the musical “Crenshaw Boulevard”-- were produced at the Inner City Cultural Center, ran six weeks apiece and essentially disappeared, he says.

Then came “Willie & Esther,” his first comedy. A play about two middle-aged, African-American blue-collar lovers, it received considerable attention during its six-month run here at the 99-seat Theatre of Arts in 1991, then went on to productions Off-Broadway and in Washington, Memphis, Denver and San Francisco.

Now he’s turning out one play a year, including “Stonethrower,” a historically based play about black soldiers in the late 1800s, which was read at the Taper’s Mentor Playwrights series last year and is set for another reading next month at the Burbage Theatre.

Coming up are various projects with other members of Black Playwrights, including “Burn, Baby, Burn Hour,” an impressionistic piece about the Rodney King beating and subsequent riot.

But neither Bronson nor his colleagues are turning their backs on the Industry. He has written scripts for the TV show “Head of the Class,” and is now writing both comedy and dramatic film treatments. Playwrights member Ehrich Van Lowe is executive producer of Fox-TV’s “ROC,” while founding Playwrights president Finney has been writing for TV’s “Family Matters” for three years.

“In order to live, you have to pursue TV and movies,” Bronson says. “This isn’t really a theater town. It’s a film town.”

EDIT VILLARREAL: Already in Her 30s, She Turned to Writing

Texas-born-and-reared Edit Villarreal didn’t start out wanting to be a writer. Despite her UC Berkeley degree in theatrical set and costume design, she worked as a carpenter, a medical social worker and held assorted jobs in and around theaters.

Sometimes she wrote poetry and short stories, sometimes she toyed with writing novels. Then, encouraged by playwright Maria Irene Fornes’ response to her first play “Going Home,” Villarreal went back to school. Already in her 30s, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama in fall, 1983.

All of Villarreal’s playwriting since then has had some public airing, including readings in Tucson and here. “Love Medicine,” her adaptation of the title chapter in Louise Erdrich’s book of the same name, was produced at the Taper’s Itchey Foot cabaret. “R and J,” her Latino update of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” set in a contemporary Los Angeles barrio, was done first as a staged reading in 1991 at South Coast Repertory and later produced twice at Cal State L.A.

Latino theater, as most ethnic theater, is still edging into the mainstream. There are probably fewer than a dozen programs nationally that are specifically for Latino writers, says Jose Cruz Gonzalez, project director of South Coast Repertory’s highly regarded Hispanic Playwrights Project and director of “R and J.” After seven years, he adds, 640 plays have been submitted to his program, 50 have received workshops and 17 had world-premiere productions at South Coast and elsewhere.

One of those 17 plays was Villarreal’s “My Visits With MGM (My Grandmother Marta).” The semi-autobiographical memory play highlights connections between a grandmother and granddaughter and was developed in various readings, workshops and radio performances here and elsewhere. The playwright has publicly credited SCR’s publication of her script with getting “MGM’s” first production--at San Jose Repertory in January, 1992.

There have now been about a dozen productions of “MGM” in both small and Equity houses, and the play opens April 30 in a 150-seat theater in Albuquerque, N.M. In fact, says Villarreal, last year she could actually have lived “an extremely modest existence” off her royalties for the very first time.

Fortunately, she doesn’t have to rely on artists’ royalties for a livelihood. Since a few months after she graduated from Yale in May, 1986, the 42-year-old playwright has been an assistant professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, where she teaches playwriting and Chicano theater.

She is also doing some film work. She wrote a film called “La Carpa,” with Carlos Avila, which will air on PBS’ “American Playhouse” in June and was screened at the Sundance Festival last month. Villarreal and her husband, fellow Yale graduate Bennett Cohen, are writing a series for MTV/Nickelodeon about a high school newspaper staff.

Also set for June is a staged reading at UC Riverside of her play “Alone in the Water.” And still germinating is “a romantic comedy idea.” There’s no title and nothing on paper yet, and she’s still not sure “if it will be a screenplay or ‘play’ play, but (it’s) been in my brain for about three months.”

What does she advise her playwriting students about their craft? “I tell them I love them for wanting to become playwrights. (But) the best writers I have taught or gone to school with also do film and TV work, and that’s the way you’re going to make a living as a writer.”

JONATHAN TOLINS: He Started in Game Shows, Now He Has a Hit

Before he graduated from Harvard in 1988, New Yorker Jonathan Tolins acted in 11 shows, directed four and won a major literary award for his first full-length play. So when he finished college, he headed straight to Hollywood--and a job writing questions for the game show “Wipeout.”

He and “Wipeout” colleague Seth Bass started doing TV scripts on spec, but Tolins wanted to write something for himself to act in. The result was “Climate,” a series of nine vignettes about twenty-something people like himself. It ran at Theatre/Theater for seven months to a packed house--of about 30 seats--got great reviews and moved to a second small theater.

He was on a roll. Not long after “Climate” closed, he started “The Twilight of the Golds,” currently a hit at the Pasadena Playhouse. That play, which took 3 1/2 months to write, took shape largely while he was office temping at studios and elsewhere. He wrote at his Hollywood apartment in the early morning and evening, on lunch hours and “when the boss was away from the office.”

Tolins and Bass have been represented by the William Morris Agency since April, 1990, and agent Alan Gasmer says he signed the writing team initially after reading their spec scripts for “Dear John” and “Married . . . With Children.” The two writers have now finished their second screenplay and are starting an adaptation of a novel.

Gasmer was, in fact, surprised to learn that Tolins wrote plays, he says, but apparently lost no time getting “Twilight” into the William Morris pipeline. A while later, Esther Sherman, the agency’s New York theatrical specialist, sent the play on to Pasadena Playhouse executive Deborah Dixon. Dixon took it to her boss, Playhouse executive director Lars Hansen, and the rest is history.

Tolins’ play was no easy sell, either. There may be only five characters, but his ambitious play called for his actors to emote in front of sets whose walls fly away to reveal, among other things, clouds and fire. “Twilight” wraps Wagnerian opera, social issues and advanced technology in a package that is both funny and horrific.

Even at 26, Tolins clearly knows the business. His “Twilight” script was rejected for a reading at one theater, he concedes, but he also turned down possible productions in small local houses. He put up $500 of his own money for a reading of “Twilight” last July to widen his producer net: “I really felt I had something that might have commercial potential.”

He certainly did. “Twilight” runs through Feb. 28 at the Playhouse, then moves to its sister theaters in Poway and Santa Barbara. Charles Duggan, the San Francisco-based producer who took Joan Collins to Broadway in “Private Lives” last year, is the Playhouse’s partner on the Tolins play and has indicated plans to keep the show traveling. A London production is under discussion, Tolins says, and “there is a lot of interest--or at least a lot of talk” about a possible film.