Season’s Greetings : South Coast Repertory’s 30th Year Will Have a Familiar British Accent

They’ve made it to the start of another season--again. Having accomplished the feat 29 times before, they say it’s business as usual.

Yet on the eve of their 30th season, which begins tonight with a revival of Paul Osborn’s nearly forgotten “Morning’s at Seven,” the two founders of South Coast Repertory can’t help feeling an extra measure of satisfaction and relief.

“Given our longevity, especially when so many theaters have gone by the wayside, it’s something of a milestone,” SCR artistic director Martin Benson said in an interview earlier this week in Costa Mesa.

Anyone looking for a theme to the season beyond marketing hoopla (“In the 1960s South Coast Repertory Made Waves. Get Set for the Next Wave!”) will be sorely disappointed.

“There’s no single idea that identifies this as our 30th,” said Benson, who is directing Osborn’s gentle 1939 back-porch comedy. “We’re not doing 30 one-act plays or plays that are 30 minutes long or anything like that. In fact, it’s really no different from other seasons.”

SCR will offer 11 plays for subscribers and single-ticket buyers in its 1993-94 schedule, six on the Mainstage and five on the Second Stage. (See accompanying box, F25.) The customary holiday show, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” also will be presented on the Mainstage as a non-subscription offering.

“We selected plays the way we always do,” Benson continued. “It is an agonizing, endless process that starts six to nine months earlier. Finally, almost out of frustration, we say, ‘Well, here it is.’ ”

David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director, put it another way in a separate interview at the county’s only professional resident theater.

“We just keep looking for the best possible plays we can get that fit into the parameters of our needs,” he said. “In a sense this is the most considered season we’ve ever done.

“More thought, more analysis, more attention to our company artists--how they can work from one show to the other--has gone into our planning than ever. That’s partly because of economics and partly because we hope it will show up to our advantage on stage.”

A look at the upcoming season confirms the similarity to previous seasons and, if anything, a deepened loyalty to SCR’s long-held taste for plays of British and Irish origin.

There are a total of five such offerings this time: Alan Ayckbourn’s “Man of the Moment,” Peter Shaffer’s “Lettice & Lovage” and Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa” on the Mainstage, and Joe Orton’s “Loot” and Frank McGuinness’ “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me” on the Second Stage.

That compares with three British plays last season and, not counting Caribbean-style Shakespeare, three the season before.

Ayckbourn has come to seem almost a house playwright. “Man of the Moment,” to be directed by Emmes, is the third of the Englishman’s dark comedies that SCR will have produced in as many years. (“Intimate Exchanges” was done in 1993 and “Woman in Mind” in 1992. A fourth, “A Chorus of Disapproval,” was staged in 1989.)

“It’s true we’ve been an Anglophile theater,” Emmes said. “But that goes back to our interest in text and literature, language and argument. It just happens that some very strong writers come from the British Isles.”

Meanwhile, another playwright from overseas who also will be familiar to longtime SCR audiences is the South African dramatist Athol Fugard. “Playland,” to be directed by Benson, will be the fourth SCR production of Fugard’s work. (Others were “Blood Knot” in 1982; “Master Harold . . . and the Boys” in 1985; and “The Road to Mecca” in 1989.)

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the upcoming season, however, is how little new work by contemporary American writers has been scheduled. This comes as a particular surprise because SCR is so widely touted for developing original plays.

The theater has announced just two world premieres this season: New York playwright Richard Greenberg’s “Night and Her Stars” (a change from the previously titled “Ecstatic Air”) on the Mainstage, and SCR literary manager John Glore’s “The Company of Heaven” (which, incidentally, has a British setting) on the Second Stage.

With the final offering on the Second Stage still not chosen, the season could have a third new play. But, Emmes said, “nothing has been decided.”

Even if the number of originals is down, though, Benson and Emmes are remarkably high on the two they’ll do.

Greenberg’s latest, which SCR commissioned after premiering his “The Extra Man” in 1991, is said to be about the quiz-show scandals of the ‘50s. Still a script-in-progress, it will go into private workshops at the theater next week to prepare for a production opening in February.

Benson, who confesses that he prefers the play’s old title, described “Night and Her Stars” as “wickedly funny” and full of “seductive arias” delivered by a television producer whose way with words could make him a modern Mephistopheles.

“We cleared the decks to put this one into the season,” Emmes said. “I think it’s a breakthrough for Richard, a new direction. It made an impression on me, when I first read it, that ranks with ‘Prelude to a Kiss’ and ‘Search and Destroy.’ ”

(Craig Lucas’ 1988 “Prelude” is probably the best-known play to originate at SCR. Howard Korder’s 1990 “Search” won a best-play prize awarded by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle.)

Emmes said the 35-year-old Greenberg, whose national reputation was made in 1988 with the satirical “Eastern Standard,” wrote “Night” while recovering from a recent battle with Hodgkin’s disease.

“He did it in this great spurt of creativity,” Emmes noted. “When you walk up to death’s door, it puts a lot of things in perspective.”

Glore’s new play, “The Company of Heaven,” is described in SCR’s season brochure as taking place “on a quiet evening in the English countryside,” where “something otherworldly happens.” The playwright himself says it deals with “the whole issue of spirituality in our material age.”

As SCR’s literary manager for the last nine years, Glore says he feels added pressure to succeed that he might not feel elsewhere. “I’m known around here,” he explained. “If I fall flat on my face, I’m going to have to live with that.”

On the other hand, he realizes his well-connected staff position gave him access to Benson and Emmes not readily available to other playwrights.

“I convinced David and Martin to give me a paid leave of absence to write the play,” Glore said. “It was the equivalent of a commission, and that gave them the right to first look. So there’s a logic to it.”

Unlike Greenberg, Glore, 37, has never had a full-length play produced before. He has had two children’s plays done, however, both at SCR’s Young Conservatory Players: “Wind of a Thousand Tales” in 1988 and “Folk Tales Too” in 1989. And in 1990 his “What She Found There” won the National 10-Minute Play Contest sponsored by the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Emmes and Benson, for their part, were emphatic about having chosen “Heaven” strictly on its merits.

“We love John to death, and he’s a tremendous asset to the theater,” Benson said. “But he’s not being rewarded for long service. We wouldn’t do the play had there been a better one around. It’s that simple.”

As in recent seasons, SCR will pay homage to a classic American comedy from the 1930s. But this time the selection is less familiar than usual.

Casual playgoers probably won’t have seen “Morning’s at Seven” before (unless they happened to catch it at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego a few months back). Nor are they likely to laugh as hard as they did at “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” which SCR revived last year for its opening play.

“To me it’s a play you smile at,” Benson said. “It’s a charmer that reaches your heart because the characters have some real life-and-death issues at stake. It’s American Chekov. I know we’ve used the term before, so that sounds like a cliche. But I think it’s true.

“As I told the cast on the first day of rehearsal, we will in no way lessen the comedic value of the play, but there are a lot of dark corners in this piece, and I want to go down and look in every one of them.”

If SCR’s 30th season does touch a thematic nerve, it is institutional rather than artistic. Emmes, 54, and Benson, 56, both say they’ve come to the realization that eventually they will have to hand over the theater to somebody else.

They are not about to give up their posts any time soon, however, certainly not for at least a decade and, from the way they talk about loving their work, possibly not even then.

Still, events such as the recent upheaval at the New York Shakespeare Festival caused by the death of its founder, Joseph Papp, have reminded them of the importance of planning an orderly succession.

“I don’t want to make more of it than it deserves,” Emmes said. “But we’re thinking about the future. It’s just something that comes up when you’re going into your 30th season.

“We’re going to start looking for emerging directors who in time could take on a position of leadership. I’d like to think the person who might be running SCR would not be a clone of Martin and me but would have the same kind of commitment to literature of the theater and to new work.”

Emmes and Benson say that as a model for succession they are drawn to the Old Globe, where the founding artistic director Craig Noel developed confidence in a successor, Jack O’Brien, handed over artistic control of the theater and retained an emeritus status.

“Craig is still there in his 70s doing as good work as he’s ever done,” Emmes said. “But Jack is in the trenches making the day-to-day decisions with (managing director) Tom Hall on the business side. And Craig continues to be a source of guidance, the e minence grise, if you will. That kind of situation is attractive to Martin and me.”

Whatever happens, planning has always been one of SCR’s major strengths. And it’s a good bet that when the time comes, Emmes and Benson will hand over a fiscally sound institution.

SCR has never run a deficit in any of the past 29 seasons, Emmes noted. Even in a tough economy, when annual contributed income for fiscal 1993 was down by $100,000 to $1.35 million, SCR managed to wind up roughly $10,000 in the black on a budget of $5.8 million. The surplus was achieved through a combination of cost-cutting measures and better-than-expected ticket sales, Emmes noted.

The budget for fiscal 1994, which began Sept. 1, also comes to $5.8 million. But it restores SCR’s fund-raising goal to $1.45 million, roughly the same amount received in 1992.

While Emmes complains about not being able to increase the budget over last year, forcing certain artistic choices such as smaller casts, SCR still has considerably more money to work with than it did at the height of the high-flying ‘80s.

In 1988, for example, its operating budget totaled $4.6 million and its endowment fund came to $5 million. Today, in addition to its larger budget, the endowment fund comes to $8.7 million ($6.2 million in cash and convertible assets, $425,000 in pledges and $2 million in deferred gifts).

And its subscriber base apparently remains strong. Last season SCR had about 16,000 subscribers for the 507-seat Mainstage offerings and 4,100 for the 161-seat Second Stage.

“We’ve had one of the highest renewal rates . . . in a number of years,” Emmes said. “So it looks like our subscribers will be back. And that tells us they thought the work was strong last season.”

The only subscriber weakness that has cropped up is the conversion rate for single-ticket buyers and others.

“In past years,” said Emmes, “we’ve signed up new subscribers at a higher rate. And that points to the economy in general. So, as all the business wags are saying, the idea is to ‘stay alive till ’95.’ ”

* Paul Osborn’s “Morning’s at Seven” begins previews tonight and premieres Sept. 10 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. It runs through Oct. 10. $15 to $25 (previews); $25 to $35 (regular run). (714) 957-4033.

SOUTH COAST REPERTORY

Revised ‘93-’94

Schedule, Mainstage:

* Sept. 3-Oct. 10: “Morning’s at Seven”

* Oct. 15-Nov. 21: “Man of the Moment”

* Nov. 30-Dec. 26: “A Christmas Carol” (non-subscription)

* Jan. 7- Feb. 13: “Hedda Gabler”

* Feb. 25-April 3: “Night and Her Stars”

* April 8-May 15: “Lettice & Lovage”

* May 27-July 3: “Dancing at Lughnasa”

Second Stage:

* Sept. 21-Oct. 24: “Loot”

* Nov. 2-Dec. 5: “The Company of Heaven”

* Jan. 25-Feb. 27: “Playland”

* March 15-April 17: “Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me”

* April 26-May 29: To be announced

Six-play Mainstage subscription: $93 to $198; single tickets: $25 to $35. Five-play Second Stage subscription: $83 to $150; single tickets: $23 to $33. (714) 957-4033.