296 Plays--Not One by a Black Writer : South Coast Repertory’s directors say they are not exclusionary. Others are surprised at the record of the nationally prominent house.

In its entire 29-year history, South Coast Repertory has never produced the work of a black American playwright living or dead, famous or obscure, avant-garde or middle-of-the-road. Not once in 296 productions.

This may be the single most astonishing fact about the remarkable success of a nationally prominent Southern California theater born in the same year as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and grown to maturity between the century’s worst racially sparked urban insurrections--the Watts riots of 1965 and the Los Angeles riots of 1992--only a commuter’s drive from its doorstep.

It is also a little-known, unreported fact. Mention it to anybody in the theater world, and it invariably elicits surprise.

“I’m stunned,” said C. Bernard Jackson, an astute veteran of the Southland’s black American arts scene. “They would have done better just based on the law of averages.” (Jackson’s Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles nurtured George C. Wolfe, the black Tony Award-winning writer-director and, to a small degree, August Wilson, the black two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist, in their early days.)

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SCR doesn’t advertise the total absence of black American dramatists from both its Mainstage and Second Stage or from its Collaboration Laboratory, a longstanding program to develop new plays by emerging writers.

Instead, the Costa Mesa theater, which won a Tony Award in 1988 largely in recognition of its commitment to undiscovered writers, has long proclaimed a credo of enlightened social engagement and cultural diversity.

“Certainly we are not exclusionary,” SCR co-founder Martin Benson said recently. “We have never said, ‘We will not do a play by a black playwright,’ or anything like that.

“We’re always excited when a play comes from any minority source, because it helps open up the theater and keeps it from being the white elitist enclave it is often accused of being.”

Further, in the lead article of a recently published SCR magazine to celebrate the theater’s history, Benson and co-founder David Emmes write that they are “ever on the lookout for new ways to redefine the establishment.”

They emphasize their devotion to “ethnic voices and non-traditional visions” and say they prize creative work that “more closely reflects the vibrant multicultural character of our community and our nation.”

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A separate overview of SCR’s programming policy asserts that plays from the classic and modern repertoires are “chosen for their ability to illuminate the compelling personal and social issues of our time.”

In a recent interview at the theater, moreover, Emmes described an embryonic program called Nexus, which is intended to foster a combination of cultural diversity and experimental theater.

“What we are looking for ultimately is getting interconnected,” he said. “We want to explore the interaction of cultural influences. If we are going to succeed as a society, we must overcome this Balkanization of people.

“Without each of us giving up our identities we must get to a point where we become interculturally related, or we fractionalize ourselves out of existence. And we are hoping that artistically there’s a way of doing that.”

How, then, do they explain their exclusion of black American writers from SCR for three decades?

“That’s a very good question,” Benson said. “I really have no specific answer, except to say I read a ton of scripts and with very few exceptions I haven’t seen any (by black Americans) we wanted to do which weren’t either committed elsewhere--I’m referring now to August Wilson’s plays--or dealt out before we could get them.”

As for helping to develop new black writers by proffering commissions, public readings or in-house workshops--SCR’s usual array of services--Benson added: “I must confess we’ve never had an agenda to go out and find black writers. We haven’t put the resources into discovering them the way we have, say, with Hispanic writers.”

The theater’s commitment to those writers through its Hispanic Playwrights Project, an offshoot of the Collaboration Laboratory, has resulted in four SCR productions since the project’s inception in 1986.

All were world premieres: Arthur Giron’s “Charley Bacon & His Family” and Lisa Loomer’s “Birds,” both offered the year HPP began. The others commissioned and developed by SCR were: Octavio Solis’ “Man of the Flesh” in 1990 and Milcha Sanchez-Scott’s “El Dorado” in 1991.

Those are the only SCR world premieres by Latino writers, or any writers of color, out of a total of 53 since the company was founded. The other 49 were premieres of plays by white writers.

Going all the way back to SCR’s beginning, three other Latino plays were mounted in revival--Fernando Arrabal’s “An Evening of Arrabal” in 1969, Giron’s “Becoming Memories” in 1984 and Manuel Puig’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in 1991--for a total of seven.

The scant number of minority productions notwithstanding, SCR’s effort to work with Latino and Asian writers cannot be dismissed.

Over the years the theater has awarded commissions to eight Latino playwrights. It also commissioned the Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang and the Japanese American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda long before either gained success. Both have yet to submit their scripts to SCR.

“We have a very large Hispanic community nearby, and we’ve responded to it,” Benson noted. “I think we’ve worked very successfully in that area, whatever the number of Hispanic plays that have actually made it onto our stages.”

Latinos constitute 23% of the county’s population, and Asians make up 10%, according to the 1990 census.

The question is, with just 39,159 black residents in the county, constituting only 2% of the population, does SCR have a similar obligation to present black American plays?

Jackson says yes.

“I don’t care how removed South Coast Rep feels from the tides of Los Angeles,” said Jackson, who co-founded L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center 28 years ago. “The 1992 riot just happened. Those currents of dissatisfaction are going to continue to affect all aspects of life in Southern California.

“Cultural institutions have to help their constituencies come to grips with their feelings whether or not they live right where the disturbances happened. And South Coast Rep has a special responsibility in a county perceived as a narrow enclave of privilege. You’d think they’d want to offset that image.”

Joyce Jordan concurs.

“They never have anything on the Mainstage pertinent to our community,” said Jordan, who publishes the Black Orange, a Mission Viejo-based African American magazine.

She is not mollified by the fact that twice during the late ‘80s SCR rented its Second Stage to the now-disbanded Orange County Black Actors Theatre for short-run summer productions of the musical revues “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and “Eubie!”

“We know they’ve had some black performances there,” Jordan said. “But that’s no investment in the community. They will assist without risk. What theater wouldn’t do that?”

Nor is she comforted that over the years SCR has staged a handful of Mainstage productions with black actors in some traditionally white roles or that it occasionally draws on the black cultural experience, as it did a few seasons back for a Caribbean-style version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

Similarly, Woody King, an elder statesman of the African American theater world, is not impressed that SCR has mounted several of white South African Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid plays or that his latest drama about black-white relations, “Playland,” is now on the SCR Second Stage, neatly coinciding with Black History Month.

“I think Fugard is one of the world’s great writers,” said King, who heads the black New Federal Theatre in New York. “They should have given Fugard the Nobel Prize years ago. But America embraces him because he’s not writing about their back yard.

“It’s unbelievable that the artistic leadership of a professional theater cannot find plays by African American writers. It seems to me they should do at least one black play every few years just to keep current.

“I would be remiss if I said, ‘Gosh, I can’t find any white plays worth doing, or any Jewish plays.’ Could I really say that? If I did, there must be something warped in my sensibility. Because that does not reflect America.”

King added, “I choose to do one or two white plays every other year, or one or two Latino plays. Not that I’m white, Jewish or Latino. A contemporary theater simply cannot ignore that kind of art. And the same goes for African American art.”

An informal survey of 10 not-for-profit regional theaters comparable to SCR in California and around the country tends to support King’s assessment. It also shows that black American plays constitute well under 10% of each theater’s total productions. (see box).

The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles has done 12 plays by black American writers (and six by Latinos) of 166 productions since its founding in 1967.

The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego has produced 12 black American plays, including the current musical revue “Blues in the Night” (and 10 Latino plays), among 513 productions since 1950. In addition, it has “Jar the Floor” by Cheryl L. West opening in March. West is an emerging black writer whose work is gaining currency.

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The New York Shakespeare Festival, headed by Wolfe since 1993, has produced more black American plays than any theater company. This season alone it has a hit in black writer Eugene Lee’s “East Texas Hot Links,” which originated in Los Angeles at the Met Theatre, and three more black plays opening by the end of March.

But long before Wolfe became its producer, the 40-year-old festival had the largest roster of black dramatists in the nation. The late Joseph Papp, the festival’s Jewish founder, produced more than 50 black American plays by 35 writers, including everyone from Ed Bullins, Alice Childress and Adrienne Kennedy to Charles Gordone, Ntozake Shange and Wolfe.

While readily conceding the need for minority plays, SCR’s Benson nonetheless worries about the pressure of politically correct programming.

“Ultimately,” he said, “we’ve got to do the work we want to do, the plays we think are the best at a given time. It always starts with the art. It can’t be a quota thing or an agenda thing.

“We can’t put the cart before the horse. We can’t say, ‘We’ve got to do a play written by a black person. We don’t have one that’s particularly good, but we’re going to do it anyway.’ That would be wrong.

“But . . . I can feel the spurs in my side. I think it’s fair to say we haven’t been aggressive enough in seeking out black playwrights. It’s something we’re going to have to take a look at.”