THEATER : Will It Be a Day at the Beach? : ‘I’m open to almost anything,’ says Michael Greif, La Jolla Playhouse’s new artistic director. Fine, but after Des McAnuff, will that be enough?

In 1990, Joseph Papp named 31-year-old Michael Greif to be one of three resident directors at the New York Public Theatre. “Michael who?” was the response from the New York theater community.

Greif’s work at the Public got some mixed reviews, but he was taken seriously. Still, he’s not exactly a big name. Yet. Just over a week ago, Greif, known mostly as a free-lance director for regional theaters, became the recipient of another surprise appointment: As of the 1995 season, he will replace Des McAnuff as artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, one of the most prestigious jobs in American regional theater.

Once again, theater insiders are buzzing, although Playhouse officials say choosing a not-yet-too-well-known director is exactly what they’d done when they brought McAnuff on board just over a decade ago.

“We wanted someone with directorial talent and institutional experience, but we were also looking for a younger person,” says Gary L. Wollman, president of the Board of Trustees of the La Jolla Playhouse. (Playhouse founding director McAnuff, 41, is best known for co-creating “The Who’s Tommy,” and is leaving to pursue film and theater projects.)

“Part of it stemmed from our experience with Des. Our artistic mission here is to be a haven for new work, and there’s a whole new generation of theater artists whom we expect Michael to bring to the Playhouse. He’s certainly someone whose work, to some extent, challenges the current assumptions as to what theater should be.”

Responses to Greif’s eclectic productions prove the point. The same New York critics who praised the rich theatricality of his breakthrough 1990 production of “Machinal” at the Public Theatre damned his indulgent spectacle of “Pericles” at the same venue. Greif is unapologetic about his devotion to the expressive possibilities of the stage and its craft.

“I’m interested in pieces that revel in their own theatricality,” Greif said in a recent phone interview from Baltimore, where he is currently directing rehearsals of Donald Margulies’ “The Loman Family Picnic” at the Center Stage.

Greif’s link to the La Jolla Playhouse dates to 1983, the year the theater was revived. While a graduate student at UC San Diego, where the theater is located, he assisted McAnuff on Playhouse productions of “Romeo and Juliet,” and, subsequently, “As You Like It” and “Big River,” both in 1984. He returned to the theater in 1986 to co-direct, with Bill Irwin, “The Three Cuckolds” and again in 1992 to direct Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw.”

Greif caught the public eye in New York, however, during his 1990-91 stint at the Public. Among the plays he directed that season were “A Bright Room Called Day,” Tony Kushner’s political allegory about artists and writers living in the Weimar Republic; Constance Congdon’s “Casanova,” a Rashomon-like reappraisal of the notorious womanizer told from the points of view of the title character, his long-suffering lover and a transvestite; and the maligned “Pericles,” starring Campbell Scott.

Kushner’s first major production in New York was panned, but few of those who saw “Bright Room” will forget the first act curtain, when the devil appeared in a smoking jacket accompanied by a red-eyed hellhound and clouds of smoke.

“Michael has what I feel is exactly the right balance,” Kushner said of Greif’s ability to walk the line between cool intellectualism and melodrama. “He’s completely unafraid of going to very dark places. On its best nights, the play was working not when the audience was sobbing openly at the end, but when they were frightened and disturbed and scared.”

Greif admits that he is comfortable with what he calls the “yin and yang” of the theater, accommodating both intellect and emotions. “I feel that our very best directors are those who are brilliant interpreters of the material but who also have a great sense of the dramatic. I like the idea of an intelligent framework but one that is never enforced at the expense of real blood and guts and tears between the characters onstage.”

Greif has mined those feelings over wide terrain. “Machinal,” for example, is an obscure 1928 work by Sophie Treadwell exploring one woman’s socially claustrophobic journey to murder. This summer, Greif will be part of McAnuff’s final season as artistic director at the La Jolla Playhouse, directing Neal Bell’s new play based on the Emile Zola novel “Therese Raquin.” Greif’s resume could well be called eclectic, even allowing for his one excursion into the musical theater, directing international and American touring productions of Roger Miller’s “Big River.”

“I’m open to almost anything,” Greif said. “I worry about that, being pulled in a lot of different directions. But that’s one of the reasons I was drawn to La Jolla. Its reputation, to a large extent, is based on its diversity, and the board is committed to that.”

Common threads are nonetheless apparent in Greif’s work. He is invariably concerned with how people respond to events and the moral and political ramifications of their acts and feelings--both in microcosm and macrocosm. Accountability is a watchword of Greif’s focus. “His instincts are very deeply moral and very political,” Kushner said.

Early in his career, Greif said the primary function of the theater is to teach. He now says it’s “to share.”

“Perhaps I’ve gotten smarter,” Greif said with a touch of self-mockery, “or less tolerant of didacticism, since I made that statement. But I’m still very much interested in finding politically astute plays that allow you to engage in political issues or questions through an individual journey.”

Greif’s political and moral outlooks were nurtured in a childhood spent in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. To one side of his comfortably middle-class Jewish home were affluent suburbs; to the other, poverty. The son of an optician father and insurance auditor, his experience in the economically mixed community made him sensitive to the inherently dramatic conflicts of the “over- and underprivileged.”

His sense of being what he calls “the other”--a feeling of alienation and dislocation often expressed in his work--came from “growing up gay,” he says. “That can really give you a strong perception of the threat a political system can perpetrate on an individual--whether you’re talking about Jews or gays or women or people of color.”

After directing musicals in high school, Greif pursued an acting and directing career at Northwestern University, where he studied under the first of his three mentors--Frank Galati, Alan Schneider and Des McAnuff. From Galati, who directed the Broadway Pulitzer Prize-winning production of “The Grapes of Wrath,” Greif says he learned about “the spirit and generosity and poetic soul of the theater.” Later, at UCSD, Greif studied with Schneider, the late director credited as among the foremost interpreters of the work of Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett and other icons of avant-garde theater.

It was Schneider, in fact, who recommended Greif, then his pupil, to McAnuff. Both were impressed with his student work there. “We clearly expected exceptional things from him,” recalled McAnuff.

McAnuff was not officially on the search committee for his own replacement, but he clearly endorses the choice. “I find Michael refreshingly sane and thoughtful. At the same time, he has tremendous integrity and very strong ideas about how a theater should be run--and not run. He has quite a lot of experience with the institutional theater and he knows La Jolla. He’ll know how to fight for what he believes in.”

Greif says he admires McAnuff’s ability to connect with an audience: “Des has the great strength of taking material he’s working on and making it relevant,” he said. “The approach to ‘Big River’ was never slight, never commercial. It was a play with music that became a musical about race relations in a developing country.”

Yet, commercialism apparently is not something Greif wants to evade at all costs. In fact, Papp once praised Greif for having “some of the best attributes of the good commercial directors.”

Greif now says Papp was pointing to his “populist streak. . . . I’m very interested in the audience that I’m speaking to.”

To that end, Greif plans to spend this summer getting to know San Diego audiences. “I’m going to spend a lot of time this summer with them. From the month of May on, I’ll be trying to find out who is going to the theater in San Diego--and who isn’t and why they aren’t. Regional theaters across the country are seeking out new audiences, and quite often people aren’t going to the theater because they don’t see themselves or their issues represented on that stage.”

Invariably, part of that ongoing dialogue with the community, as much as with the board of directors for the La Jolla Playhouse, will involve the prickly debate of “commercial” versus “not-for-profit theater.” The idea that regional nonprofit theaters like La Jolla are sometimes farm teams for Broadway has raised consternation in certain quarters. And Greif understands the problem.

“Any theater will get in trouble if it sells its soul to develop a project just because it might make a lot of money,” he said. “But just because something makes a lot of money doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. If something is commercially viable but also fascinating, I’m all for it. I get very alarmed when anybody starts talking about ‘balancing’ a season for those reasons. It’s a mistake.”

Greif gets high marks from the theater community for his ability to balance such concerns, even as he insists that they will not--or should not--affect his lineup of plays at La Jolla. Michael David, a partner of the New York theater producers the Dodgers, who developed “Big River,” “Into the Woods” and “Tommy” at the La Jolla Playhouse before presenting these musicals on Broadway, says, “Michael seems to have his feet firmly planted where commercial theater fears to go, and that’s good for the theater. Though the criteria may be different and our measure of success is different, I hope that our respective agendas will be able to coincide as it has in the past. I don’t see why it shouldn’t.”

JoAnne Akalaitis, Papp’s controversial successor at the Public Theatre who was dismissed from the artistic director’s post last year, says she doesn’t foresee such troubles ahead for her former colleague. Although, she says, “I did tell him to get a good contract.”

“Michael is an optimist and, for his age, a seasoned professional,” Akalaitis said. “His appointment is really about belief in the possibility of a serious American theater. It takes tremendous energy, skill and leadership qualities to inspire audiences, press and the board of directors to get behind that kind of idealism and adventure.”

Greif is clearly stimulated by the challenge. Reminded that the La Jolla Playhouse has a $1.6-million deficit, he said, cheerily, “I know. I’ve got to get real smart about identifying alternative funding sources,” he said. “Actually, I’ve got to get real smart, real fast, about a lot of things.”