Displaying Art of Survival : Laguna’s Pageant of Masters Emerges From Muddy Mess With Help of Volunteers

“It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

The words came to Glen Eytchison in an early-morning phone call last Nov. 11, but at first he had trouble deciphering them. What was gone? What was the caller talking about?

Slowly, it became apparent that something serious was happening at the grounds of the Pageant of the Masters, Laguna Beach’s most famous tourist attraction. Eytchison, the pageant’s director for 16 years, had left his office at the pageant grounds just hours before. Now, he rushed back.

His first view of the damage was through a window of the pageant office kitchen: Appliances and dishes were afloat in a soup of mud several feet deep.

“It looked like ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ ” he said, comparing the scene to a 1972 disaster movie about a cruise ship capsized by a tidal wave. “It was like the building had been picked up and shaken like a martini.”

That was only the beginning. In front of the orchestra pit was a jumbled pile of sets and props 15 feet high. The pit itself was full of mud. Stage supports were knocked askew. Inside the office buildings, some walls were knocked out, while locked closets were filled with three feet of mud.

It had rained less than an inch the night of the flood, but that was enough to unleash a torrent of mud from a canyon denuded in the firestorm of late October. Now, buried in the muck were computers--with all their stored data--along with administrative records, irreplaceable art books, makeup, costumes and tools from the carpentry shops.

“And live rattlesnakes in the mud,” Eytchison said last week. “That was interesting.”

Some wondered if the pageant could recover in time for its 1994 season, but those who know the operation best say they had faith all along. Don Williamson, an architect and the pageant’s director for 15 years before Eytchison took over, inspected the buildings not long after the mudslide and now terms them “a god-awful mess . . . really shocking.”

But, he added: “You know the old adage about show business. I had sympathy for Glen, but I figured he would find a way to put it all together.”

Eytchison, his staff and an army of volunteers have put it together. The Pageant of the Masters, first held in 1932 and interrupted only during World War II, will have a special performance for firefighters Tuesday before launching its regular 1994 run on Friday. A quirky local institution, the pageant features live volunteers in elaborately staged tableaux vivants , live re-creations of famous and lesser-known works of art.

The survival of the pageant is a symbol of the resilience of the community itself, and its artistic core, said artist Roark Gourley, who helped organize relief efforts after the fires that destroyed 366 homes last fall.

“I think if you dropped an atomic bomb on Laguna, there’d be artists back here two weeks later, just because we love the place so much,” the sculptor said. “The pageant and the Festival of Arts, to me, is the heart of Laguna.”

For the pageant, the drama started Oct. 27, the day of the fires. As flames encroached on all sides, Eytchison and a few staff members--and even some strangers--fought back with hoses.

“There were people just showing up to help us who we were never able to thank,” he said. “It was really impressive. It was moving.”

A few trees on the border of the pageant grounds were scorched, but the buildings were saved. The pageant became a focus of local relief efforts and was to be the site of a benefit concert with comic Elayne Boosler and singer Graham Nash. But the concert never came off.

On Nov. 10, Eytchison left about midnight for home, planning to come in early the next day. Motion-detector alarms later helped piece together what happened next: At 4:20 a.m., a wall of mud cascaded from a side canyon through construction shops into the Irvine Bowl itself and out through the backstage area and pageant offices. Along the way, the mud knocked out walls and carried them along, depositing them in one big stack. It all took about two minutes.

It would have been easy to fall into despair, surveying the wreckage just a few hours later, Eytchison said. Damage was later estimated at more than $500,000. What’s more, three months of research already had gone into the next show, and all of it was buried in the mud.

But before long, volunteers began to appear, and the long, difficult task of digging out began.

“Just when I thought the world was caving in, there’s a line of volunteers here,” Eytchison said. “On one hand, I was totally depressed. On the other hand, you can’t help but be completely moved and impressed by the dedication of these people. That is what got me through. That is what got everybody through.”

“The first thing we had to do was get it organized again so (Eytchison) could start working on this year’s show again,” volunteer Lisa Tyson said. “It was just a matter of picking through what was there to see what we could save.”

Local shops donated shovels and wheelbarrows. The owners of a neighboring restaurant, the Tivoli Terrace, fed volunteers for free for more than a month. Much of the work involved wading through cold, stinking mud and digging for whatever could be salvaged. Several volunteers likened it to archeology.

One of the first things fished out of the mud was a pageant sign from the ‘40s, with a depiction of Botticelli’s “Venus.” “We got an easel and put her out,” Eytchison said. “She became our mascot.”

Books became a primary focus of the salvage. Most were ruined, but volunteers carefully washed off the pages and opened the books to dry at pages featuring art already selected for the next pageant.

“It was kind of a race against time,” volunteer Kristen Nannes said.

All but one of the pageant’s computers were packed solidly with mud, but with the help of a computer technician who called after reading of the mudslide, the data in one of them was retrieved. Volunteers, working hour after hour, later keyed other information back into new computers.

Meanwhile, more than 40,000 sandbags were hauled onto the festival and pageant grounds, fashioned into five-foot-high walls that would, officials hoped, channel the runoff from future storms harmlessly through the grounds and out onto the street. The bags were later replaced with large cement blocks, which will be used through the next three rainy seasons until the vegetation on nearby slopes comes back fully.

New storm drains also were built, and eventually structural repairs were undertaken.

Even as salvage and other operations went on, Eytchison had to plan the next show. Working from folding tables on the stage of the adjacent Forum Theatre--his office was destroyed--he began choosing works for the show that debuts this week. The planning usually takes place in September through December, but was not completed this year until February.

The pageant might be considered a quaint anachronism in this era of high-tech entertainment, but it endures. In its first year of existence, the pageant drew an estimated 2,200 people. Crowds now average about 200,000 each summer, over 52 performances.

“The pageant has a life of its own somehow,” Williamson said. “It’s such a naive concept, really, but if you do it honestly, it becomes a show.”

Employing a crew of 25 and a cast of about 130 volunteers, the show is a unifying force in this tightknit community. If anything, the events of the past eight months have pulled them closer together, many say.