A Mecca Is Reborn : Padua Hills Festival isn’t in Padua now, but even in Burbank it’s still an idyllic spot for playwrights who want to do new work.

Woodbury University is hidden from view, tucked alongside the northbound I-5 freeway near Burbank Airport. It’s one of many tiny campuses that dot the Los Angeles landscape--and hardly the place you expect to find a nationally known theater mecca.

But home it now is to the reborn Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, the West’s highly respected, artist-run workshop for emerging dramatists--a group that’s known for such luminary past and present faculty as Sam Shepard, Maria Irene Fornes and David Henry Hwang.

The outdoor festival, held in conjunction with the workshop, presents eight new plays, from Thursday through Aug. 14. Included this year are works by Fornes, John O’Keefe, John Steppling, Padua founder-artistic director Murray Mednick and others.

A fixture of the Southland summer arts scene since 1978, the Padua Festival went dormant two seasons ago, due to financial and organizational troubles. But thanks to a $25,000 Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre challenge grant and a new board of directors, it’s making a comeback with this, its 15th season.

Or at least it’s going to try.

For as venerated as Padua may be, it has yet to solve the conundrum that vexes so many artist-run endeavors. Nurturing artists, it seems, isn’t the same as having an administrative knack. The bottom line is the bottom line--and minding it is not necessarily the forte of artist-administrators like Mednick. “Fund-raising has always been a big hassle, because I’m not good at it, I don’t have the time for it and I’m not that interested in it,” he admits.

Here, playwrights come first. Mednick has excelled at fostering a learning environment in which writers thrive. “I’d say there was a Padua attitude toward theater as a fine art, with the playwright’s role emphasized,” he says. “We’ve been able to refine the discourse about the art of playwriting.”

The proof is in the full evenings of new works that are presented at the end of every year’s workshop, set alfresco at various locations around the campus.

This year the outdoor festival presents eight new plays, on two separate bills of four works each.

It’s a chance for outsiders to catch a glimpse of what makes Padua distinctive. “This really is a playwrights’ organization, run by a playwright, and that’s unique,” Mednick says. “We have this reputation of being radical in our non-careerism. A lot of people have this attitude that we’re a wild kind of day camp. Not true. We’re very serious.”

The 5-year-old Padua Hills Press has published “Best of the West,” an anthology of eight works staged in 1989-1990. A second anthology, featuring plays from the 1991 festival, is in the works.

There really is no such thing as a “Padua script.” Yet there is a mystique that perpetuates the idea that Padua writers are more similar than they actually are.

Stylistically, Padua is often thought of as spawning edgy work that features short, filmic scenes or poetically minimalist dialogue. But the writing is actually more varied than legend would have it. About all that one won’t see is long-winded kitchen-sink realism.

Mednick says that there isn’t a Padua play per se but that there is a Padua mind-set.

The emphasis is on creative exploration for its own sake. “There is a premium on making certain kinds of inquiries,” he says. “We don’t rely on psychological motivation in a naturalistic sense, but on language in relation to the space.”

Contrary to popular assumption that the Padua approach is solely experimental, the workshop and festival stress a solid grounding in theatrical history. “Because there is seriousness--and a high valuation of what theater can mean in the community--there is respect for certain kinds of tradition of theater from the Greeks on,” Mednick says.

Certainly, it’s an approach--at least as outlined by Mednick--that flies in the face of Padua’s maverick reputation. “That’s a traditional, not a political-radical approach,” he says.

This is partly why Mednick is able to retain high-caliber instructors such as the New York-based Fornes, who has been with Padua since its inception, and L.A.’s own John Steppling. “I teach a great deal at universities,” Fornes says, “but Padua is the only place where playwriting is taught through exercises that help the writers stretch their imagination and to write, through different approaches to reaching one’s creative reservoir.

“In most places, the teaching is more like editing, and that doesn’t help the writer in a lasting way,” adds Fornes, who has premiered a number of her new works at Padua. “It may help them put together a play, but it doesn’t help them develop their muscles. They just teach them certain tricks to get them on the loop rather than developing a mechanism in the person.”

The Padua students come from L.A. and across the country, chosen through an application process by Mednick and members of the faculty--Jon Robin Baitz is among the more famous alumni. The students share a willingness to pursue matters of craft apart from job market concerns. “They know what they’re getting into,” Mednick says. “The ones who can’t keep up and (don’t) have a truly interested approach don’t stick.”

Yet there’s nothing particularly exotic about the workshop. It’s a sequence of intensive classes, which typically include both lecture-discussions and writing exercises, with each teacher holding forth as he or she sees fit.

There is method even in the lack of regimentation. “We have the students exposed to each of us in turn, and they’re also attached to a playwright in terms of the festival,” Mednick explains. “There’s a dynamic that begins to work. (The teachers) are all veterans and they know the routine.”

It’s a method that’s not easy to describe. “It’s difficult to explain to people an approach that isn’t career-oriented and that is grounded in a philosophy of asking real questions about theater and the intellectual reward of it,” Mednick says.

Mednick was shaped by a decade spent with New York’s Theater Genesis, from 1964 to 1974. There he was exposed to a hotbed of the then-burgeoning Off Off Broadway movement, and also to a group that valued literary and theatrical experimentation.

The ensemble was essential. “It was that approach to playwriting--making long-term commitments to adults and taking the emphasis off ‘What have you written lately?’--that I valued,” Mednick says.

Not surprisingly, this is also the Padua ethos. “In a different way, I do that with Padua,” says Mednick, who has been at the helm every year except 1988, when he took a year off to refocus on his own writing, and director Roxanne Rogers took the helm. “I try and stay with people, keeping a continuity, and I don’t act like an artistic director.”

In fact, he’s never been particularly autocratic. Mednick felt a need for a change of venue when he moved to California in the mid-’70s. Yet he soon found himself wanting to re-create the ambience he had known in New York. “It was a peculiar reaction to the fact that I felt isolated out here,” he says.

Living in La Verne at the time, Mednick was approached by La Verne University, another of L.A.’s tiny outposts of academia, where he first met playwright Kelly Stuart, now a Padua fixture.

There was a major perk that went with this faculty position. “One day, the semi-retired chair of the theater department took me up to Padua Hills,” Mednick recalls. “He said, ‘Why don’t you have a workshop here? We’ll pay for it. Invite your friends.’ So I did.”

The year was 1978. The place was Padua Hills, a picturesque, if decaying, estate in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. “We had no idea of having an outdoor festival, but we couldn’t use the theater there,” says Mednick of how it became known as a festival of site-specific works. “It had a lot of nice outdoor spaces.”

In fact, Mednick didn’t initially conceive of the workshop--whose initial participants included both Fornes and Sam Shepard--as a production-oriented event. “We had students come, and the work became so interesting that we decided to hire some actors for one weekend,” he says. “Initially, I thought that was going to be it.”

It wasn’t. “It went so well that they wanted it back for another year. And then Pomona College (took it over) for four years. We did get Rockefeller Foundation support too, which was crucial for about four years.”

Then, after those early years, Padua had enough of a following that it was able to sustain itself--albeit precariously--without a university. The group has always relied heavily on a combination of tuition ($1,000) and box office, although it’s never been stable enough to plan more than one year at a time.

The semi-itinerant nature of the festival hasn’t helped. After the original site, Padua began to migrate to a series of locations, including, most recently, three years at Cal State Northridge’s Art and Design Center.

In 1992, Padua suspended operations, citing financial troubles. It was also acknowledged at the time that the group lost out on an anticipated $20,000 grant, due to a perception on the part of the granting body that Padua didn’t have its administrative act together.

Padua also began to lose out on other grants, in part because it was not able to come up with the kind of community outreach programming that has been in favor in recent years.

Yet administration has always been the pivotal issue. And that was still the case almost two years ago when Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre first considered giving support to Padua.

Friends had told Mednick he should approach Skirball-Kenis--and Skirball-Kenis had also been aware of Padua’s reputation--before they actually got around to discussing a relationship.

In fact, neither remembers who made the first contact. But the two groups approached each other at nearly the same time. “We really wanted to ask Murray (Mednick) to do some strategizing, to explain the two-year hiatus, to ensure (us) that the festival would be run well,” says Skirball-Kenis Producing Director Lisa Sanman. “He also wanted to make some changes, and it took some time.

“He wanted to look at restructuring the board and to try and come up with some different financial resources, and we wanted to encourage that.”

Mednick’s take on the process is only slightly different. “It took a while to convince them that we were worthwhile,” he says. “I’m hoping it will be ongoing.” He put together a 12-member board and was able to persuade Skirball-Kenis that he was serious about runninga tighter administrative ship.

In addition to the challenge grant from Skirball-Kenis, and as part of its awards and fellowship program, Skirball-Kenis is providing one full student scholarship for the 1994 workshop-festival. It sees this support as a way of bolstering both individual artists and the theater community.

“There’s a huge community of artists here,” says Sanman. “(Padua) provides opportunity and training for playwrights and we need that around.”

Mednick sits in a lawn chair, smoking and drinking a Coke as he concentrates on giving precise answers to an interviewer’s questions. He is as focused as anyone could be--anyone faced with the daunting task of juggling the dual commitments of a playwright and an administrator. Like many in his position, he must weigh competing demands, without letting the organization he has created usurp his primary identity as an artist.

And that’s no mean feat. “It takes a year to prepare for (the workshop-festival), and I need a staff of at least one or two people working with me during the year to raise the money for it, organize it and getting it on,” he says. “It’s not something that I want to do full time. The (size) that the festival is now, I can oversee it without it stopping me from being a playwright.”

Yet he continues--perhaps because an artist isn’t always best off sequestered in the garret. He needs lively minds with which to interact, and that’s what Mednick wants Padua to provide.

Still, it’s a long way from the heady beginnings of Off Off Broadway during the late 1960s and early 1970s. “I don’t think it’s analogous to what I felt in New York, but New York was special then,” Mednick says. “The tradition of inviting people, as opposed to having a kind of script contest, has evolved from that. We have created a community here and had an influence on the theater community as a whole.”

And that influence extends beyond what will be seen onstage this summer. “I’m very interested in an approach that has to do with a system of values, and that’s what we teach here as much as anything,” Mednick says. “It’s about being able to be straightforward with each other, and the feeling that there is something to be in search of that has value and relevance outside of us.”*

* 1994 Festival of New Plays, Woodbury University, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank . Thursday to Aug. 14. A Series, Thursdays and Fridays, and B Series, Saturdays and Sundays, 7:30 p.m., $20 (Series A plus B, $35) . (213) 466-1767.