Laguna Playhouse Sets Stage for New Role : Theater: Institution marks 75 years of history with a bold move forward.

LAGUNA BEACH — When the Coast Highway was still a footpath and Laguna Canyon Road a dusty, one-lane thoroughfare, Jayne Peake and Isabel Frost organized a drama club here in their living room.

It met for the first time 75 years ago this month; it went on to become the oldest continuously operating theater company in Southern California. Beyond that, the Laguna Playhouse, as it is now known, has become one of the nation’s most venerable community-based theatrical institutions, “one of the most respected in the country for the past 20 to 30 years,” says Jim Carver, a past president and current board member of the Assn. of American Community Theaters.

Currently being professionalized from top to bottom, it has reached not just a milestone of longevity with its diamond jubilee but “a fork in the road that will take us to a new plateau,” according to its board president, Carl E. Schwab of Laguna Niguel.

Projecting a budget of $1.5 million this season--almost double what it was five years ago--and a base of more than 7,000 subscribers, the playhouse is poised to take a place alongside South Coast Repertory as a true regional theater company.

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The nonprofit troupe has played a significant role in the county’s history. Surviving fire and flood--to say nothing of the Great Depression, which wiped out the 78-year-old Pasadena Playhouse for much of the 1930s--it carved out a reputation alongside the Laguna Festival of Arts as an oasis of indigenous culture among the orange groves.

During the late 1930s, movie stars and Tinseltown swells came down for light entertainment. Douglas Fairbanks used to bring his Hollywood entourage from Los Angeles on his yacht. They would take in a show at the playhouse, then located on Ocean Avenue, and camp on the beach in Emerald Bay where the city fathers rigged up wood-planked tents.

During the 1940s and ‘50s, the playhouse gained the ardent support of Bette Davis, whose sister Barbara Berry worked backstage. In the early 1960s, Harrison Ford was cast in a play by former playhouse artistic director Douglas Rowe and was “discovered” shortly afterward, along with Mike Farrell of “M*A*S*H” television fame, who also got his start at the playhouse.

The Laguna troupe won the AACT’s national competition in 1987 with “Quilters” and went on to represent the United States at the 1988 International Community Theater Festival in Dundalk, Ireland, where it placed second.

“Besides those milestones,” notes Richard Stein, the playhouse’s executive director, “there was a vision of turning professional as early as 1966 on the part of the artistic leadership. SCR and the start-up of the regional theater movement, nationally, helped spark those thoughts.

“But the board wasn’t receptive at that time. In fact, Doug Rowe resigned over the issue. So I think the idea of moving in that direction was here early on.”

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Next year the playhouse plans to open a second, 225-seat theater with the expected completion of a $1.5-million capital campaign, part of which requires a $1-million naming gift.

In 1968, its current home, a 420-seat theater on Laguna Canyon Road, was named for Nellie Gale Moulton, who had given $100,000 toward its construction. The building on Ocean Avenue (remembered fondly by some veteran playgoers as “The Pepper Tree Playhouse”) had been torn down to make way for a city parking lot, and major contributions for a new theater had come not just from the Moultons but also from the Irvines. The families had been rivals in prominence.

Constance Morthland, who was instrumental in arranging the Moulton gift, recalls “a very interesting story behind what happened.”

“Mrs. Moulton was a wonderful lady. Lewis Moulton, her husband, came out from Boston to be James Irvine’s secretary. The Irvines had all the land, but there was one part of the land that didn’t have enough water. So James Irvine eventually gave that to the Moultons, and that was called the Moulton Ranch.

“They had the hardest time making a living there,” Morthland, 85, said during a recent conversation at her Moss Point estate, “because they couldn’t get enough water. So Mrs. Moulton sold it to the man who built Leisure World. And all the property south of that was sold too. Mrs. Moulton got about $6 million for it, which was about the time we asked for her gift.

“Well, when Mrs. Moulton gave the money, Athalie Irvine Clark and the other Irvines thought they should give a contribution too, since the Moulton Theater would be right next to the Irvine Bowl. They gave just under what Mrs. Moulton gave--their gift was $90,000--so they wouldn’t steal the limelight.

“Those amounts don’t seem like much now, but they were in 1968. The Moulton didn’t cost that much. It was built for not more than $500,000.”

Indeed, it cost more to renovate the Moulton, adding on a balcony and office space and expanding the lobby in 1985, than it cost for the original construction.

Howard (Hap) Graham, a former Broadway actor who managed the theater on and off for a dozen years in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s, and Barbara Berry, who lived in the village, got Bette Davis involved in the playhouse.

Davis came regularly to see the shows at the Pepper Tree and gave pep talks to the actors and money to the organization. “Bette helped us out in a number of ways,” Graham, 85, said on the phone from his home in Vista.

“I went back east for a show she did, ‘Two’s Company.’ I was in it. We had six weeks on the road and a six-month run on Broadway that could have gone a lot longer even though it wasn’t such a hot show. Everybody wanted to see her. She hadn’t been on the stage in many years.

“I came back to the playhouse, where Barbara was always working backstage. She stayed near Bette, who had a big house on the ocean. [It sold recently for $16 million.] She used to loan it to me to throw parties for the playhouse.”

Later, in the 1960s, Davis and her then-husband Gary Merrill went on the road with “The World of Carl Sandburg,” and before taking the show to New York, they closed it temporarily and brought it down from Hollywood to the Irvine Bowl. The one-night performance, a benefit for the playhouse, raised roughly $10,000, Graham recalled.

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Rowe returned to the playhouse in 1976 to succeed Graham and stayed until 1991 when he resigned again, this time to resume a professional acting career he had been nursing on and off.

Sitting recently under a leafy back yard tree not far from the Moulton, Rowe was holding a notebook which had been preserved by a playhouse devotee and passed along to him for safekeeping. He opened it as though it might have been the Bible, and he read from the handwritten minutes of the first meeting that Peake and Frost held in their home on Oct. 22, 1920.

“Isn’t this the killer? ‘After some discussion concerning the advisability of affiliating with the Artist Club, it was decided to form a separate organization to be known for the time being as the ‘Community Dramatic Club’ . . . Seventeen [of us] enrolled as charter members . . . The meeting then adjourned and [we went on] cracking nuts.’ ”

He grinned broadly as he marveled at the ordinariness of such a momentous event. “ ‘Cracking nuts!’ You can’t beat that.” He closed the pages, now yellow with age.

Asked to pick the single most important figure in the playhouse’s history, Rowe said there were far too many to name just one.

“But if I absolutely had to pick one,” he added, “I’d have to say Fred McConnell. Fred was one of the preeminent figures in the regional theater movement. For years and years he was the artistic director of the Cleveland Playhouse.

“He retired out here, and it was Fred who designed the auditorium and the stage for the Moulton--exactly where the seats were to go, how high they should be, everything. I sat in the room when the first line was drawn on that thing.

“Fred modeled the interior exactly on the Cleveland’s 77th Street Playhouse. He had arguments with the architect, who’d never built a theater before. He had arguments with the money people. He fought for six months over the sight lines of that theater.

“Fred could barely walk around. He was in his 80s. He died fighting for that theater. But he was amazing. And we were very fortunate that he happened to be here then, or the Moulton could have turned into a theatrical disaster.”

For his part, Stein, who became executive director in 1990, credits Schwab and a revamped board of directors with the ambition and the fiscal courage now needed to make the leap to expanded, fully professional operations.

Andrew Barnicle, who took over from Rowe as artistic director, concurs. “There wasn’t always agreement about where the playhouse was going. And I don’t think it’s just a coincidence that it’s happening on our 75th anniversary. It’s the natural gestation of an organism that is growing with the times.

“Besides, after 75 years, there are not too many places left to go.”