THEATER NOTES : Padua Hills Fest Bites the Dust

Padua Hills Playwrights Workshop/Festival is dead. Founder-director Murray Mednick said he made the decision to pull the plug during last summer’s festival, held on the USC campus, but didn’t make a public announcement of it.

The peripatetic workshop and festival was presented 15 times in 17 years at many different venues, specializing in development of young playwrights and site-specific productions.

“We have several generations of students who are working all over the country,” Mednick said. “We helped keep alive the importance of good writing. We had a definite, very sophisticated style.”

But Mednick said he’s “burned out. There just is not enough support.” Padua Hills didn’t pay its actors last summer, for the first time in its history, he said. He was disappointed that $25,000 in funding from the Skirball-Kenis Theatre for the 1994 festival wasn’t renewed--let alone increased--this year.

Skirball-Kenis executive director Kym Eisner expressed disappointment at the demise of Padua Hills. But she said the grant was supposed to help develop the board. And Padua wasn’t doing well in that department--Mednick said there were only a couple of active board members when he decided to throw in the towel.

Some of his students are discussing trying to continue the festival in New York, Mednick said. But he wouldn’t participate, except perhaps as a playwright.

M eanwhile, John Steppling, one of the better-known writers developed by Padua Hills, is running a new group called Empire “Red” Lip, which “fills a void left by the demise of Padua Hills,” according to a press release for its first production, “Aftershock” (now at the Downtown Playhouse). The release goes on to pledge that Empire “Red” Lip will provide “Los Angeles with the cutting-edge theater it doesn’t know it needs.”

DEAF WEST GRANT: National Endowment for the Arts grants may shrink, but government support for Deaf West Theatre keeps going strong. Deaf West will receive $366,000 during the next three years from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services.

This is the third such grant to Deaf West from the same office: It also received $382,000 between 1991 and 1994 and $384,000 between 1992 and last August. The money will be used for two annual productions as well as training programs in acting, writing, dance and art.

ATTENTION, SHOPPERS: A recording of the 11th annual S.T.A.G.E. (Southland Theatre Artists Goodwill Event), held last February, is out on a double CD from DRG Records. It features many of the Southland’s notable musical theater performers singing songs by Harold Arlen. A quarter of the profits will benefit the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.

The 1996 S.T.A.G.E will be held for the first time at the Doolittle Theatre in Hollywood, and focus for the third time on the music of Stephen Sondheim. Four performances are scheduled March 8-10, with proceeds benefiting two AIDS causes.

THE TIMING: American Theatre magazine reported in October that the most-scheduled play in the 1995-96 seasons of Theatre Communications Group members--that is, most of the country’s leading nonprofit theaters--is David Ives’ “All in the Timing,” with 15 productions scheduled (caveat: The survey omits any works by Shakespeare, “the perennial contender”). When the survey was published, no theater in the Los Angeles area had yet slated the Ives work, a collection of six playlets. Now, however, comes word that International City Theatre in Long Beach plans to present “All in the Timing” May 10-June 16.

HYPERBOLE 101: Director Harold Prince, at a recent Los Angeles press conference, described the critics’ pans of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” in its first, workshop production as “the most savage thing that ever happened.”*