1996 A LOOK AHEAD: From O.C. Theater, expect both the far out and the far in : Stage Is Set for a Diverse Theater Year

With a comedy up and running at the Laguna Playhouse and a drama about to open at South Coast Repertory, the new year in theater is already upon us and has the look of a genuine smorgasbord.

Laguna Playhouse artistic director Andrew Barnicle sets the stage with a top-notch revival of Neil Simon’s “Rumors,” a late-’80s Broadway farce full of old-fashioned laughs about a group of well-heeled suburbanites who hatch an absurd, Byzantine cover-up at a dinner party to save their friend’s political career. (Through Jan. 28.)

Does it sound familiar? In fact, “Rumors” is not about the Orange County Board of Supervisors or the shenanigans that pass for much of local government. But it might as well be, given the wacky, tacky antics that Simon’s comedy offers.

The first new play of the year, Philip K. Gotanda’s “The Ballad of Yachiyo”--which opens Friday at South Coast Repertory--takes place in another world entirely, as far from farce as a play can get. (Through Feb. 11.)

Said to be a fictionalized account of a true story that Gotanda unearthed about one of his ancestors, it combines the tale of a young woman’s coming of age in Hawaii nearly a century ago with the deeply ingrained Japanese traditions of an expatriate community. The result is “a poetical, lyrical play,” said David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director.

Gotanda wrote “The Ballad of Yachiyo” on a commission from SCR and Berkeley Repertory, where it recently had a successful run. Both theater companies are producing it.

“Philip has been able to bring the elements of Japanese culture into the story,” Emmes said. “Pottery-making and the tea service, for example. They have been so wonderfully integrated that it makes a unique and fascinating kind of storytelling.”

Eric Bogosian brings another kind of cultural integration--more precisely, disintegration--to the Irvine Barclay Theatre (Jan. 19) with his new one-man show, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee.”

Regularly described as cutting-edge satire about “the black hole of the American psyche,” Bogosian’s work skewers the contemporary scene with its take-no-prisoners treatment of society’s misfits and marvels alike.

If titles are any indication, “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee” may be less hard-hitting than his last show--it was called “Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead”--but don’t bet on it.

Bogosian wouldn’t be Bogosian if he weren’t taking on all comers: drugged-out bikers, Jesus as Valley Boy, new-age hucksters, sanctimonious real estate brokers, abusive parents and God.

At the Orange County Performing Arts Center, the prime venue for touring Broadway musicals, theatergoers have only one musical to look forward to between now and summer: “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” with the Pointer Sisters, on its latest national road show (May 21 to 26).

After that, it’s anybody’s guess--including center officials’. Pace Theatricals, which supplies the center with most of the touring musicals, is slower this year than usual in putting together its new slate of shows.

(A road version of “Sunset Boulevard” begins a four-year national tour in June. But it won’t reach the center until 1997.)

So in the first half of 1996, fans of musical theater at the center will have to make final performances tonight and Sunday of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” their last hurrah. Until fall they will have to go elsewhere for musicals.

The Fullerton Civic Light Opera is more than ready to take up the slack with a stageful: “Good News” (Feb. 16 to March 3), “Man of La Mancha” (May 10 to 26), “The Desert Song” (July 12 to 28) and “Guys and Dolls” (Oct. 18 to Nov. 3).

Otherwise it will be a starvation diet of TV substitutes, community and dinner-theater productions or trips out of the county to the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles and the like.

Singer-songwriter Mark Turnbull’s new one-man cabaret-style show, “Grandma’s Shoes,” comes to the Newport Theatre Arts Center (Thursday, Jan. 13, 19 and 20).

Meanwhile, playgoers proper have plenty to choose from.

Besides its Mainstage production of “The Ballad of Yachiyo,” SCR will offer Jeffrey Hatcher’s “Three Viewings” on the Second Stage later this month (Jan. 23 to Feb. 25).

The play, which consists of seriocomic monologues by three characters, received fine notices last spring at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. As Newsday writer Jan Stuart noted in an admiring review: “There is a lot of cool mortuary talk” in the play, which is set in a funeral parlor, and “before this brief evening is out, you will learn, among other things, some nifty post-mortem cosmetic tips.”

SCR also has some weird Shakespeare on tap with an updated version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” perhaps the Bard’s most popular comedy (Feb. 23 to March 31).

“We think it’s going to be unusual and imaginative,” Emmes said. “But we’re not deconstructing it or standing it on its head, or anything like that.”

Further down the road, SCR will be offering the American premiere of Richard Nelson’s acclaimed “New England,” first produced by the Royal Shakespeare Co. in London (April 15 to May 12) and Shaw’s “Arms and the Man,” directed by SCR’s Shavian specialist, artistic director Martin Benson.

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JAN HERMAN’S BEST BETS IN THEATER

In chronological order:

* “Rumors,” Laguna Playhouse, Laguna Beach, through Jan. 28.

* Mark Turnbull’s “Grandma’s Shoes,” Newport Theatre Arts Center, Newport Beach, (Friday and Jan. 13 and 19 to 21).

* “The Ballad of Yachiyo” (Friday through Feb. 12), “Three Viewings” (Jan. 23 to Feb. 25), “New England” (April 15 to May 12) and “Arms and the Man” (May 24 to June 30), all at South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa.

* Eric Bogosian’s “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee,” Irvine Barclay Theatre, Jan. 19.

* “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa, May 21 to 26.