Award for Best Parent to a Play

“It was the good flood,” says dramaturge Jerry Patch, while producing artistic director David Emmes pulls up another agricultural metaphor: “It was a bumper crop.” They are referring to the current season at South Coast Repertory, the two-stage theater in Costa Mesa. Since October, South Coast has presented four world premiere plays, all commissioned by the theater, all good. Two of them--Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” and Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories”--are keepers, major debuts, plays that will undoubtedly enjoy lives beyond Orange County. A third, David Henry Hwang’s “Golden Child,” went on to play the Kennedy Center. To switch metaphors from agriculture to baseball, this is an amazing batting average.

South Coast has long been celebrated for its dedication to new plays--it won the Tony for outstanding regional theater in 1988. This is clearly the place to be for any subscriber who wants to be among the first in the country to see a new play.

But what of the subscriber to Los Angeles’ flagship theater, the Mark Taper Forum? The last time the Taper put a new play on its mainstage that it had commissioned before any drafts had been written was in 1993--Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.” It has presented other plays since that it’s developed, such as Eduardo Machado’s “Floating Islands” and Lisa Loomer’s “The Waiting Room,” but they did not give commissions to these playwrights until drafts of the plays had been submitted. Taper subscribers see world-class theater, but they don’t discover it.

The Center Theatre Group’s Gordon Davidson spends a lot of time, money and energy developing new plays, though not for the Mark Taper Forum or the Ahmanson, the two theaters he programs. He believes “premiere-itis,” as he puts it, is pointless. Like South Coast Rep, CTG hands out playwriting commissions, administers workshops, labs and new play programs. But the two theaters clearly take different positions on the importance of presenting new work.

The exigencies of producing for the Taper and for the Ahmanson are, invariably, difficult, and only rarely does Davidson put untested, home-grown plays on those stages. He senses that his subscribers expect something different, though he is careful not to say “better,” when they come to the Taper. “There’s a different atmosphere, particularly in the last 10 or so years, and not as much latitude from the audiences, who have been given more. We’re at the center of Los Angeles theater, people pay more, but I’m determined not to be a victim of that, which is why I’m putting the New Theatre for Now [four new or somewhat new plays, 16-18 performances each] on the mainstage this year. I’m hoping that people will put on a different pair of glasses when they come.”

Davidson concedes the theater serves different functions in regard to generating new plays. “It’s not a horse race, and I don’t think of us as competitive unless it’s thrown up in my face,” he says. “In the 10 years of our New Work Festival, we have developed plays that have gone on to other theaters. Some of them we try to bring back to us and some we can’t. My own philosophy is that I’m happy to do that--push work out into the world. We encourage complex canvasses and big ideas. One shot at a play is often not enough. There is a thrill about birthing something, no question, but it’s not the only set of questions to ask.”

Still, birthing worked magic on “Three Days of Rain.” A description of the play, currently at South Coast’s 161-seat second stage, can hardly convey its originality. The first act depicts the reunion of three childhood friends; the second rewinds 35 years, and the actors play their characters’ parents. The connections between the malaise of the present and the turmoil of the past are left in the air for the audience to construct, a sleight of hand expertly designed by Greenberg.

Not surprisingly, “Three Days” is the product of a long association between South Coast and the playwright, going back to 1987, when Greenberg was three years out of Yale Drama School. Further, South Coast has outfitted the play with a full 40-performance run and an impeccable production--first-rate acting, set and direction. In fact, “Three Days” is the best new play I have seen premiered in Southern California in my three years here.

South Coast fosters and maintains long-term relationships with artists. Thanks to an endowment (ensuring at least $2 million for new play development each year), it commissions artists through lean years as well as in times of plenty (the Taper’s New Work Festival was canceled in 1991 because of budget cutbacks). Moreover, South Coast features an intimate second stage that is perfect, financially and aesthetically, for new work finding its sea legs before an audience.

Every fall in its New Work Festival, the Taper produces work it is developing--but didn’t necessarily commission--at the John Anson Ford Theatre, under the rubric Taper, Too. But it has yet to find a secure second stage, a place that doesn’t feel ancillary in the public mind to the main nest of the Taper. Tentative plans are now being laid for a second and third stage in Culver City, something Davidson has been trying to make happen for many years.

South Coast, on the other hand, has had its second stage since the complex was opened in 1978. It was there, in October, that the theater reaped another harvest on a long-term commitment: It opened “Collected Stories,” a play about the ferocious and intricate battle between a writer and her young protegee. The play dealt with issues of worldly success and artistic purity, as did an earlier Margulies play, “Sight Unseen,” which was also commissioned by SCR, and was a breakthrough play for the playwright. In fact, Margulies told The Times in an earlier interview that his SCR commission came at a time when he was discouraged and thinking about quitting the theater altogether.

Preceding “Three Days of Rain” was “BAFO,” a new play from a writer who had been produced at South Coast a decade ago and who had dropped out of sight for a while. Tom Strelich had gotten a day job at a Santa Barbara think tank, which supplied the basis for a very funny, up-to-the-minute Catch-22-like comedy about men caught in the crossfire of defense industry downsizing. While not as far-reaching or mature as the other world premieres in the season, Strelich’s “BAFO” showed off a fresh and vigorous comic voice and marked the return of a writer who had somewhere to go when he was ready to return to the stage.

South Coast does not always have seasons like 1996-97, but it clearly has a coherent and consistent policy toward commissioning and producing playwrights that the Taper cannot and does not want to duplicate. The theaters do indeed serve different functions. Nevertheless, Taper subscribers are advised to make the drive to Costa Mesa to see Richard Greenberg’s play, just as Costa Mesa residents had to get in the car to see Zoe Caldwell in “Master Class.” But, it must be said, there is a kind of romance in what South Coast does, in its loyalty to the well-chosen playwright, which is rare in California or anywhere in the country.