SCR Festival Will Help Fill a Gap in West

COSTA MESA — Backed by a $175,00 grant from the Mellon Foundation, South Coast Repertory has scheduled a new Pacific Playwrights Festival for two weekends in June. It has also established a new fund for staging commercial productions in New York.

The Costa Mesa theater announced Thursday that the festival will gather playwrights, artistic directors and literary staffs from regional theater companies in Western states to present six new plays in staged readings and workshop productions.

“We are particularly interested in forging stronger ties among West Coast theaters,” SCR artistic director Martin Benson said in a prepared statement. “But we do want the festival to have a national reach so that the playwrights involved will gain maximum exposure for their work.”

The festival, to be headed by SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch, will operate as part of SCR’s Collaboration Laboratory (Colab), which has a $2-million endowment. Income from the endowment goes to developing and commissioning new plays. The Mellon grant, which has no matching requirement, is to help underwrite the festival for two years.

“What we’ve noticed sort of fading from the scene in the West are the kinds of programs that tend to be done in summer that build communities of artists,” Patch said. “There are some in particular areas of the country, but they’re all basically from Minneapolis east to Connecticut and dipping down to part of the South. West of Chicago, however, there has been a real falling off of that kind of festival program.”

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Patch noted that the grandfather of all these programs is the National Playwrights Conference at Waterford, Conn., founded by Lloyd Richards, a former artistic director of Yale Repertory.

Similar festivals include Midwest Play Labs in Minneapolis, the New Harmony Project in New Harmony, Ind., the Southern Writers Conference in Knoxville, Tenn., the Humana Festival at the Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky and New York Stage and Film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

“We expect to have as many as a dozen playwrights working here at our festival,” Patch said, “either on their own plays or as dramaturges on plays by others.”

The six new plays will be performed June 25-28. Preview performances will be offered June 19-21. The plays have not been announced, but they will include scripts chosen from submissions to SCR’s annual Hispanic Playwrights Project.

Calling the festival “a logical extension of the work we’ve been doing,” SCR producing artistic director David Emmes said he wants it to foster “a community of artists that we hope functions as a creative hothouse.”

Emmes said he foresees “the possibility of producing partnerships with other Western theaters” growing out of the festival. The festival would develop new work by emerging writers “that we feel should be produced whether or not they fit into SCR’s programming aesthetic,” he said.

Among participants expected to attend the Pacific Playwrights Festival are David Henry Hwang (“M. Butterfly” and “The Golden Child”); Howard Korder (“Search and Destroy”); Amy Freed (“Freedomland”); director Mark Rucker, a SCR associate artist; and Juliette Carrillo, who heads SCR’s Hispanic Playwrights Project and who will be an associate director of the festival along with SCR literary manager John Glore.

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In a separate but related move, SCR is exploring ways to finance and mount co-productions with an eye toward doing them in New York for greater exposure and, potentially, greater income. It has established a group of backers, the National Producers Circle, financed by founding gifts totaling $250,000 from the Segerstrom Foundation and SCR trustee Barbara Roberts and her husband, William H. Roberts.

“Funds will be earmarked to help a show go commercial or for artistic enhancement,” SCR spokesman Cristofer Gross said. The goal is $500,000, with membership in the circle open to a limited number of donors who contribute a minimum of $50,000.

SCR has done occasional co-productions before, among them “V & V Only” with New York’s Circle Repertory in 1988, “Ballad of Yachiyo” with Berkeley Repertory in 1996 and “The Golden Child” with New York’s Public Theater last season. It also has an upcoming co-production with Berkeley Rep, a new adaptation of Aristophanes’ “The Birds,” which will open on the SCR Second Stage in January.

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But Emmes and Benson are the only artistic directors from Southern California’s handful of professional regional theaters who have not directed in New York, on or off Broadway, or in any professional theater other than their home company.

Co-productions would enable them not just to direct elsewhere for the first time but perhaps to make their marks in a larger arena.

* The schedule and ticket prices for the Pacific Playwrights Festival have not been announced. For more information: (714) 708-5500.