John Glore: On the Job and ‘On the Jump’

If unproduced plays were sheep, South Coast Repertory’s literary manager would be a shepherd. He has tended flocks of scripts over the last 13 years, helping the county’s only professional resident theater earn a national reputation for bringing new plays to market.

The job, though hardly pastoral, demands a shepherd’s devotion, with its all-consuming hours. And that goes double for a literary manager who also is a playwright with ambitions for getting his work produced.

“Being the literary manager here makes it both harder and easier to be a playwright,” says John Glore, 42, whose “On the Jump” will have a NewSCRipt reading tonight at 7:30 on the SCR mainstage in Costa Mesa. “But by and large, I’d have to say harder. When you read hundreds of plays a year, it becomes oppressive. It makes it difficult to feel you have an original idea in your head.”

Still, Glore, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama, has managed nicely.

SCR gave his first full-length play, “The Company of Heaven,” a handsome mounting on the Second Stage in 1993. And while that drama about paranormal phenomena and the nature of contemporary faith has yet to be produced elsewhere, it has been published by the Dramatists Play Service in New York. A group of his short dream plays, “Morpheus Quartet,” was staged last month at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.

This time Glore has written a romantic comedy involving a young woman deserted by her husband on her wedding night--only the latest misfortune in a long string--who falls in love with a dead man.

“It’s a fairy tale of sorts,” he says, adapted from a short story written by his wife, Amy Dunkleberger, a film cataloger who also writes screenplays. “She wasn’t having any luck getting it taken anywhere. So I asked her to let me run with it.”

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The title “On the Jump” comes from early 20th century slang, now archaic, meaning busy or active. The play itself is “almost old-fashioned,” Glore notes, with its subtitle, “A Romance,” and its light-comedy style.

“It doesn’t really have the earmarks of the contemporary works that SCR typically does,” he adds. “They’re usually more edgy.”

Who tends Glore’s plays when he’s busying being the playwright? Ordinarily SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch, who helped shepherd “The Company of Heaven” through development. But at SCR it’s never one person helping shape new works.

“There’s a whole team here with Martin and David,” Glore said, referring to SCR co-founders Martin Benson and David Emmes, who always have a say in the plays’ evolution and who almost always get to direct them.

* “On the Jump” will be presented in a NewSCRipt reading tonight at 7:30 at South Coast Repertory Theater’s Mainstage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $7. (714) 708-5555.