SCR Season Big on Old, Easy on New

South Coast Repertory has named five of the six Mainstage plays and three of the five Second Stage plays for its 1998-99 subscription seasons.

The Costa Mesa theater, which has a national reputation for mounting new plays, will be celebrating its 35th consecutive year next season. The plays named so far, however, are heavy on revivals and light on world premieres.

“Ah, Wilderness!” (Sept. 4-Oct. 11), Eugene O’Neill’s nostalgic, semiautobiographical depiction of small-town life--first produced in 1933 and his only comedy--will launch the season on the Mainstage. It will be followed by the West Coast premiere of Donald Margulies’ 1998 drama, “Dinner With Friends” (Oct. 16-Nov. 22). The play, which premiered at the Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky., is about two couples whose marriages have taken different paths.

The Mainstage schedule continues with a nonsubscription holiday offering of “A Christmas Carol” (Nov. 28-Dec. 27), now in its 19th year, adapted by SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch from the Charles Dickens story, and Moliere’s 1664 anti-clerical satire, “Tartuffe” (Jan. 8-Feb. 14). The French classic centers on a lecherous churchman, Tartuffe, who is determined to seduce his bourgeois benefactor’s wife. Greedy as well as hypocritical in all things, Tartuffe also intends to marry their daughter and dupe the family out of its wealth.

John Steinbeck’s 1937 tragedy “Of Mice and Men” follows (Feb. 19-April 4). The play, adapted by Steinbeck from his short Depression-era novel of the same name, tells of two migrant workers hired as farmhands in the Salinas Valley: One is a loving, simple-minded giant who needs protection, both despite and because of his brute strength; the other, whose life gains meaning from their friendship, is his protector.

The only world premiere, as announced Monday, will be a Mainstage production of “On the Jump” (April 9-May 16), by SCR Literary Manager John Glore (based on a story by his wife, Amy Dunkleberger). It is a comic tale of redemption about a newlywed who is robbed and abandoned by her husband on their wedding night.

“On the Jump” had a New-SCRipt reading as a work in progress earlier this season and is scheduled for another reading (June 26) in SCR’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, which closes the current season.

Glore’s first major play, “The Company of Heaven,” had its world premiere on the SCR Second Stage in 1993; his recent adaptation of Aristophanes’ satirical farce, “The Birds,” co-written with Latino troupe Culture Clash, premiered earlier this season.

The sixth Mainstage subscription offering (May 21-June 27, 1999) has not been announced.

The West Coast premiere of Jon Klein’s “Dimly Perceived Threats to the System” (Sept. 22-Oct. 25) will open the Second Stage season of five subscription offerings. This 1997 comedy, which premiered at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., centers on a family that espouses family values and coping strategies but has its own troubles trying to cope in the ‘90s.

SCR announced the titles of two other plays for the Second Stage: David Hare’s “Skylight” and Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano.” But it hasn’t decided on the slots they’ll fill in the schedule. Two others are still to be announced and scheduled.

The traditional nonsubscription Christmas production on the Second Stage, now in its fifth year, will be Octavio Solis’ “La Posada Magica” (Dec. 11-27), with music by Marcos Loya.

Subscriptions to the six-play Mainstage season are $120 to $243; subscriptions to the five-play Second Stage season are $108 to $190. They are on sale at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Single tickets go on sale in mid-August. Information: (714) 708-5555.