Who’s Afraid of Henrik Ibsen?

One Saturday afternoon, in a cavernous rehearsal space above a sporting goods store at San Diego’s University Towne Centre shopping mall, Les Waters and Annie Smart watched a marriage fall apart.

Waters, 46, and Smart, 45, are the director and costume/set designer, respectively, of the upcoming La Jolla Playhouse production of “Nora,” Ingmar Bergman’s 1981 stage adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1878 play “A Doll’s House.”

Bergman, better known as a film director than for his theatrical ventures, pared Ibsen’s, three-act, three-hour drama down to one fast-moving, 100-minute act, removing servants, children, extraneous dialogue and stage business. The only thing Bergman didn’t seem to cut is the pain, as the childish “doll” wife Nora and Torvald, her doting, paternal husband, uncover the harsh truths about their unbalanced relationship.

Waters and Smart--also a married couple, with more success--are natives of England. They moved to San Diego in 1995 when Waters accepted a position as head of the directing program at the University of California, San Diego. The university’s drama department uses the La Jolla Playhouse during the academic year; the playhouse’s own season is in the summer. “Nora,” which opens tonight, is the first of this summer’s six productions.

Run-throughs of this show tend to leave the participants emotionally drained--particularly Kellie Overbey as Nora, who’s rarely offstage for a second, and cinched up even during rehearsal in a rib-crunching Victorian corset. “This thing is sort of like a nasty little machine,” said Waters.

Smart found San Diego a ripe ground for research for “Nora.” “[The play] is about those women who play at marriage, which I think is a very Southern California thing,” she muses. “You get the right house and nice toys for the children, and the right upholstery . . . I think there is this curious thing, the little-girl women--the frisky squirrels, we used to call them.

“Coming from London, that was a huge shock--I haven’t been around women like that since I was a little girl and my mother was around women like that. It may have something to do with it being a very nouveau riche area, there is this whole insecurity--well, that is another whole conversation!”

While the story is Ibsen’s, domestic strife is hardly unfamiliar turf for the oft-married Bergman, 79. It comes as no surprise that he would choose to take his knife to “A Doll’s House.” “Nora” was first presented in 1981 as a part of a three-part series known as “The Bergman Project,” which also included a Bergman adaptation of August Strindberg’s “Miss Julie” and his stage adaptation of his own film “Scenes From a Marriage.”

Neither Waters nor Smart ever met Bergman, and the couple are probably the pair least likely to ever become the model for a Bergman film. Both placid, soft-spoken and reserved, they seem to juggle dual careers and three young children--Jacob, 10, Nancy, 7, and Madeleine, 2, with relatively little strife. They met as students at England’s Manchester College, and have been together ever since.

Of course, there’s a bit of disappointment for Smart that went with the move to San Diego. Smart was just 18 months into “a very nice job” as head of the fine arts master program at Wimbledon School of Art when Waters got the offer to come to UCSD. With three children, the stability of tenure was an offer they couldn’t refuse.

And how does Smart feel about Southern California now that she’s here? “I’ve stopped trying to pack my bags every morning, that’s as far as I’ll go,” she said, laughing. “Being in San Diego, we are hardly in the swim of things. It’s not like being in New York or London. There isn’t the opportunity for us to go out and choose good work to do.”

But Smart quickly added that she has few complaints about La Jolla Playhouse. “It’s great working here, they have really high standards. This is my second show [she was the designer on last year’s acclaimed “The Importance of Being Earnest,” also directed by Waters] and I’ve enjoyed both of them so far.”

After years of freelancing, Waters also has mixed feelings about leaving the tenuous world of the freelance director to become a tenured faculty member. “[The position] is a relief, but it’s also a trap,” he said. “I mean, it’s great to have the security of employment, but I think it can dull the edge. I think in this line of work you can become addicted to the insecurity of it.”

Smart also remains torn between her old life and the new one. “I think, for me, it is not getting addicted to the insecurity, but you do get addicted to the freedom,” she said. “That’s what I hate about being here, that my choices are limited. Also, with the children--if we didn’t have the children, I could hop on planes and be anywhere. And I don’t want to have that option, in a way, while they’re so young.”

The situation is better now for the children, since Mommy and Daddy are no longer jetting around the world to make a living. Still, during final rehearsals and the opening of a new show, “the children have to take a back seat a bit--like next week, basically we won’t see them,” Smart said. “But that’s nothing we feel guilty about. That’s just the way it is.”

One of the children, at least, has already got the acting bug, so to speak. Jacob is busy rehearsing his first role, in a UCSD production called “Not Them!”--a spoof of the 1954 sci-fi movie “Them!”--in which he portrays a “small boy released from the clutches of a giant mutant ant.”

Waters, a veteran of many prominent regional theaters in the United States--Chicago’s Steppenwolf, the Guthrie and American Repertory Theatre, among others--finds a kind of insecurity here, not limited to Southern California.

“My feeling is that regional theaters are really rather timid nowadays about new work,” he observed. “I do know some very powerful scripts out there that various theaters just won’t touch because oooh, they might offend the subscribers. That subscription base doesn’t exist so much in England. Since the point I first started working in the States, theaters have gotten a little more scared.”

Added Smart: “Things seem to have to come with a stamp of approval or label on them: ‘Was it a big hit in London?’ Of the interesting work being done in New York, so much of it comes from London, because there they have dared to try it out.”

What San Diego provides, they note, is a pool of wonderful actors, even though the hungry maw of Hollywood is always waiting to gobble them up. And, of course, it provides the opportunity to continue to work together frequently.

“Because we know each other so well, we can speak in a sort of shorthand, and know each other’s taste, in a way you couldn’t get in a new designer/director relationship,” Waters said.

“Or you can interpret that another way--we know each other’s shortcomings, and we can accommodate that very well,” Smart added. “The interesting thing is that it doesn’t really matter how many shows you do together, each one is as likely to fail or succeed as another. Just because we are working together is no guarantee that it is going to work.

“Every time we do a long run of shows together, I worry, because I am absolutely sure there is going to be a bummer in there somewhere, and it is going to be one of our faults, or both of our faults,” she continues. “You have to carry it around for a few months after. You can’t walk away from it.”

But for a couple, even when they work apart, bad scenes on the stage find their way into the marriage. “If Les has a bad show, he’s going to bring the show home,” Smart said. “And if I’ve done something really terrible, it’s the same.”

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“NORA,” La Jolla Playhouse / Weiss Theater, La Jolla Village Drive and Torrey Pines Road. Dates: Opens today, 7 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends June 21. Prices: $21-$39. Phone: (619) 550-1010.