The SCR Now-Sayers

Other theater companies may specialize in classic works, cutting-edge directorial concepts, musical comedy or multimedia spectacle. At South Coast Repertory, while celebrated plays of the past have their place--witness season opener Eugene O’Neill’s 1933 “Ah, Wilderness!”--contemporary American playwrights are king.

They’ve been adding to those ranks since 1984, when the Costa Mesa company began funding “research and development.” Several playwrights on the receiving end of this largess have burnished the theater’s luster by winning Obies and other awards--even as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

In SCR’s 35th anniversary season, which opens Friday, seven of the 13 plays (including two holiday productions) were written in the 1990s.

Subjects range from a middle-aged couple’s messy breakup (Donald Margulies’ “Dinner with Friends,” opening Oct. 23) to the desperation of a married Cuban woman under house arrest whose guard offers a double-edged proposition in exchange for intercepted letters from her faraway husband (Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano,” opening April 30).

Last month, the company published “Plays From South Coast Repertory, Vol. II,” a volume of several of the new works produced by the SCR over the last four years.

After an evening steeped in the emotional worlds evoked on those pages, one is liable to view every conversation as potentially theatrical. So the next day’s audience with founding artistic directors David Emmes and Martin Benson seemed like a scene from a play about two guys’ missionary zeal to create a playwright’s theater.

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Scene: A spacious office furnished with cluttered bookshelves, a couch and chairs.

Characters: David Emmes, 59, a reserved, somewhat formal speaker; Martin Benson, 61, punchier, with a droll sense of humor and a perpetually bemused expression; reporter.

*

Benson: From our first sitting around and scratching out the ideas for this wonderful theater we were going to have, new plays were a part of it.

In our first season, when no one was getting paid, and Dave and I were siphoning money in, we produced a new play called “Chocolates,” by Ian Bernard, the musical director on “Laugh-In.” It started out as a one-act play, acquired a second act, then became overburdened with a third act--and ended up off-Broadway, with many of the old Steve Allen regulars. It wasn’t particularly successful, but this was the very first year.

In our second year, we had “The Trial of Gabriel Kapuniak,” which is without a doubt the worst new play we ever conceived of. I played the leading role, ranting and raving for two hours, so I know. We actually played that for an audience of two people who were too embarrassed to get up and leave. I kept thinking, Why don’t those people leave so I can go home? (Laughs.)

Emmes: There’s an awful lot of new play programs going on where they end up with just endless readings and the plays never get produced. We wanted to make sure we were producing them. On our 20th anniversary, we wanted to use part of our endowment to fund this kind of artistic research and development. Our board embraced this idea. When that came to pass--

Benson (cutting in): We knew we couldn’t get John Guare or Harold Pinter. They’re not gonna say, ‘Oh, yeah, send me a few bucks and we’ll write a play for you.’ We were looking around for young talent--looking for the ideal play.

Reporter: And what’s that?

Benson: Oh, it depends on your mood at the moment. You read a play and you say, “This is it! I’m gonna do this!” Or we’d read a play which really didn’t work but had one dynamite scene, and we’d say, “There’s a writer here. We’ve gotta support this writer, whoever he happens to be, because down the line he or she is gonna write something really good.”

Emmes: We are very much text-oriented. A literate quality has always been in the plays we do, like those of Shaw, Tom Stoppard or Richard Greenberg. Yet at the same time we love plays that are overtly theatrical, that give you experiences you can’t have anywhere else. The other factor is, what the play is saying. What it’s artistic relevance is at any given time.

Reporter: So you’re doing a play in November about Richard Nixon’s 1950 Senate race against Helen Gahagan Douglas--Keith Reddin’s “But Not for Me” --because, uh, dirty politics are in the news?

Benson: We chose to go ahead with it because we were intrigued by it. It’s interesting stuff. But then we looked at all the Clinton follies. . . . Yeah, there was all sorts of dirty campaigning before Nixon, but this campaign is where it really became brutal--

Emmes (interrupting): Yeah, Douglas was really a character--

Benson: (cutting in): The distortion, the terrible, fiendish distortions of what her record was.

Emmes: But we’ve always chosen plays first and foremost because there’s the artistic justification to do it, not because it has some topical interest. We would never choose a play with movie-of-the-week syndrome.

Reporter (impatiently): But aren’t you really just catering to a smug yuppie audience--people who pride themselves on catching references to famous people, say, but who don’t want to be shocked or disturbed by what they see?

Emmes (cautiously): I’m not sure I’d agree completely. I’d say there’s probably a segment of our audience who might be as you describe. But we’ve found it is much more heterogeneous. The Second Stage audiences are much more willing to go on more experimental journeys with us.

Benson: A colleague of ours says what people want to see at his theater are plays about rich white people. (Laughs.) But certainly in Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano” you don’t have that.

Emmes: If there were playwrights dealing with other issues or different structural forms who were, in our minds, theatrically substantial, I don’t think we’d shy away from doing them. A lot of it simply has to do with what’s being written about.

Benson: I don’t think you can find a consistent pattern in what we’re doing because, another thing is, we’ll want to commission a playwright and he’ll have several ideas. One might appeal to us more than others. But if the playwright says, “You know that idea you guys loved? I can’t get anywhere on that. I’m gonna write this play about such-and-such.” And we’ll say, “Godspeed.”

Emmes: Writing the play is a journey of exploration and discovery. What’s unique at SCR is, because we have been around a long time and have an institution, one play is not going to make or break us. We are prepared to fail on occasion. We’ll take that risk to support the playwright’s vision.

One reason we’ve been so successful in working with playwrights is very often, when new plays are done, especially in New York theaters, the pressures of wanting to make a play be successful is so intense. The director is trying to make his or her career on the basis of this production. And it comes down to “If you’re the playwright and I’m the director and somebody has to suffer, let it be you.”

Benson: Putting a season together has so many complex pieces. The marketing department is screaming at us, “Come on, you promised us those titles a month ago!” And we’re still trying to work it all out.

There’s a play we’re sort of betting on. One more rewrite and we can put it in the season. And then we realize at the last minute, no, it’s gonna have to go next year.

Then there’s waiting for the availability of a particular play. A year ago, we were 95% certain we had Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive.” There was just one last little person to check with. Now it ends up on the Taper season in L.A. this year. They can outbid us. They’re 750 seats versus 500. That’s a sizable difference in royalties.

Reporter: So, uh, looking ahead, I know you’ve been asked before about what happens after you’re no longer around . . .

Benson (dryly): We’re asked that question more and more.

Emmes (soberly): It’s really important that the transition of leadership be done very carefully, not anything abrupt or revolutionary, but building on the idea of SCR as a playwright’s theater. We wouldn’t want it to suddenly become a designer’s theater or a director’s theater.

But for the near term (he brightens visibly), what we’re looking at in terms of opportunities is like a golden age for us. After all these years, we’ve now got major American playwrights thinking of SCR when they’re writing plays. We have marvelous actors and designers and directors working for us, and it’s a great, fertile time to move forward.

Reporter: That sounds like the close of an interview. (Laughter.)

* “Ah, Wilderness!,” directed by Martin Benson, runs Friday-Oct. 11 (Tuesday-Saturday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 7:30 p.m., weekend matinees at 2:30 p.m.) on SCR’s Mainstage. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Ticket prices: $18-$45, with discounts for students, seniors and groups of 15 or more. SCR’s first new play this season is “Dimly Perceived Threats to the System,” by Jon Klein, opening Sept. 25 on the Second Stage. Box office: (714) 957-4033.