Edgy, Yes, but on Solid Ground

It is a Sunday night in early August at the La Jolla Playhouse, well into the second act of a performance of the Paul Gordon-John Caird musical “Jane Eyre.” Just minutes into the pivotal scene in which Edward Rochester’s estate is set aflame, an alarm sounds.

Strobe lights at the far outside corners of the proscenium begin to flash, and the house lights come up.

Theatergoers look at one another in confusion. Is this part of the scene, or is it a real fire? Should they get up and leave or not? Maybe it’s a conceptual flourish, one of those arty avant-garde interruptions that’s meant to call attention to the artificiality of the play.

The momentary befuddlement is understandable, particularly for those who’ve been coming to this theater since it was relaunched in 1983 by the iconoclastic Des McAnuff. In those days, a coup de theatre like that would’ve made perfect sense. In those days, there were more than a few times when the fourth wall was broken and traditional staging decorum went out the window--or up into the lighting grids and catwalks, back into the far limits of the scene shop or even outside to the loading docks.

But this is not the La Jolla Playhouse of the wild and woolly early McAnuff years. This is the comparatively staid, albeit fiscally more sound, playhouse of outgoing artistic director Michael Greif, who has been at the helm since he took over from McAnuff in 1995. And this “Jane Eyre” is as straightforward and mindful of the strictures of convention as the Bronte heroine herself. The fire alarm is indeed a real fire alarm--although no actual fire will be found, and the performance will resume after only a brief evacuation.

Still, that alarm--and the theatrical frisson it caused--may be a portent, a sign of things to come. For there is a new artistic director-designate already in residence at La Jolla, and her sensibilities just might include setting off alarms in unexpected ways.

Anne (pronounced “Annie”) Hamburger was appointed in March and has been in residence since July. She will take over from Greif when he departs in October, and she is now planning her first season, which will begin next spring.

An innovative producer and theater guerrilla widely admired and respected in the East Coast performing arts community, Hamburger founded and ran New York’s acclaimed site-specific theater company En Garde Arts for 13 years, from 1986 to 1999. Now, she stands poised to bring back some of the cutting-edge cachet the Playhouse once had.

“I’d really like to be trying to do work that’s daring, and work that isn’t tied down to using the proscenium in normal ways,” says Hamburger, 45, seated in an upstairs lounge at the theater, just a couple of weeks after moving from New York to the West Coast with her husband, computer programmer and philosopher Ralph Jenney, and their 22-month-old twins. “For me, doing six shows a year will allow me to work with a broader range of artists than I have in the past.

“Obviously, I have a great obligation to building the subscription season first,” she continues. “But after that, I would like to be doing some stuff outside. And I don’t want to only work with text-based artists. I also want to work with artists that work from an image base and do nonlinear-type shows. I want to be doing new musical theater, and the other thing that interests me a lot is adapting classics. Also, there’s a lot of advocacy work that needs to be done when you’re trying to bring world-class artists to a particular institution. You need to cultivate those relationships, and that takes time.”

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Born and reared in Baltimore, Hamburger trained as a visual and performance artist at the University of Massachusetts and elsewhere. She was working as a performance artist when she first hooked up with director Anne Bogart in 1979. At that time, Bogart was staging a series of dramas at various sites around Manhattan. Hamburger began acting for the director but soon discovered she had more affinity for unearthing unusual locations and producing. A few years later, in 1983, she decided to go to graduate school. She entered the Yale School of Drama, and it was there, in her senior year, that she launched En Garde Arts.

Dealing with errant fire alarms is nothing compared to the logistics Hamburger faced during her En Garde years, commissioning original works and presenting them in the kind of places where most producers wouldn’t even post fliers, let alone stage large-scale public events.

The late Los Angeles writer-director Reza Abdoh came to New York in 1990 for his “Father Was a Peculiar Man,” which included a street procession through four square blocks of the meat packing district. In 1993, Hamburger produced Charles L. Mee Jr.’s “Orestes” in the West Side railroad yards. The late Jonathan Larson (“Rent”) was given his first professional production in 1995 when she brought his musical “J.P. Morgan Saves the Nation,” with book and lyrics by Jeffrey M. Jones, to the corner of Wall Street and Broad, on the steps of the Federal Building and into the street.

In 1996, Hamburger hired a crew of day laborers from the neighborhood to help her excavate the crumbling ruins of the East River Park Amphitheater, where the New York Shakespeare Festival first performed, so she could use it as the site for “The Trojan Women: A Love Story,” written by Charles L. Mee Jr. and directed by Tina Landau. That same year, Hamburger brought over actress Fiona Shaw and director Deborah Warner from the U.K. to present T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in the dilapidated Liberty Theatre on 42nd Street. And last year, she presented the three-part work “The Secret History of the Lower East Side,” directed by Matt Wilder, on the rooftop of Seward Park High.

Director Bogart has done several projects with En Garde Arts, including “Marathon Dancing,” a piece about the often brutal dance craze of the 1930s, which was presented in the Grand Lodge Room of the Chelsea Masonic Hall in 1994.

“Because she’s gone up against City Hall and made the impossible happen in New York, she has become this amazing person,” Bogart says. “Of all the people I know, Anne is the one who has changed the most. She has loosened up and grown to be a significant force, and it’s really through a match of her intelligence with her will and her imagination of what could happen.”

Landau, another En Garde Arts mainstay who has also directed at the La Jolla Playhouse, staged “Stonewall: Night Variations,” a 25th anniversary homage to the groundbreaking gay rights protest, on an empty Hudson River pier in 1994. “I remember from the very establishment of En Garde, I thought this is the place that I want to work,” she says. “I had just focused in on [Hamburger] as holding the key to my creative life. There is no one who is more committed and impassioned in terms of her time and energy than Anne. Anne is a completely creative soul who generates ideas and knows how to talk to artists.”

En Garde Arts presented two productions per year, mostly in New York but also in Washington, D.C., Prague and London. The organization received seven Obie Awards, two Drama Desk Awards and a special Outer Critics Circle award, as well as other recognition--all on an annual budget that had grown to only about $800,000 (versus, say, La Jolla Playhouse’s $6.2 million) by the time Hamburger closed down En Garde Arts, shortly after she decided to take the La Jolla job.

“I felt like my work with En Garde had run its course,” she says. “Part of what site-specific work is dependent on is great available sites, and New York has really undergone a real estate boom that has made it very difficult to find interesting sites.

“I also really started to feel like I needed and wanted a better support system for what I did,” she says. “I felt like it was just climbing up a mountain made with tiny pebbles in a pair of high heels.”

She also began to sense that the reputation she had developed might allow her to continue her work in a different context. “Artists would come to me with their site-specific project because they really wanted to work with me, not because they really wanted to do something that was site-specific,” Hamburger says. “So I started to say, I think my interests are shifting from the place as the primary instrument of creation, to the artists themselves and their ideas.”

When the La Jolla offer came along, the fit seemed right. “I think if I hadn’t gotten this job, I probably wouldn’t have gone to work for another regional theater,” Hamburger says. “To me it was this particular job that seemed interesting. The fact that it’s on the coast near a major metropolitan city was appealing to me, and I think the theater is unique in the country in terms of what its history has been and how committed it has been to invention and experimentation.”

Then too, she had personal reasons to make a change. “Another part of the reason that I took the job is not artistic,” she says. “I was sitting on a panel last year, and somebody raised their hand and said, ‘Well, how can you possibly be in the theater and be a mother?’ And that struck a chord with me. It’s very hard to work in the theater in New York City and be a parent if you don’t have resources that come from family money or a husband making a lot of money or something like that.”

Naming a producer rather than a director as artistic head is unusual in regional theater, though not in New York City. But from La Jolla’s point of view, that was a selling point. “We have the advantage of her being here full time, where she can really focus on the Playhouse and not be distracted by other things,” says longtime board member and search committee chair Joan Jacobs. Hiring Hamburger was “a risky choice, but a wonderful choice. Anne fits the mold of what we think the Playhouse should be. We do works that are not necessarily easy plays, and we need to play the role of being a place where we can commission works and give people the opportunity to put them on the stage.”

Indeed, Hamburger is now hard at work and intends to bring “many of the artists who were staples of En Garde Arts” to La Jolla. She has already talked with Bogart and Landau, among others.

“From the time my position was announced, I really hit the ground running in terms of starting to have meetings with people and sitting down and saying to some of my favorite artists, ‘OK, what would you like to do?’ ” she says.

Hamburger also plans to do a great deal of commissioning, although the fruits of those efforts won’t be seen for a while. “It’s going to take me a good three to five years, I would say, to really be able to institute certain programs that I have ideas for and develop some new works,” she says.

Yet rather than limit herself to artists she’s worked with before, Hamburger expects to bring in a wide range of talents. “Because En Garde only had the money to do two productions a year, and because these productions were so enormous, there were a lot of people I couldn’t work with that I really wanted to work with,” she says. “For me, the vision of this theater is about bringing in the artists that I believe in and care about and giving them a platform upon which to pursue their creative dreams.

“I love live performance, and I hope I’m always fortunate enough to be able to continue to make a living producing it, because that’s what really makes me tick.” *