La Jolla Playhouse Names Artistic Director

Anne Hamburger, a producer known for site-specific off-off-Broadway theater, will become the artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse beginning next year.

The announcement, to be made today by theater officials, ends a search that began last year when Michael Greif, the theater’s current artistic director, said he would leave after the 1999 season.

Hamburger, 45, founded En Garde Arts in 1986. For the last 13 years, her company commissioned and produced more than 25 new plays and musicals, mainly in New York but also in Prague, London and Washington, D.C. En Garde Arts, which will disband with her departure, won seven Village Voice Obie awards, two Drama Desk awards and a special Outer Critics Circle award for its New York productions.

Most of the company’s early work was produced outdoors--on city streets, a pier, in rail yards. In 1989, Hamburger trained to become a certified city fire guard so that she could better handle the fire department’s requirements at outdoor locations.

“It will be a refreshing change to have a roof and not have to worry about [rehearsing] in the rain,” Hamburger said. However, she added that three of her major productions have taken place inside theaters--including an acclaimed 37-minute production of “The Waste Land” in 1996, starring Fiona Shaw in a New York space that “was crumbling and old, but it was a theater.”

Her 1990 production of “Father Was a Peculiar Man,” by the late Los Angeles artist Reza Abdoh, involved a street procession. But many of her shows required paid admission to set seating areas, akin to the audience-performer relationship she’ll encounter at La Jolla, she said, “except that our proscenium was 300 feet wide and as high as the sky.”

She has no immediate plans to produce site-specific work in La Jolla, Hamburger said, “although as I come to know the community, I may find a site that’s appropriate. However, my interests have grown away from site work. I’m more interested now in putting collaborators together and doing plays and musical theater.”

La Jolla has been an occasional launch pad for Broadway shows, which Hamburger said interests her because Broadway can “expand the outreach, the number of people who see a work.” Even her site-specific work was “populist in that a lot of non-theatergoers attended just because it was in their neighborhood.”

Unlike Greif and his predecessor, Des McAnuff, La Jolla’s only artistic directors since the theater reopened in 1983, Hamburger is a producer rather than a director. The La Jolla board “was very smart” to examine nondirectors, Greif said. “She can more easily distribute her focus throughout the season than I could when I was directing a show.” Greif also directed outside La Jolla during his tenure, which proved a boon for La Jolla when he brought his New York staging of “Rent” there, “but it often meant I was away from the theater.”

Hamburger and her computer programmer/philosopher-husband, Ralph Jenney, are parents of 1-year-old twins; she said she looks forward to raising them in a city “where they won’t have to put their boots on when they go outside.”