First-Timers Feel Shakes and Quakes

South Coast Repertory, one of Southern California’s leading theater companies, has a national reputation for fostering new plays, and occasionally it takes a chance on a playwright who never has had a work staged before.

Having one’s debut at a respected regional theater might be the play-writing equivalent of a college football player in the first round of the National Football League draft. It does not guarantee a successful professional career, but it tags the draftee as a hot prospect.

SCR’s rookie playwright stars include Margaret Edson, whose first and so far only play, “Wit,” premiered at the Costa Mesa theater in 1995. “Wit,” about a scholar stricken with ovarian cancer, won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Roger Rueff emerged at SCR in 1992; his play, “Hospitality Suite,” about small-time businessmen at a trade convention, will be revived next year in a Rueff-scripted film version starring Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito.

Clearly, starting out at SCR is a tad different from beginning at a small, grass-roots theater like Santa Ana’s Alternative Repertory Theatre, currently staging “Six Random Women and the Voice of a Man,” a first effort by Orange County playwright Carolyn Carpenter (see related story). At ART, unlike SCR, most of the actors and staff keep day jobs to pay the bills.

However, judging from the stories told by three playwrights who had their first-ever productions at SCR during the 1990s, the theater gods like to toy with those on whom they smile--bestowing, along with the glory, some uncomfortable moments that turn into indelible memories, funny only in retrospect.

For Rueff, it was the night the earth moved: April 22, 1992, when an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.1 struck during the second act of the second performance of “Hospitality Suite.”

Never having experienced an earthquake before, the Illinois resident thought at first that someone was kicking the seat he saw shaking in front of him.

Director Steve Albrezzi sat next to Rueff and quickly clarified matters. “He freaked and screamed, ‘Actors, get off the stage!’ ”

The audience looked up and gasped. Then the stage manager called down from the booth, and it was like the voice of God: ‘Don’t move, all the lights are double-hung.”’--and therefore theoretically quake-proof.

The kicker: Two actors on stage did exactly as we’re told to do during an earthquake, huddling in the nearest doorway. But this one was just part of the stage set.

Cecilia Fannon was a wreck on the first evening her play was produced. One of the lead actors in “Green Icebergs” had lost his voice and couldn’t perform; the substitute, who hadn’t read the entire play when he was called in that afternoon, read his part from a script.

Fannon, who lives in Newport Beach, had requested a juniper tree to enhance the Tuscan villa where the play is set, but there was no time to attach the branches to the trunks for the first preview performance.

“It was like a huge phallic symbol up there,” she recalled, and the orange color of the backdrop reminded her more of a Taco Bell restaurant than a weathered old villa wall in Italy.

“I was just falling apart and freaking out,” Fannon recalled. “John Glore [SCR’s literary manager] took me out and gave me two margaritas. It didn’t help.”

All was well that ended well: The substitute actor, Douglas Sills, got an ovation, the scenery was touched up in time for the official opening a few nights later, the reviews were glowing and Fannon remembers her first theater production (not counting a previous play that received two performances in a Los Angeles hotel for an NPR radio broadcast) fondly.

“I have people walk up to me to this day and tell me how thrilled they were by that production.”

“Red Corners,” a sequel to “Green Icebergs,” opened last January in Cincinnati during an ice storm. Fannon said she handled it as a perfectly calm veteran--even after her husband, writer Jonathan Bliss, slipped on the ice and shattered a leg the morning the play opened.

Glore’s first voyage as a produced playwright--apart from a series of successful children’s plays he wrote for SCR’s Young Conservatory Players youth company starting in 1988--was “The Company of Heaven,” which premiered at SCR in November 1993.

While the actors played, Laguna Beach burned in that month’s epic brush fires. So did Glore’s throat.

“All I remember was I was sick as a dog for the week of previews and the opening,” and the smoke in the air made things worse, Glore recalled. “I was trying my best not to cough through the opening night performance.”

Fire, sickness and earthquake aside, SCR tries to make first-time playwrights feel confident, even though the process of staging a new play often puts a script to the acid test, with the director and others raising questions, giving critiques, and suggesting changes in a push to perfect the work.

“We want to let the new playwright know we’re here to support their vision,” said David Emmes, SCR’s producing artistic director. “They should not feel obligated to follow any suggestion of a director or actor or designer. There’s a risk they’ll lose contact with the impulse that made them want to write the play in the first place.”

“What I learned was to do nothing precipitously,” Glore said. “It’s better to do nothing than to make a change you’re not sure is the right one.”

Emmes said he typically counsels first-time playwrights on coping with reviews.

“They’re in a very vulnerable position, obviously, and people are going to make comments. You try to let them know that the measure of what they’ve written won’t come in the reviews . . . . Sitting in an audience that is responding to the work is the truest feedback they will get about the play.”