South Coast Repertory Wins 3-Year, $300,000 Grant

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will give South Coast Repertory $300,000 over the next three years to continue the Pacific Playwrights Festival, an annual late-spring event designed as a creative caldron and launching pad for new plays.

The Pacific Playwrights Festival will have its third run this June at the Costa Mesa theater. The Mellon Foundation helped underwrite the first two festivals with a two-year, $175,000 grant.

The festival brings playwrights to SCR to refine plays-in-progress in private workshops with directors and other creative advisors. They are then staged for the public, either in full productions with costumes and scenery or in readings given by casts of actors wearing street clothes and reading from scripts.

The grant extension and increase--from $87,500 to $100,000 annually--is a vote of confidence in how the festival has progressed, said Catherine Wichterman, the Mellon Foundation official who makes arts grant recommendations to the foundation’s board of directors.

“The increase is in recognition of the progress the festival has made and its plans for the future,” she said. The Mellon Foundation gives $10 million to $20 million annually to arts organizations.

“It was a great endorsement. We’re very honored,” said David Emmes, co-founder and producing artistic director of SCR. Emmes said the Mellon grant will cover about half the estimated $200,000 cost of the three-week festival.

When the festival was established in 1998, Emmes said he hoped it would foster a “community of artists” and be a “creative hotbed.”

This week, he pointed to its track record in developing 10 new plays--out of 18 presented in the first two festivals--that have gone on to full runs at SCR or other theaters around the country.

The festival’s fruits include both of this month’s world-premiere offerings at SCR. “The Hollow Lands,” by Howard Korder, opens tonight on the Mainstage. The play first received public readings at the 1998 festival. Jose Rivera’s “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” first staged in a preliminary workshop production during last year’s festival, will play on the Second Stage starting Jan. 25.

The 1999 Pacific Playwrights Festival helped develop three other plays that have been or will be produced as part of SCR’s regular seasons--”On the Jump” by John Glore, staged last year, “The Beginning of August,” by Tom Donaghy, coming April 25, and “Everett Beekin,” by Richard Greenberg, expected to be part of SCR’s 2000-01 season.

Other California recipients of Mellon grants, all for the development of new plays, are the La Jolla Playhouse, $150,000 for one year, the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles, $300,000 for three years, and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, $300,000 over three years. The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles also receives Mellon Foundation support for new work; it is in the second year of a two-year $200,000 grant.