In for the Long Run

The past recedes quickly in Orange County, where orange groves have virtually disappeared and old traditions and cherished landscapes are impatiently shunted aside by fresh developments.

As the Laguna Playhouse, the county’s oldest theater, celebrates its 80th anniversary this weekend, there are few, if any, links left between the institution’s present and its past.

For its first 70 years, the playhouse was a community theater where amateurs put on shows for fun, glory and camaraderie. It was recognized as one of the best theaters of its kind in the country.

The last 10 years have brought a complete change in leadership and direction. Now the playhouse is a fully professional, nonprofit regional theater that aspires to be recognized as one of the best in the country, period.

Executive director Richard Stein arrived in 1990; the following year, Andrew Barnicle became the playhouse’s artistic director. In 1995, they realized their aim of going pro, as the playhouse signed a contract with Actors’ Equity ensuring that most--and in many productions, all--roles would be played by union actors earning union wages.

The theater’s growth over the last decade has been rapid, even by Orange County standards.

Stein says the annual budget has quintupled from $800,000 when he arrived to $4 million. The full-time staff has grown from 12 to 20 with many more positions filled by part-timers.

“A lot of the things I wanted to have happen have happened,” Barnicle said. “It looks like the place I wished it to become 10 years ago.”

There is more wishing and striving to be done, however. The big dream at the playhouse is to build a second, smaller stage to complement the 420-seat Moulton Theater. The company has an ideal site for the project--an adjoining office building it bought in 1998 for $3.1 million--but lacks the cash to remodel it.

Fund-raising has been proceeding quietly. Chastened by a thwarted capital campaign during the mid-1990s, Stein and Barnicle are staying mum about budgets and timetables for the expansion--at least until the playhouse secures a major cornerstone gift.

They have plenty of competition for the local arts-philanthropy dollar. The Orange County Performing Arts Center is in the midst of a $200-million expansion campaign. South Coast Repertory--long considered the county’s top theater and now regarded as among the nation’s best, especially as an incubator for new plays--also is engaged in a capital campaign to add a stage to its complex in Costa Mesa.

What’s more, Stein acknowledges, the playhouse has struggled in its annual fund-raising efforts. This year’s target is $750,000--a good chunk of it to be raised with the 80th anniversary gala Saturday night. If successful, the playhouse will fund 18% of its budget with donations, far below what Stein says is a national standard of about 40% for nonprofit theaters. South Coast, with its $8.3-million budget, seeks to fund about 30% of its operating costs via donations.

South Coast has a 161-seat second stage to launch new work without taking a big box office risk; until it builds another stage, the Laguna Playhouse doesn’t have that luxury. (The playhouse has premiered three plays and one new adaptation of a classic during the Stein/Barnicle tenure, with a fourth new play, “Who’s Hot, Who’s Not,” on tap later this season.) If two or three shows in its seven-play seasons don’t do well, Barnicle said, the result can be a deficit.

Which is what happened last season.

“We ran a large deficit,” Stein said, declining to give a figure. “But we’re back on track,” said Barnicle.

The playhouse has been buoyed by a leap in season subscribers, Stein said. There are 10,000 now, up from fewer than 7,000 a year ago, with a record renewal rate of 80%.

Stein said that $500,000 in repair costs over the last two years contributed to the 1999-2000 deficit as the playhouse replaced antiquated stage lighting and fixed the roof, the air conditioning and the plumbing in the 31-year-old Moulton Theater.

“I think we also made mistakes in marketing last year, and we have adjusted for it,” Stein said. “I won’t go into a lot of details. Let’s say there were some new approaches and ideas tried out, and by and large they failed.”

The theater had gotten a big boost in 1997-98 from a musical comedy revue, “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” that grossed $1.25 million, a record, and helped lift attendance to an all-time high of 110,000.

But the next season had a good deal of the challenging fare--including plays about AIDS and the Holocaust--that Stein and Barnicle see as an important part of their mission. They think that may have chased away some subscribers brought in by “I Love You.”

Consequently, Stein says, the playhouse has emerged with a large core audience that has stuck with it--”people who did embrace the eclectic philosophy.” Last year’s attendance was about 95,000, and the playhouse leaders expect 100,000 or so will be the norm.

While the playhouse stakes a claim as the longest continuously running theater on the West Coast, its relatively recent move into the professional ranks usually places it toward the back of the line of theaters vying for the rights to hot, recent-vintage plays. The larger, better-established La Jolla Playhouse, Mark Taper Forum and South Coast Repertory get first dibs.

Stein and Barnicle have begun making scouting trips overseas to find fresh properties--among them “Kevin’s Bed,” an Irish comedy that had its U.S. premiere at Laguna last season. “Enter the Guardsman,” a musical opening next month, was spotted by Barnicle on a London stage.

If there is a strand that links the founders of 1920 to the leadership of 2000, Stein and Barnicle say it’s to be found in the playhouse’s original mission statement: “To operate exclusively for literary and educational purposes and do everything necessary and appropriate for the advancement of literary and dramatic arts. . . .”

Those values have been preserved and updated in a new mission statement, adopted in 1998, that reflects the playhouse’s grander ambitions: “To produce an extraordinary and diverse program of theater for which we will be widely recognized. . . .”

Straddling the amateur and professional eras at the playhouse is Jim Ryan, the theater’s senior staff member. He began volunteering in 1974, when he was a U.S. Marine Corps officer stationed at El Toro. Ryan, 59, acted, directed and helped build scenery. Since 1980 he has been a full-time staffer as production manager and head of technical operations.

He has fond memories of the amateur days but has no regrets about the playhouse moving on.

“Some people didn’t want to lose the camaraderie, they didn’t want it to become such a business that they weren’t having fun any more,” Ryan says.

“It was their hobby and they wanted to keep that. When we’d take a show apart, the families would come, the kids would be running around, the food would be set out. It would really be a fun thing to do. But I think some people fail to realize you have to grow. You can’t stay the same and be successful for very long.”

If anything links the old amateur playhouse to today’s professional playhouse, Ryan said, it’s that people who get caught up in the theater, whether as volunteers or as paid hands, put their hearts and pride above bottom line considerations.

“I always said when the playhouse was a community theater that professionalism was a state of mind and not a matter of money. Now while it is a job, I think we all have a special place in our hearts for what we do. None of us is really going to get rich here.”

Another change, Ryan says, is that the ghosts seem to have gone.

Back in the 1980s, staffers swore that they had seen or heard spirits in the Moulton Theater. Ryan says that Jan Arvan, an actor and director, was supposedly seen around the theater after his death. There were similar reports about spectral sightings of Steve Shaefer, a lighting and sound man.

Former managing director Douglas Rowe remembers the day he was addressing some actors after a rehearsal, his back turned toward the stage.

“There were two people whose jaws just dropped. They knew Jan Arvan, and they swore up and down that they just saw Jan walk across the stage. We went backstage to see if anyone was there, and we found no one.”

Ryan says he gave such talk no credence until the day he was working in the dressing room and heard two little girls talking to each other and walking across the stage. He dashed out and they were gone.

That should have been impossible, since he was alone in the theater with all the doors locked, he said. “I was really taken back by it.”

There haven’t been any ghost sightings in the decade of the new regime, Ryan says. Maybe the spirits were purists disgusted by the onset of professionalism and left. Or maybe they saw that the playhouse was finally on the road to its proper destiny and felt free to move on.

“I think I’m going to come back and haunt the place just for the heck of it,” Ryan said. “I have a very possessive attitude toward the playhouse, and I want to make sure it’s taken care of.”

SHOW TIME

Laguna Playhouse 80th Anniversary Gala, 6 p.m. Saturday at Pelican Hill Golf Club, 22651 Pelican Hill Road South, Newport Beach. $250-$750 per person. (949) 497-2787, ext. 217.

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Laguna Playhouse Timeline

* Oct. 22, 1920: The first meeting of the Laguna Beach Dramatic Club, organized by Jayne Peake and Isabel Frost, is held in the living room of a private home.

* 1922: The Playhouse puts on its first full production, “Suppressed Desires,” a satire about Freudian psychology by Susan Glaspel. It is presented in a former vulcanizing shop on Coast Highway.

* 1924-27: The 235-seat Playhouse at 319 Ocean Ave. is built gradually while other temporary venues house productions.

* December, 1941: The Playhouse serves as an emergency barracks for newly arrived soldiers deployed in Laguna after the United States’ entry into World War II.

* 1942-46: No productions, as the USO rents the Playhouse as a venue for entertaining troops. The monthly rent of $18.75 is paid in War Bonds.

* 1952: The Orange County Grand Jury condemns the Playhouse building as a “fire trap,” leading to the installation of a sprinkler system and other safety improvements.

* 1961: Bette Davis stars in a benefit production of “The World of Carl Sandburg” at the Irvine Bowl, the kickoff event in the fund-raising drive for a new Playhouse.

* 1964-65: The newly formed South Coast Repertory tours shows around Orange County, presenting brief runs of “Tartuffe,” “Waiting for Godot,” “Volpone” and “The Hostage” at the Playhouse.

* March 2-13, 1965: The first West Coast stage appearance of Harry (Harrison) Ford takes place at the Playhouse, in “John Brown’s Body” by Stephen Vincent Benet. Mike Farrell, later a regular on the TV series “M*A*S*H” and “Providence,” also plays in several Laguna Playhouse productions during the mid-1960s.

Other big names who appear at the original Playhouse over the years in summer stock shows put on by outside producers include Burl Ives, Shelly Winters, Keenan Wynn, Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, Roddy McDowall, Margaret Whiting and Marlo Thomas.

* 1966: Managing director Douglas Rowe proposes turning the theater into a professional company but nothing comes of it; instead, South Coast Repertory becomes part of the burgeoning regional theater movement and begins its rise to national prominence as Orange County’s foremost professional theater company.

* September, 1969: The Moulton Theater opens at 606 Laguna Canyon Road. It is named for Nellie Gail Moulton, owner of a vast ranch, who donates $100,000 toward the project. Total construction cost for the 350-seat theater is $450,000.

* 1976-91: Douglas Rowe returns as managing director and holds leadership roles at the theater through 1991, when he resigns to pursue his acting career.

* 1985: The Moulton Theater is renovated for $650,000. The lobby is expanded, office space is added, and a balcony is built in the auditorium, raising seating capacity to its present 420.

* 1987-88: The Playhouse’s production of “Quilters,” a musical about frontier women, wins a national competition for community theaters in Oklahoma. It travels to Ireland, where it is declared the audience favorite (and the jury’s number two pick) in an international competition.

* 1988: The Playhouse announces a plan to build a second, satellite theater. Then-general manager Jody Johnston Davidson says it “will give us a chance to spread our wings artistically. We’ll be looking for shows on the cutting edge, contemporary new material, new playwrights.”

Twelve years later that ambition remains unfulfilled as the Playhouse quietly continues to solicit donations for a second stage. Plans call for remodeling an office building next to the Moulton Theater which the Playhouse bought for $3.1 million in 1998. It has since generated more than $350,000 a year in rental income.

* 1990: Richard Stein, formerly managing director of the Grove Shakespeare Festival, is appointed executive director.

* 1991: Andrew Barnicle, an actor, associate director of San Diego County’s North Coast Repertory Theatre and head of the theater department at U.S. International University, succeeds Rowe as artistic director. The new leadership pushes to turn the community theater into a professional stage company.

* May, 1995: The Playhouse signs its first contract with Actors’ Equity, agreeing to hire union actors for all roles--except in plays exceeding 11 parts, when a mixture of union and nonunion players can be cast in the additional roles.

* November, 1997: The Playhouse enjoys its all-time biggest box office hit with the West Coast premiere of the musical revue “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” by Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts. The original four-week run and a six-week return engagement the following summer gross $1.25 million.

* November, 1998: Laguna Playhouse joins the League of Resident Theatres, certifying its professional status.

* June, 2000: The Playhouse announces its 80th anniversary season. It includes Julie Harris in a 25th anniversary revival of her Tony Award-winning performance in “The Belle of Amherst,” a one-woman play about 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson.

The Playhouse not only originates the revival, but, in a first for the theater, will produce Harris’s five-month national tour in “The Belle” beginning Nov. 7.

Another first: in conjunction with its 80th Anniversary, the Playhouse makes its first commission, contracting with Laguna Beach writer Sherwood Kiraly to adapt his locally-set novel, “Who’s Hot, Who’s Not” for the stage. The show premieres in February.

* Sept. 5-Oct. 8, 2000: “The Belle of Amherst” sets an attendance record for a regular subscription series show. It is seen by more than 15,000 theatergoers.