Halfway to the Next Stage

South Coast Repertory’s leaders broke two years of silence about their expansion plans Tuesday, announcing that they aim to open a 336-seat theater in October 2002. A drive to raise $40 million for the addition and other new programs is more than halfway home, with $22.6 million raised to date.

The campaign’s success will “fulfill the artistic potential of SCR . . . [for] the community as well as making a lasting contribution to the American theater,” producing artistic director David Emmes said at a news conference on one of the Costa Mesa theater’s two existing stages.

The biggest donations announced Tuesday came from Orange County’s growing high-tech sector: Broadcom Corp. co-founder Henry T. Nicholas III and his wife, Stacey, and Emulex Corp. President and Chief Executive Paul Folino and his family each have contributed $2.5 million. The Nicholases gave half of their donation in December 1998 to kick off the campaign, which proceeded quietly until now with the solicitation of major donors.

South Coast Plaza magnate Henry T. Segerstrom, Orange County’s biggest arts patron and a longtime major benefactor of South Coast Repertory, has donated the six-acre parcel on Town Center Drive that the new SCR theater will share with another major arts project: the $200-million expansion of the Orange County Performing Arts Center, projected to open in 2004 or 2005. The Segerstrom Foundation has donated an additional $1 million. Another $1 million gift, from Barbara and William H. Roberts, was announced Tuesday.

The sum raised to date also includes a large gift that Folino, president of SCR’s board, said will not be announced until next year at the donor’s request. The new theater will be named by that donor.

Emmes said that of the 54 donors so far to the capital and endowment drives, the “vast majority” are members of South Coast’s 45-member board of trustees. Other large gifts announced Tuesday include $750,000 from Donald Kennedy and $500,000 each from Pacific Life Foundation, the Orange County Register, and Elaine and Martin Weinberg.

The “major new artistic initiative,” as South Coast officials have dubbed it, is three-pronged:

* Bricks and mortar, $19 million: Enough to build the new theater, renovate the existing ones, improve backstage production facilities and fashion a striking new 200-foot curving glass facade that will front all three halls. The new theater, a three-story building that includes upstairs offices and studios, is being designed by Cesar Pelli and Associates, the same firm planning the performing arts center expansion. The theater plan includes an outdoor plaza featuring a 70-foot-tall “monument”-cum-marquee intended to give the rather muted South Coast building a more striking architectural profile. “Over the years, a lot of people have thought we were some sort of regional library,” artistic director Martin Benson said.

* Boost the endowment fund by $11 million: Bringing it from $15 million to $26 million. Projected earnings from the fattened fund would enable South Coast to step up its nationally acclaimed efforts to spawn new plays, with special emphasis on launching a new, $300,000-a-year series of plays for young audiences--many of them new works commissioned from major playwrights. SCR currently commissions 10 to 12 new plays each year, generally paying playwrights $10,000 to $15,000 to write a script. Its leaders now aim to boost commissions to as much as $20,000 to $25,000 for master playwrights.

* Raise an additional $10 million over five years to meet regular operating costs while the expansion drive goes forward.

Since 1964, Emmes and Benson have built the nonprofit SCR from a gypsy touring company into a national force. Over the last nine years, the theater has originated one Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Wit,” and four others that landed Pulitzer nominations.

Emmes and Benson say that greater accomplishments should be in store after the new theater opens.

It will complement the 507-seat Mainstage and supplant the 161-seat Second Stage. While the Second Stage often has been a launching pad for new plays, it is considered a flawed space with obstructed sight lines, limited production values, and an inadequate backstage.

The new theater is conceived as a more intimate version of a Broadway stage or one in London’s West End, South Coast officials said, with a mezzanine rising from the orchestra and a balcony on top. Benson said the farthest row will be only 42 feet from the stage, compared to about 50 feet in the single-tier Mainstage.

The new theater will feature a traditional, proscenium stage with production amenities that the Second Stage’s cramped horseshoe layout doesn’t permit. Scenery for multiple sets can be “flown” from the rafters; actors or props can rise from trapdoors in the stage.

South Coast has had to pass on some plays it wanted to produce because the Second Stage just wasn’t suitable, Benson said; also, playwrights’ agents sometimes balked at granting rights to hot properties because the potential gross in a 161-seat house was too low. The new theater should solve both of those problems, Benson said.

The Second Stage will be reconfigured as a 99-seat house, to be renamed the Nicholas Studio Theatre. The Mainstage will be renamed the Segerstrom Theatre.

* CURTAIN RISES

The new venue at SCR will enable officials to stage riskier, offbeat works. B7

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The Next Stage

South Coast Repertory announced plans Tuesday to add a third stage to its theater facility, increasing the size of the Costa Mesa complex by 50%. Groundbreaking on the $19-million espansion is scheduled for fall 2001. It is expected to open in October 2002.

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Source: South Coast Repertory

Graphics reporting by BRADY MacDONALD / Los Angeles Times