‘Chemistry’ Is Right for First-Time Director

As the most valuable player of the always risk-taking and frequently impressive Rude Guerrilla Theater Company, Jay Fraley has portrayed a Savior and a Satan.

Now, in his first turn directing a full-length play, the Laguna Beach resident tackles a comedy in which Satan is the savior.

“The Chemistry of Change,” by Marlane Meyer, concerns a 1955 household in Long Beach in which the alluring mother, Lee, supports her four grown misfit offspring by sequentially marrying and divorcing men of means and living on the settlements. When the divorce money runs out, Lee makes do by performing illegal abortions until she can find another rich fellow to wed.

En route to marrying meal-ticket number eight, she unwittingly falls for a penniless carnival barker named Smokey--who turns out to be the devil, horns included. But Smokey, in an odd twist, is a sweetheart who proves to be the best chance that Lee and her kids will have for a life based on healthy feeling rather than cynical manipulation.

As an actor, Fraley excelled as a complex but decidedly evil Lucifer in Rude Guerrilla’s production of “The History of the Devil,” by English horror meister Clive Barker. He also played Jesus in “Corpus Christi,” the controversial Terrence McNally play that imagines Jesus and his apostles as gay men. Fraley said he was smitten with “The Chemistry of Change” when American Theatre magazine published it in 1998.

“There’s a very romantic, sweet nature behind this play,” Fraley said, something that might disqualify it for Rude Guerrilla’s characteristically in-your-face approach. But it was strange and politically pointed enough, with its abundant family dysfunction and concern with feminist issues, to “fit under the umbrella.”

Fraley proposed it last year for a Rude Guerrilla production, thinking he would play the alcoholic eldest son. According to Fraley, artistic director Dave Barton passed on directing it himself--too much sweetness for his typically macabre tastes--but invited Fraley to have a go.

Fraley fell back on his three semesters of undergraduate directing classes at Texas Christian University some 20 years ago--although he only directed one-act shows then.

“I had a strong vision” for “The Chemistry of Change,” Fraley said, which included emphasizing a colorful, carnival atmosphere and accentuating the family’s eccentricity. Among his decisions was casting a petite actress, Karen Mangano, as Lee and surrounding her with “enormous” offspring.

The experience went well enough for Fraley to want to direct some more, although the intense work of bringing a show to the stage put him behind on his day job running his graphic art business. Rude Guerrilla audiences who have enjoyed his turns as Jesus and Lucifer, as a doomed noble hero (Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in “Terra Nova”) and a hapless drug addict (in Mark Ravenhill’s “Shopping and . . .”) need not worry that Fraley will vanish behind the scenes; he said he is eager to play the lead role in the company’s planned fall production of “Search and Destroy,” Howard Korder’s play about an unhealthily obsessed novice film producer.

“The Chemistry of Change” runs through June 17 at Rude Guerrilla’s Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. (714) 547-4688.

University Theater

If Orange County’s newest institution of higher learning flourishes, lovers of the performing arts could be among the beneficiaries: Part of the long-range plan for the Soka University of America campus in Aliso Viejo is a 2,500-seat theater.

The vision for a theater is “very preliminary,” said Paul R. Carbajal, senior coordinator for community relations at Soka, a fledgling liberal arts university that opens Aug. 27 with a freshman class of 120. But an area of the campus, now a parking lot, has been designated as the site for a performing arts center that might complement--or compete with--the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“A lot of folks in South Orange County don’t always make it to [Costa Mesa],” Carbajal said. “We’d like to give them a respectable alternative where they don’t have to drive so far.”

Funding for Soka University comes from Soka Gakkai, a lay Buddhist organization based in Japan that claims 12 million members worldwide and spent more than $225 million to build the Aliso Viejo campus.

Forging Alliances

South Coast Repertory’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch, is scheduled to be in Washington today to give expert testimony--not before Congress, but at a conclave of the capital city’s theater leaders aimed at helping them nurture new plays.

The New Plays Forum is a two-day event sponsored by Washington’s leading theater, Arena Stage. Patch will join playwrights Heather McDonald, Tazewell Thompson and John Strand (whose “Tom Walker” was recently seen at Arena Stage and South Coast) for a discussion on how theaters and playwrights can forge fruitful partnerships to give new work a chance.

Patch has played an important role in South Coast’s emergence as a nationally-reputed launching pad for plays, serving as a key liaison between the theater and writers whose work it wants to develop or produce. He also is a former director of the Sundance Theatre Lab, a summer play-development program at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah.

When he gets back to Costa Mesa, Patch will be busy directing SCR’s fourth annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, which gathers playwrights, directors and theater executives from around the country to work on and scout new plays. Readings and workshop productions run June 22-July 1.