Plan Steps Out From the Wings

Des McAnuff collected Tony Awards for directing “Big River” and “The Who’s Tommy,” Broadway musicals he first staged as artistic director of La Jolla Playhouse. Now it looks as if he’ll get air conditioning too.

The playhouse unveiled architectural plans Friday for an $11.5-million, 45,000-square-foot addition that will provide the nonprofit regional company with its third stage, a black-box theater that can seat as many as 450 and be reconfigured for each production.

Other amenities include rehearsal rooms, tech workshops, classrooms, a restaurant-cabaret, and for the first time, indoor offices. Since its opening in 1983, the playhouse staff has worked in trailers parked on the grounds. More than 40 people occupy four trailers; McAnuff and his artistic staff have the one without air conditioning.

“I was told when I came here 20 years ago that they would build offices,” McAnuff recalled Friday over the phone from his trailer. “I was shown designs and I bought it hook, line and sinker.”

The new designs by RoTo Architects and Fisher Merriman Sehgal Yanez Inc. are backed by $32 million the Playhouse has raised in a $36-million campaign that began in 1997. The goal, by year’s end, is to fund the expansion, bolster the theater’s endowment from less than $300,000 to $6 million and to have raised $18.5 million for annual operations over the course of five years.

Construction on the new wing, dubbed the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse in honor of a $5-million donation from the Qualcomm founder and his wife, is scheduled to start early next year.

The new theater is projected to open in spring 2004. It will be named in honor of Sheila and Hughes Potiker, La Jolla philanthropists who made a fortune publishing books of entertainment discount coupons.

The Potiker theater will help ease a logjam created by the playhouse’s affiliation with UC San Diego’s department of theater and dance. The playhouse is on campus, the site where student shows occupy the 500-seat Mandell Weiss Theatre and the 400-seat Mandell Weiss Forum about half the time. The Playhouse now will be able to expand its seasons from six productions to eight, spread over the three stages.

McAnuff also covets the black-box space as an incubator of new works via readings and workshop productions and as a home for shows aimed at kids. “Our vision is to see a parking lot full of yellow school buses,” he said.

The cabaret will have seating indoors for 200, with another 200 on its patio, said McAnuff, who sees it as a diversely programmed hub of post-theater entertainment, a la Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York City.

Overall, he said, the Potiker theater and its ancillary spaces “will give us the freedom we’ve always needed.”

The campaign is approaching its goal despite repeated turnover in the artistic director’s chair. It began under Michael Greif, continued under Anne Hamburger, who left after a year to become a Disney executive in charge of theme park entertainment, and will end under McAnuff, who returned in 2000 after six years as a filmmaker.