Dark comedy, strong reactions

At the end of “The Tempest,” William Shakespeare, through his wizardly alter ego, Prospero, addresses his audience and begs it to forgive any dramatic trespasses he may have committed, and to indulge him with a kind response.

“Gentle breath of yours my sails / Must fill, or else my project fails, / Which was to please.”

But for today’s theater companies, the project of infusing their art with fresh creative breath may mean accepting that some in the audience will be extremely displeased.

An example is South Coast Repertory’s current world premiere of “Mr. Marmalade,” by fledgling playwright Noah Haidle, 25, a graduate student at the Juilliard School.

In this dark comedy, preschoolers speak in a sexually knowing way, and one is groped at length while playing “Doctor.” Two little kids -- played by actors in their 20s -- suffer the slings and arrows of persistently outrageous adult behavior, ranging from simple neglect to intense verbal and physical abuse. One of them, 4-year-old Lucy, has an imaginary grown-up friend named Mr. Marmalade who is partly a charmer, but overwhelmingly a horror.

The show’s point isn’t to be the sordid wallow that a bald recounting of such queasy details might suggest. It relies on the transforming tactics of theatrical make-believe to make these circumstances funny and illuminating, if sometimes disturbing.

Critics have largely praised it. But for a demonstrative minority of playgoers, the project has failed.

At a recent Saturday matinee, a well-dressed young couple, seated front and center, got up, joined hands and walked out during a scene depicting a drunken, cocaine-sniffing Mr. Marmalade at his most comically debauched, complete with an inflatable erotic doll and other sex toys that spilled from his businessman’s briefcase.

A few evenings later, an unhappy white-haired man at a post-play discussion demanded of SCR’s dramaturge, Jerry Patch, “Did you consider the audience? You look around the theater, and 80% have gray hair.”

One subscriber, who attended a preview, beat critics to the punch with a scathing letter the Orange County Register printed the day before the paper ran a qualifiedly appreciative review: “Apparently, the Repertory has sunk to the level of a red-light district porno theater.... Overwhelmed by this filth, we left during the intermission.... After this experience, be assured we never want to set foot in that theater.”

A handful of playgoers at each performance have left during intermission, SCR spokesman Cristofer Gross said, noting that many productions have that many walkouts because folks simply get bored or tired and decide to forgo the second act. As word got out, Gross said, about a half-dozen ticket holders concluded that “Mr. Marmalade” wasn’t for them, so SCR invited them to trade for tickets to “Cyrano de Bergerac.”

David Emmes, South Coast’s producing artistic director, said he and artistic director Martin Benson knew going in that some playgoers probably would not have much tolerance for “Mr. Marmalade.”

But along with the thespian desire to please, Emmes said, comes an obligation to sometimes risk an audience’s displeasure -- whether it’s with dark fare like “Mr. Marmalade,” or with something more innocent, such as a re-imagined Shakespeare production that rankles purists. “To try to please everyone is to please no one,” Emmes said. “If we don’t get some letters or complaints about every play we do, then we’re maybe not doing our job.” Most of the audience, he adds, has come away from “Mr. Marmalade” impressed, or at least not offended.

“We’ve had any number saying this was the most exciting thing we’ve done this season.” But the objectors, he acknowledges, have been unusually vehement.

“Mr. Marmalade” joins the 2000 world premiere of Howard Korder’s “The Hollow Lands,” which attacked heroic notions about the pioneering spirit that won the American West, as the two recent-vintage SCR productions that have stepped on taboos and most greatly perturbed a part of the audience.

South Coast also pushed hot buttons, emptying numerous seats and prompting angry letters, with its 1988 staging of “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” Wallace Shawn’s play in which a young woman praises the Nazis as men of principal and her aunt recalls youthful sexual exploits.

Experimental theater was a core part of Emmes and Benson’s mission when they started the company in 1964. But audience incomprehension or outrage at risky propositions such as a 1970 staging of Edward Bond’s “Saved,” in which British street toughs urinate on a baby in its carriage, then stone it to death, prompted them to moderate their approach. Nowadays, the company gets high praise as a leading national force in the cultivation of new plays but like most major regional theaters it leaves most of the boundary-pushing, taboo-breaking work to smaller groups that don’t need to raise and earn millions of dollars.

“We don’t choose plays with a chip on our shoulder or because we like giving people a dose of castor oil, but because they’re exciting as theater and have something meaningful to say,” Emmes said.

For audiences at San Diego’s Old Globe, it’s usually foul language that will touch off angry complaints or early exits, said Jack O’Brien, the theater’s artistic director. It’s important to challenge subscribers from time to time, he said, but “you have to play that card judiciously.”

O’Brien said he tended to block out memories of shows that engendered lots of complaints and remember ones, such as a revival of David Mamet’s profanity-laced “American Buffalo,” that he thought would alienate playgoers but were instead warmly received. “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning baseball play, made the cut for the Old Globe’s coming season -- meaning subscribers will be confronted with its much-noted scenes of full locker-room nudity. With the show’s New York director, Joe Mantello, at the helm again in San Diego, “we’re not going out on a limb with something unknown, and I know it will be handled with consummate taste and great insight,” O’Brien says. On the other hand, he probably will not try to import “Frozen,” a current Broadway play that grabbed him, because its depiction of a serial child killer is “harrowing and very hard to take.”

Even at the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company in Santa Ana, which has established a niche as one of the region’s storefront companies most apt to deploy explicit sex, violence and angry politics, artistic director Dave Barton said he was surprised how many playgoers walked out or objected recently because they couldn’t stomach the child abuse depicted in Mark Ravenhill’s drama “Handbag.”

“It’s a rarity for us. When you’re dealing with issues of childhood, it’s kind of like one of America’s last taboos.”

“Every constituency is different,” the Old Globe’s O’Brien said. “South Coast has done a lot of innovative work over the years, and I would think their audience is amenable to being pushed a bit, unless it’s being handled tastelessly. And I can’t imagine South Coast being tasteless.”