La Jolla subscribes to a full-year plan

When the La Jolla Playhouse rose from its proverbial ashes in 1983, the phoenix it had become was the oddest bird the sleepy seaside community had ever seen.

The place people remembered as a frothy summer theater founded by local boy Gregory Peck reopened after a two-decade hiatus with Peter Sellars’ roiling production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Visions of Simone Machard.” The challenging play was rarely performed to begin with, and the enfant terrible director of the moment had decked it out with bright lights, strange noises, an exposed backstage and actors crawling atop a wire-mesh grid high above the audience’s heads.

“It was a memorable piece of theater,” recalls Chip Goodwin, then the playhouse’s chairman of the board of trustees.

Yet many couldn’t wait to forget. Long before the curtain call, a wave of people headed for the exits. But the evening’s whiff of edgy theater didn’t necessarily keep them away from the La Jolla Playhouse.

“Some couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough, and now they’re some of their biggest donors,” says Walt Jones, chairman of UC San Diego’s Department of Theatre and Dance, which works closely with the playhouse and shares its facilities.

The push that turned into pull was the climate of artistic risk-taking forged by La Jolla’s charismatic artistic director Des McAnuff, and that bold approach has helped him lead the institution to a prominent place among the country’s top regional theaters.

Over the next 20 years, the nonprofit theater managed to surmount a knot of challenges -- including a seven-figure deficit and a sometimes fractious relationship with its university host -- and nurture a banquet of new work, some of which has gone on to national acclaim. And now the playhouse is enjoying the spoils of its audience’s support -- a new $16.5-million “theater village,” which adds a third stage and fresh possibilities for the ongoing experiment.

Musicals have always been a specialty of the house under McAnuff, 52, a recovering rocker who still straps on his red-and-white Fender Stratocaster guitar for playhouse events. That continued during McAnuff’s 1995-to-2000 absence under interim artistic directors Michael Greif and Anne Hamburger.

Twenty-one plays and musicals that were developed at La Jolla or had premieres there went on to New York, where they racked up a Pulitzer Prize and 23 Tony Awards, two for McAnuff’s direction (“The Who’s Tommy” in 1993 and “Big River” in 1985).

The eclectic array of shows the playhouse has sent to Broadway includes Billy Crystal’s autobiographical “700 Sundays”; Lee Blessing’s Cold War drama, “A Walk in the Woods”; and “I Am My Own Wife,” Doug Wright’s unlikely hit about a German transvestite who survived the Nazis, which won last year’s Pulitzer and three Tonys and is scheduled for a Southern California encore this summer. The playhouse itself won a Tony for outstanding regional theater in 1993.

“Jujamcyn regards La Jolla as one of the three or four leading resident theaters in the country that develop work that might find its way into one of our theaters,” says Jack Viertel, creative director of the company that owns and operates five Broadway houses.

As the playhouse curried its own national reputation, it has helped UCSD’s graduate theater school attract some of the country’s top students because they are guaranteed experience on a professional stage, Jones says. And now, nearly 60 years since its birth as a summer hangout for Hollywood stars, the resident theater has a home to call its own for those other three seasons.

This month marks the opening of the new theater complex, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center. The 50,000-square-foot center, designed by Los Angeles architect Michael Rotondi and the firm of Fisher Sehgal Yanez, includes a wing for administrative staff, a design studio and warehouse, a recording studio, a play development center and two rehearsal spaces. Rounding out the theater village are an outdoor plaza dubbed Gregory Peck Park and a restaurant/cabaret expected to open in the fall.

But the crown jewel is the glass-enclosed Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre, which adds an experimental venue to La Jolla’s two existing ones -- the 492-seat Mandell Weiss Theatre and the Mandell Weiss Forum, which can seat 384 on three sides of its thrust stage. The Potiker Theatre is a black box with a capacity of 450, removable seats, a wire grid overhead for aerial acting, a trapped floor, a second-floor gallery and the flexibility to morph into just about any space imaginable. By providing La Jolla with a new envelope to push, the Potiker will take McAnuff’s goal of operating the playhouse as a theater laboratory to the next level.

“It gives us a chance to do -- physically -- work that we’re not able to do right now,” he says.

The Potiker will add flexibility to programming as well as stage design. Until now, the playhouse had squeezed six productions into a May-to-November schedule, surrendering the theaters to the university the rest of the year. That has prevented it from extending runs and capitalizing on its commercial successes, such as its new musical about the Four Seasons; “Jersey Boys” was forced to close in mid-January after two extensions despite smoking box office.

Although the playhouse will share the Potiker with the university for 14 weeks, the theater will be able to program productions year-round. For the first time, La Jolla will open a play on a winter night when the curtain goes up on the Georges Feydeau farce “Private Fittings” on Feb. 27, with a new translation and adaptation by Tony winner Mark O’Donnell, who co-wrote the book for “Hairspray.”

Center namesakes Joan Jacobs and husband Irwin, a former UCSD professor who founded the San Diego-based wireless communications company Qualcomm, donated $5 million for the facility. The Jacobses are key players in one of the theater’s main constituencies -- the highly educated community of university and high-tech professionals that grew up alongside the playhouse.

“I’m a big supporter of Des,” says Joan Jacobs, a board member for more than 20 years and a major arts philanthropist. “That’s always been his dream, and Irwin and I are happy to make his dream come true.”

McAnuff is happy to return the favor for the artists he cultivates. His embrace of risk doesn’t stop at taking on edgy material; for artists he admires, he’s been known to commit to a production before he even sees a script.

In the middle of the successful 1987 run of “A Walk in the Woods,” McAnuff commissioned Lee Blessing to write a new play that he would direct the following year. “He wouldn’t ask what it’s about,” Blessing says. “A lot of artistic directors who commission plays almost always want to talk to you about what the subject matter might be. It’s rare that they will say, ‘We want to commission whatever you’re writing next.’ ”

The commissions -- “Down the Road,” “Fortinbras” and “Two Rooms” -- went on to become three of Blessing’s most produced plays. Blessing’s “The Scottish Play” will be his sixth on a La Jolla stage, making him the playhouse’s most produced living playwright.

It’s critical to encourage artists to pursue work they’re passionate about, McAnuff says. “There are projects here that may not get a lot of critical attention that I believe to the bottom of my soul are really important. There are times when I wonder if Samuel Beckett were to emerge today whether he would be noticed. I like to think he would, but you never know for sure.”

McAnuff doesn’t just take chances on established writers. He was so impressed with the darkly comic “Be Aggressive” -- Annie Weisman’s satire of life in Southern California that used cheerleading as a metaphor -- that he staged it in 2001 even though the now-31-year-old playwright had never been produced.

After the play received La Jolla’s imprimatur, Weisman found McAnuff’s counterparts preferred to be the first to be second. “As soon as Des said he wanted to do my play,” she says, “suddenly I got all these competing offers.”

Not all of La Jolla’s shows could be called successes. In 2001, “Dracula, the Musical” opened in La Jolla to mixed reviews but was skewered by the New York critics when it moved to Broadway in August of last year. The show, with music by Frank Wildhorn and book by Christopher Hampton and Don Black, closed Jan. 2.

A nurturing environment

In 2001, La Jolla formalized its commitment to developing new work by launching its “Page to Stage” program, which offers playwrights six to eight weeks of feedback from McAnuff, associate artistic director Shirley Fishman and audiences in a critic-free zone. The first project was Wright’s “I Am My Own Wife,” with UCSD graduate Jefferson Mays playing Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Wright and 34 other characters. Mays went on to win a Tony. “There are a lot of developmental opportunities for playwrights in this country, but so often works get stalled at the reading stage,” says Wright, who went to La Jolla after meeting Fishman in 2000 at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory, where he developed the first act. “You can learn a certain amount hearing actors read the text aloud, but when you’re a playwright, you’re writing to excite the imaginations of the actors and the design team. It’s analogous to writing a symphony and just having the horn section present. You need to hear the entire orchestra.”

More recently, “Page to Stage” helped Billy Crystal develop his one-man show about his family. For years, Crystal had been thinking about emerging from what he calls his “self-imposed exile from stand-up” with a one-man show. After seeing “The Who’s Tommy” on Broadway, he asked McAnuff to help him shape it. McAnuff encouraged Crystal to focus on his family and childhood in a Long Island house filled with “the smell of bourbon and the sound of jazz.” “700 Sundays” had 12 workshop performances in La Jolla last spring before opening on Broadway in December to a warm reception from critics and huge box-office advances.

“I don’t think it would have happened without the La Jolla Playhouse,” Crystal says. “The step between my idea and my newfound courage was that place.”

A link to Tinsel Town

When the La Jolla Playhouse opened in 1947, it had much closer ties to Hollywood. Gregory Peck was the son of a San Diego druggist and had grown up in La Jolla, so when nostalgia for his summer stock days struck in 1945, he remembered the La Jolla High School auditorium.

With a $15,000 loan from David O. Selznick, Peck joined forces with Mel Ferrer, Joseph Cotten and Jennifer Jones to form the Actors Company, soon to be joined by Dorothy McGuire. Over the next 18 years, stars such as Vincent Price, Olivia de Havilland, Groucho Marx and Tallulah Bankhead made the journey to perform in crowd-pleasers by Tennessee Williams and Noel Coward. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz saw Vivian Vance for the first time in “The Voice of the Turtle” in 1951. La Jolla native Raquel Welch began her career in the chorus of a 1956 production of “Pal Joey.”

By the early ‘60s, TV had begun competing for talent, and Peck and friends had moved on. The theater closed in 1964, and it would be 18 years before it would reopen, delayed in part by a lengthy legal battle over the assets of a fraudulent children’s charity that the playhouse hoped to recover.

The theater board decided it wanted to reopen as a producing theater, not a presenting one, and mounted a search for an adventurous artistic director who was also comfortable with the classics. The Public Theater’s Joe Papp recommended the 30-year-old McAnuff, who had directed Shakespeare in the Park and whose play “Leave It to Beaver Is Dead” was produced at the Public. After a field trip to New York to see McAnuff’s surreal “The Death of Von Richthofen as Witnessed from Earth,” the board offered him the job in 1982.

The reopening of La Jolla “filled a very important niche,” says Jujamcyn’s Viertel, then theater critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. “The Old Globe was doing classics in a somewhat carefree but not confrontational way. Des’ production of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ that first season -- which was one of the best things I’ve seen anywhere -- was a bold, imaginative rethinking of that story and beautifully complemented the work [Old Globe artistic director] Jack O’Brien was doing. By adding La Jolla to the mix, you were getting a deeper spectrum of what the theater could do.”

With $2 million from the defunct Children’s Aid Society and additional funds from supporters, the La Jolla Playhouse had reopened in the Mandell Weiss Theatre on the UCSD campus. Locating it on school property was the handiwork of then-board member Roger Revelle, who’d led the campaign for a state university in La Jolla.

“We’d be a major arts presence in a young, growing university headed in an innovative direction with a new theater department that had ambitions of their own,” Goodwin recalls. “Everyone thought it was a great partnership.”

It turned out to be more complicated. A summer theater couldn’t sustain year-round employees, and annual negotiations with the university to extend the playhouse’s use of the venues -- a second stage, the Mandell Weiss Forum, opened in 1991 -- sometimes turned combative. Jones says the talks were held up by faculty members bitter that they weren’t invited to perform at the playhouse.

“It’s been painful and full of strife and anxiety,” he says. “Six years ago, I went to the faculty and said, ‘Let’s start acting like adults. We’ve been engaged for 15 years. Can we finally get married?’ ”

A permanent agreement spelling out the shared use of space and the graduate students’ residency program at the theater was struck in 2000, and “the relationship now is healthier than it’s ever been,” Jones says.

The new building project was launched under Greif, a UCSD theater graduate and protege of McAnuff’s who became artistic director in 1995 when his predecessor left to pursue film work and other projects. Greif continued McAnuff’s eclectic programming and oversaw the retirement of a $1.7-million debt, which the playhouse had begun whittling in 1989.

The clean financial slate set the stage for the seven-year capital-fund drive, which raised $44 million for the center and endowment from more than 3,000 supporters. The money also helps support the playhouse’s outreach programs: La Jolla operates summer programs for students in grades 2 through 12 and supplements embattled public arts education budgets with tours that bring specially commissioned works into San Diego elementary schools. Theater professionals also help high school students write and perform their own plays.

And that may be the theater’s most forward-looking project because it will keep audiences coming through the door far into the future. “There’s probably a weird pyramid effect that some kids will go into television or theater,” McAnuff says, “but hopefully you’re just simply developing an appetite and an interest, and that’s key.”