A case of self-diagnosis

IF the new musical “Zhivago” is embraced, its four creators say, it will be in no small measure because they were willing to give it a four-week test run last summer when the artistic engine was still prone to sputter and cough. The stage adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago,” opening this week at La Jolla Playhouse, is the latest show to have come through the playhouse’s Page to Stage program, an annual showcase of work-in-progress in which writers get to see how their rough drafts play with an audience -- then linger for public “talk-back” sessions in which everyone’s a critic.

The “Zhivago” partners say the experience made up in usefulness what it sometimes lacked in ego gratification.

A professor of literature came up to lyricist Michael Korie and told him that, while the show was good, the soaring verses he and Amy Powers had written to end it were “bad poetry.”

Composer Lucy Simon’s daughter confessed to her mom that an ardor-filled duet by the romantic leads, Lara and Zhivago, was “a little creepy,” given a staging that placed death literally underfoot as the two discovered rapture.

The main problem for Lara and Dr. Z, besides being married to other people, is that their affair keeps getting fouled up by the Russian Revolution. One back-talking playgoer complained about the purging of what she believed to be an essential feature of the saga: a red balalaika. It’s not in the novel, but David Lean made it a recurring motif in his epic 1965 film version of “Doctor Zhivago,” symbolic of the immortal poetic unity between Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, the versifying physician and his heart-rendingly beautiful muse.

The “Zhivago” creators, aiming to follow “Cabaret” and “Ragtime” into a winners’ circle of critically hailed hit musicals based on serious historical fiction, were probably their own most exacting second-guessers.

Simon and Michael Weller, who wrote the musical’s book, set about rewiring Act 2 after noticing that the required emotional crescendo at the end was, as Weller puts it, “not reliably overwhelming.”

They also began to frown as they watched “Mother Russia,” a lively, satiric number that was supposed to provide comic relief.

“As I saw more and more performances, I started to get embarrassed,” recalls Simon, the even-voiced, haphazardly coiffed composer. She got her start in showbiz in a singing-sisters duo with her younger sibling, Carly -- who got along OK on her own after Lucy veered onto the mommy track in 1969. With her son and daughter grown, Simon emerged as a hit Broadway composer with “The Secret Garden” (1991). Soon after, she bought the rights to “Dr. Zhivago” from Pasternak’s estate and began a more than 10-year journey to bring its pages alive on stage.

When the project stalled about five years ago, Des McAnuff, the La Jolla Playhouse artistic director, jumped in and started building a team around Simon. Weller, whom McAnuff first commissioned more than 20 years ago, is known for plays chronicling the countercultural generation of the ‘60s from its undergraduate years into middle age -- and for his screen adaptations of the musical “Hair” and of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, “Ragtime.” Korie’s credits include the libretto for the biographical opera “Harvey Milk” and lyrics for “Grey Gardens,” a recent off-Broadway musical. Powers was recruited to bring a female lyricist’s perspective.

The “Zhivago” team convened in La Jolla last July for the uncommonly elaborate tryout that Page to Stage affords. The marriage of subject matter and play-development method gave new meaning to that grim term from Soviet jurisprudence, “show trial.”

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A testing ground

AFTER five years and seven workshop productions, the forum that McAnuff established with Shirley Fishman, the playhouse’s point person for new-play development, has quickly won a spot on the national A-list of programs devoted to shepherding new work.

The first one they took on was an oddball entity called “I Am My Own Wife.” Doug Wright, who’d worked with McAnuff in film and television, had written the first act of his single-actor show about a gay East Berlin transvestite who dodged persecution under the Nazis and communists. The playhouse provided the time, space and dramaturgical advice the playwright and actor Jefferson Mays needed to finish the piece. It was Wright’s idea also to give it a trial run in front of an audience.

“They were like tasters in a test kitchen,” Wright says, recalling the first slice of the public to lay eyes on a show that went on to win both the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for best play in 2004 as well as a best actor Tony for Mays. “They came because they wanted to see the birth of new work, not to be passively entertained.”

But most important, Wright says, were the key behind-the-scenes personnel. In the theater, as in Hollywood, writers can fall into “development hell,” where they are shunted from workshop to workshop.

“There’s a real danger in the development process as it exists now,” Wright says. “There are people who develop plays with a great deal of care and respect for the writer and people who are reckless about it. When you find somebody adept, you go to them again and again. The only thing that protects you are the select group that does it very well” -- among whom he counts the La Jolla Playhouse and Sundance Theatre Lab teams he credits as crucial to “I Am My Own Wife.”

After that first happy experience, the playhouse made Page to Stage an ongoing enterprise, and it now uses the title as an umbrella for all its work in commissioning and developing plays.

McAnuff says that some new plays, such as the rock ‘n’ roll musical “Jersey Boys,” which moved from its La Jolla premiere to a smash Broadway run, are simple enough or sufficiently developed on arrival not to need a public workshop. Workshop expenses have ranged from $100,000 for smaller shows to the $700,000 spent on the “Zhivago” test run.

The program received a celebrity benediction when Billy Crystal spent a month in 2004 using it to make his leap from comic star of stand-up, sketch and screen to heartstring-tugging theatrical storyteller. Working with McAnuff, he emerged with “700 Sundays,” the autobiographical solo show he took directly to Broadway and a Tony Award. Next for Page to Stage, in February, is another high-profile workshop: Aaron Sorkin, creator of TV’s “The West Wing,” sought out McAnuff to direct his return to playwriting, “The Farnsworth Invention,” a true David vs. Goliath story about a small-town inventor battling RCA over who created television.

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Standing out in a crowd

FLEXIBILITY and a tight focus distinguish the La Jolla method from such highly regarded play-development peers as the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Sundance lab in Utah and the Pacific Playwrights Festival at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa. They are communal affairs, in which an assortment of plays get worked on side by side, ending in readings, workshop productions, or, in the case of Humana, formal, 15-performance premieres.

Another major play-development player, L.A.’s Center Theatre Group, has abandoned the assortment of public forums for readings and workshops established under its longtime leader, Gordon Davidson. His successor, Michael Ritchie, dislikes workshops and would rather have new plays worked on behind the scenes.

Page to Stage workshops take place when it is convenient for the creators rather than on a set annual schedule. Attention goes to one show at a time, and the performance runs are marathons by workshop standards: where new-play showcases other than Humana may involve a week or two of rehearsal, followed by one or two readings, Page to Stage typically carves out more than a month to rehearse and stage a show. All but one of the workshop performance runs have lasted two weeks or more, and the plays change nightly as writers retool dialogue and directors and actors try out different ideas.

The point, says McAnuff, is “not just to get an affirmation of the greatness of the work. It’s to chip away” at defects that become apparent as it’s performed. During the shows, the creative team’s eyes often veer from the stage to the audience, looking for clues in their faces and body language. Is the piece engaging them, entertaining them, and, God willing, moving them?

“You have an incredible amount of time in front of a live audience to fully experience the play and its consequences. You learn everything,” says Sarah Schulman, whose drama “The Burning Deck” was workshopped in La Jolla in 2003. As a novelist as well as a playwright, Schulman knows what it’s like to create in a medium that doesn’t allow for audience feedback on a work in progress. She relished the “talk-back” responses to her play. “It’s an incredible, privileged experience. Being changed by other people is what you’re yearning for.”

McAnuff describes Page to Stage as a “safe haven” -- critics can see the workshops but are sworn not to review the unfinished work -- where even failure can be productive. After spending their 2004 sojourn doggedly trying to stage the suppression of a 19th century student revolt in Paris, the New York theater troupe, the Civilians, decided afterward that the storytelling in their show, “Paris Commune,” had to be broadly revamped. That meant ditching much of what they’d worked on in La Jolla. But Steve Cosson, who co-wrote and directed the musical, says that the show’s failure to coalesce in the workshop was a necessary lesson he and Michael Friedman had to absorb so they could move forward later on and restructure it into a workable play.

Of course, as outcomes go, validation is preferable to hard-knocks schooling. For all the problems that director McAnuff and the “Zhivago” creators discerned and grappled with last summer, Weller says his nightly reading of the audience reassured him that the show was working.

“One of the great things was to see that you’d found a story that grips people, and by the end, grown Republican men are sobbing and leaping to their feet to applaud. For me, this is quite delicious.”

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‘Zhivago’

Where: La Jolla Playhouse, 2910 La Jolla Village Drive, La Jolla

When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays, 8 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: June 25

Price: $48-$85

Contact: (858) 550-1010 or www.lajollaplayhouse.com