Pacific Playwrights favor experience

Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies and Tony winner Richard Greenberg are among the veteran playwrights whose work will be presented at this year’s Pacific Playwrights Festival, South Coast Repertory’s annual weekend of new plays.

The festival, a breeding ground for plays that have achieved national prominence, takes place May 4 to 6. Nilo Cruz’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner “Anna in the Tropics,” David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” and Amy Freed’s “The Beard of Avon” are a few of the previous offerings.

This year’s event, in its 10th outing, will feature fewer unknowns. “We thought it would be great to have a lot of our core artists,” said John Glore, festival co-director. “It’s such a milestone.”

Along with the works of longtime South Coast collaborators Greenberg and Margulies will be new plays by Jose Rivera, John Strand and David Wiener, as well as festival newcomers Julie Marie Myatt and recent Yale School of Drama graduate Kenneth Lin.

Eugene Labiche’s classic farce, “An Italian Straw Hat,” adapted and translated by Strand, is a first for the festival, which has never featured a musical in development, Glore said. Conceived as a vaudevillian entertainment and set in turn-of-the-century New York, it will be punctuated with period-inspired “musical moments” by prolific stage and screen composer Dennis McCarthy.

Receiving staged readings are Margulies’ “Shipwrecked! The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself),” Greenberg’s “Our Mother’s Brief Affair With David Greenglass,” and “Boleros for the Disenchanted,” by Rivera, whose “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” was a 1999 PPF workshop production.

Lin’s play, “Po’ Boy Tango,” was an early contender for a festival slot, “and it held its own against everything else that was competing with it,” Glore said. The play, which revolves around a reunion between a soul food-loving African American nurse and the immigrant son of a celebrated Chinese chef, will have four workshop performances.

The fully staged world premieres of Myatt’s “My Wandering Boy” and Wiener’s “System Wonderland” (which had a 2006 PPF reading) are part of South Coast’s regular season and will anchor the festival.

In a departure from the festival’s more usual mix of commissioned and noncommissioned works, all but Myatt’s play are SCR commissions. The theater generally produces only one in five commissions.

Because launching new work is the festival’s primary goal, Glore said, scouts from other theater companies won’t “press their noses against the shop window and see a bunch of things that have sold signs on them already.”

“They’ll still have the opportunity to sample the wares and take things home with them.”

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lynne.heffley@latimes.com