In pursuit of the ‘whoa’ moments

As the newly appointed artistic director of the La Jolla Playhouse, Christopher Ashley was quite taken when a literary agent gave him a brief description of a new play by one of his writers: “This guy is in bed with his wife and he suddenly turns to her and says, ‘Honey, let’s sell the kids.’ ”

“It was so ‘whoa,’ so explosive,” says Ashley of the play, “The Gingerbread House” by Mark Schultz.

Since April, when he was named to succeed Des McAnuff, the 43-year-old Ashley has been traversing the country, picking brains and plowing through piles of scripts to find the “whoa” that he hopes will typify his tenure at La Jolla.

“If you give yourself over to the most interesting, what people disagree about, then you’re going to create both interest and upset,” he says. “If you’re really provocative, you’re not going to have people saying, ‘Oh, we love our little provocative theater.’ You’re going to have people picketing you.”

Ashley is hardly anyone’s idea of a bomb-thrower. Sitting in a West Village restaurant near the home he soon will be abandoning for a La Jolla beach house, he is affable, unpretentious and studiously calm -- despite the 12 Starbucks he’s said to drink in the course of a day. A onetime Yale wunderkind who blazed onto the scene at age 24 in 1989 with an off-Broadway production (“The Night Hank Williams Died”), he is widely known as the go-to director for finding the heart and sophisticated wisdom in comedy. He has done so repeatedly in several Paul Rudnick comedies (most notably 1993’s “Jeffrey”); a 2000 Broadway revival of “The Rocky Horror Show”; the 2005 Elvis Presley jukebox musical “All Shook Up”; and the new musical “Xanadu.” The latter, Douglas Carter Beane’s retelling of the Olivia Newton-John 1980 roller-disco film bomb, has become an unexpected hit of the new Broadway season. Thus, it seemed like a safe if not altogether surprising choice when the La Jolla Playhouse’s board selected Ashley after an exhaustive 10-month search from a list of nearly 40 candidates.

“I think people are going to be very surprised,” says Carter Beane, who has worked with Ashley on several projects. “Chris has rich and deeply veined knowledge of theater, and he’s very enthusiastic about new work, especially when it’s totally different from his own. Most importantly, he knows how to massage things along. You never hear about the ‘Chris Ashley hissy fit.’ I’ve literally seen him massage people out of a room.”

That blend of commercial instincts, people skills and boldness of vision are what got Ashley the job, says Ralph Bryan, president of La Jolla’s board. “We made a conscious decision to go with Chris to move the Playhouse forward,” he adds, noting that Ashley appears to have a “higher tolerance for risk” than McAnuff. Asked if he’s prepared for the playhouse to be picketed, Bryan responds, “If Chris wants to take those sorts of risks, then we’re very supportive of him . . . but you also need to sell tickets. It’s fine to make people angry. But you also want to make them laugh and ensure they feel they are included on the journey. That’s the hardest part.”

For all the talk of “whoa,” however, Ashley will inaugurate his first complete season with the fluffy “Xanadu,” followed by “The Third Story” by Charles Busch, who is known for such light comedic fare as “The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife” and the current off-Broadway drag farce, “Die, Mommy, Die!”

“I had wanted to start off with as meaty material as I could find, but there was such a demand in the community to see ‘Xanadu.’ So it’ll be a bit like getting dessert first,” he says sheepishly, noting that the Playhouse will be in the financially advantageous position of producing the touring version. And he adds that although Busch will have a drag role in “Third Story,” his play is by far his most ambitious, dealing with the complexities of cloning. The season gets “meatier” with a revival of the relatively obscure “Tobacco Road,” the lurid 1933 melodrama about Georgia sharecroppers, adapted from the Erskine Caldwell novel. What comes next will be closely watched -- and critiqued -- to see in what ways Ashley will expand on the Playhouse’s motto: “A safe harbor for unsafe work.”

The artistic director will have a wide canvas on which to sketch his vision. In addition to the two main stages and three rehearsal spaces that can accommodate audiences, the Playhouse added the 450-seat Potiker Theatre in 2005 and is developing a cabaret and restaurant to open in June.

Moreover, in addition to the Page-to-Stage program, which is focused on early development of plays, a grant from the James Irvine Foundation and Jordan Ressler Endowment Fund has established “The Edge” series, a mandate to develop more daring work, both in form and content. Those plays might not appeal to La Jolla’s subscriber base but could bring in new audiences.

The new series was recently inaugurated with a two-week workshop of “Most Wanted,” directed by former Playhouse artistic director Michael Greif (“Rent”), about San Diegan Andrew Cunanan’s killing spree that ended in the murder of Gianni Versace. “Some people are eager for it, and others would just as soon it not happen,” Ashley says of the production. “Anything that scary is worth paying attention to.”

In programming, Ashley says he will be guided for the most part by “the best advice” given to him by McAnuff: “Follow the artists.” “You need to bring in people that you aren’t already comfortable with,” he says. After mentioning the old guard -- Ariane Mnouchkine, Ivo Van Hove, Deborah Warner -- he brings up such names as playwrights Sarah Kane (“Blasted”), David Adjmi (“Strange Attractors”), the Bosnian-born director Tea Alagic as well as the Civilians, a group working on a piece about the sexual scandal of evangelist Ted Haggard. “There are 40 plays sitting on my desk, in various states of readiness, by new voices, which look at issues from a very unfamiliar lens,” Ashley says. “It’s exciting to have the Playhouse’s resources to develop those.”

The director also believes in mining such less-performed classics as the violent Jacobean drama “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” Ibsen’s “Enemy of the People” and Edward Bond’s “Lear,” in which the paranoid king builds a wall around his kingdom only to see it turn to mud when hit by a cataclysmic storm. “It’s sort of like Katrina meeting immigration issues,” he says.

He hopes the revivals, combined with possible productions of new political works by Tarell Alvin McCraney (“The Brothers Size”), David Hare and Chuck Mee will add to the discourse of what’s sure to be a combustible election cycle.

Given that “edgy” is such an elastic term, Ashley says a goal will be to try to generate the type of enthusiasm and excitement that often greets the arrival of new technology: “How do you make the theater, which for most people isn’t even on the radar, as exciting and indispensable as the iPhone? It’s about tapping into what people feel urgently, about their parents, their neighbors, their country in this moment in time. How does a theater keep asking in the freshest possible way, ‘What’s bothering you?’ ‘What’s on your mind?’ ‘What are you most passionate about?’ ”

From ‘the outside in’

Achild of academics who taught philosophy and medieval literature, Ashley was born in Chicago but spent a peripatetic youth living in college towns from Durham, N.C., to London and Lisbon. His mother, the daughter of Protestant missionaries in Angola, helped shape his worldview with bedtime stories of her adventures in the African wild. While in elementary school in upstate New York, he discovered the magic of the stage through an uncle who dabbled in community theater. Ashley began acting in local productions of “Oliver!” and “The Sound of Music.”

After his parents divorced when he was 13, he attended Andover Prep in Massachusetts -- though he’s quick to disavow any blue bloodlines one might read into that. “I spent a lot of time with adults with a leftist political perspective,” he says. “And when you spend a lot of time abroad, you grow up with a certain detachment about America.”

That distance, in turn, has led him to seek out young first- and second-generation playwrights who can write about America from, as he terms it, “the outside in.” He’s planning a festival of plays that will look at the country from the perspective of someone who is not part of that mainstream. “A 25-year-old, who has not grown up with the mythology of America, of the vast West and farming communities, can look freshly at the culture,” he says. “There’s no Chevrolet commercial in his or her perspective. And there is that inevitable tension between wanting to be a part of it and wanting to critique it.”

Listening for other voices

As eager as Ashley is to tap into young multicultural talent for the Playhouse, he’s also aware of the pitfalls. “How do you keep from getting caught in saying the same things in more or less the same way is a good question,” he says. “It’s one thing to provoke, it’s quite another to provoke with some nuance and skill.” Citing the importance of countervailing thought in the theater, Ashley says he’d be willing to commission a play from, say, a pro-Islamist or a right-wing point of view -- as long as it met a certain standard of excellence. In fact, he says, he’s long been interested in developing a musical biography of John Birch, a messianic figure among rabidly radical conservatives.

What appeals most to the director in Birch’s story is what appeals to him in any theater piece: the stakes. And the higher the better. As a director, Ashley’s signature has been to bring a persuasive commitment to those stakes, whether they apply to a missionary turned CIA agent fighting the Communist Chinese or a dim-bulb Venice Beach artist dreaming of opening a roller disco called Xanadu.

As artistic director, he’s likely to bring the same commitment to a different set of stakes, one that he is unfamiliar with and that often comes with an unforgiving spotlight. What he hopes not to lose sight of while pivoting around the perils is an Ashley watchword: “demented.”

“What I’ve been most successful at in my career is to take something that has some element of dementia, even something fundamentally ridiculous, and yet being respectful of the huge outsized stakes,” says Ashley. Exploring the vagaries and varieties of that human dilemma, he says, “is what the theater does really well, perhaps better than any other art form. If theater could be as interesting as life is, it would be the best theater in the world.”