Editor’s Note: This is PART 2 of a two-part series recognizing SCR’s 60th anniversary season, which continues through August.
South Coast Repertory founders David Emmes and Martin Benson had every reason to be satisfied as 1989 wound to an end. The decision at the beginning of the decade to recommit to new plays, which was part of SCR’s founding vision but scuttled for most of the 1970s, had paid off.
The 1980s saw:
24 new play commissions;
five world premieres of commissioned plays;
26 total world premieres.
Additionally, its three new play initiatives, the NewSCRipts staged reading series and Hispanic Playwrights Project, which launched in 1986, and the California Playwrights Project, which launched in 1988, were going strong.
Oh, and then there was that rosy glow from the lobby: the Tony Award for Regional Theatre Excellence SCR earned in 1988.
The theater had reached the goal Emmes had articulated 10 years earlier: to create a national profile for SCR based on new play development, specifically emerging playwrights.
The seeds planted in the 1970s had sprouted into sturdy strands.
But in the next decades, they were about to burst past the clouds.
The dramaturg SETS THE SCENE
“People ask me that all the time, ‘What are you looking for,’” says SCR resident dramaturg Jerry Patch, named SCR’s first literary director in 1976 and who, despite a long break at two other theaters, never seemed too far away. “And I always say, ‘I don’t know until I read it.’ We have never looked for anything specific. We were just looking for writers.”
Patch said from the beginning of SCR’s commissioning program, the focus was investing in playwrights, not plays. At the time, most play commissions at other theaters were given to writers with works already in progress or written for that theater.
“It was never a one-play deal,” Patch said about SCR’s commissions. “We were trying to build relationships with writers we admired over the long term. Sure, we hoped to get a play we could produce out of it. That was our goal just as it was the playwright’s. But we were looking for people who we believed could write. If we did, we commissioned. And if they write a play you wind up not doing for whatever reason, you commission them again. And ultimately what we found is that even though we didn’t necessarily produce them, we were doing about one in three. And the ones we didn’t produce almost always got produced somewhere else.”
UPPING THEIR GAME in The 1990s
The first play of 1990 was the SCR-commissioned world premiere of Howard Korder’s dark tale of America on the skids, “Search and Destroy.” It won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s inaugural Ted B. Schmitt Award for best Southern California world premiere.
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The next season, 1990-1991, two playwrights whose names would become very familiar to SCR patrons debuted: Donald Margulies with “Sight Unseen” and Richard Greenberg with “The Extra Man.”
A total of 31 world premieres were staged in the 1990s. Five earned the LADCC world premiere award and five were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize: In 1992, it was Margulies’ play, and then a dizzying three-year stretch beginning in 1997 with Margulies’ “Collected Stories,” Amy Freed’s “Freedomland” and Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” in 1998, and finishing with a crescendo in 1999 with Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” which won the award. All but “Wit” were SCR commissions.
PHOTO 1: From left, Heather Ehlers, Peter Michael Goetz and Annie LaRussa in "Freedomland." PHOTO 2: Megan Cole, left, and Patricia Fraser in "Wit" at SCR. Photos courtesy of SCR
The decade also saw the theater's most ambitious new play initiative to date: the 1998 debut of the Pacific Playwrights Festival (PPF).
PPF was launched to fill a void in Southern California after two major new play development entities, the Audrey Skirball Kenis Theatre Projects and the Padua Playwrights Festival, folded earlier in the decade. But it was also part of the theater vision outlined in the nine-page manifesto that hung in the lobby of SCR’s first two spaces: to contribute to the growth and maturation of the American theater by encouraging playwrights to write plays by producing them.
“Now more than ever it (is) difficult to make a living as a playwright due to the talent drain of promising young playwrights tempted away to Hollywood and never returning to the theater,” former literary manager and associate artist John Glore told OC Weekly in 2007. “That is what a festival like this is intended to do, to help make our most talented playwrights stay encouraged about writing for the theater and to get them more productions around the country, which can provide a viable career for them.”
PPF has turned into a powerhouse gateway for new plays. Through the 2022-23 season, roughly 90 percent of the plays read, workshopped or staged as part of the PPF had been produced by SCR or another theater.
“A lot of theaters have these festivals where they read plays and in many cases, they don’t do any of them,” says Eleanor Burgess, whose play “Galilee, 34,“ received a staged reading at PPF last year and a full production this year. “None of them are moving up to the big leagues. I mean I’m grateful to any theater that tries to support new plays but for South Coast to actively program new plays and commission plays they intend to produce is wonderful.”
New Voices Take Center Stage in the Early 2000s
Plays by Greenberg, Margulies and Freed accounted for nearly a third of SCR’s world premieres in the 1990s, but there was also an infusion of newer voices, particularly women, which had been lacking in SCR’s history up to that point.
During that decade, SCR staged seven plays written by women, four of them world premieres. In the 2000s, these numbers jumped to 20 and 14. They included Lynn Nottage, whose “Intimate Apparel,” an SCR commission, would become one of the most produced works of the 21st century, as well as early career works from Laura Gunderson, Julia Cho and Julie Marie Myatt.
2003 was a high point. The two fully mounted PPF plays were Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel,” and Rolin Jones' “The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” which was a Pulitzer finalist. That same year, Time Magazine tabbed SCR as one of the top five regional theaters in the country due in part that it had nine plays commissioned, developed or originated by SCR playing in New York.
During this time, SCR also championed early works by Quiara Alegría Hudes. In 2003 and 2004, “Yemaya’s Belly” and “The Adventures of Barrio Grrrl!” were part of SCR’s final two Hispanic Playwrights Projects. She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama in 2012 for her play “Water by the Spoonful.“
This decade also saw the departure of two key artists responsible for these successes. In 2005, Patch left SCR to become resident artistic director at the Old Globe Theatre, and then left San Diego three years later to become the Manhattan Theatre Club's director of artistic development.
Also departing SCR around the same time was Jennifer Kiger, who had served as literary manager for five years. She left to become the associate artistic director at Yale Repertory Theatre and director of new play programs for Yale’s Binger Center for New Theatre.
Whether related to their departures or not, few new plays seemed to catch fire during the second half of the 2000s. (Although David Lindsay Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which was commissioned by SCR and read at the 2005 PPF, but premiered in New York, won the 2007 Pulitzer, and Julie Marie Myatt’s “The Happy Ones,” directed by Benson, earned SCR its seventh LADCC best Southern California world premiere in 2009.)
Changing of the Guard I, 2010: The Founders ReTIRE, SorT Of, and Hand the Reins to Marc Masterson
In February 2010, Benson and Emmes announced they were stepping down as co-artistic directors. They would take on the titles of founding artistic directors and stay on staff for at least five years to help the new artistic director transition in turbulent economic times.
The new artistic director certainly had new play cred: Marc Masterson, who had overseen more than 100 world productions in his 11 years running the Actor’s Theatre in Louisville, which also produced the (now defunct) Humana Festival of New Plays.
During Masterson's SCR tenure which ended in 2017, 77 plays, not counting “A Christmas Carol” or the Theatre for Young Audiences series, were staged, 29 of them world premieres by 25 playwrights, 20 of whom had never received a previous full production at SCR.
Three breakout plays during Masterson’s time were Qui Nguyen’s “Vietgone” in 2015, Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House Part 2,” and Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band.” Nguyen and Lee’s pieces were both products of SCR’s Crossroads commissioning program, which generated work reflecting some aspect of Orange County’s cultural diversity.
PHOTO 1: From left, Paco Tolson, Maureen Sebastian, Samantha Quan and Raymond Lee in "Vietgone." PHOTO 2: Bill Geisslinger and Shannon Cochran in "A Doll’s House, Part 2." Photos courtesy of SCR
Changing of the Guard II, 2018: The David Ivers ERA
After Masterson’s contract expired in 2018, another national search commenced and in September 2018, David Ivers was officially announced as the new artistic director. Though the first season he oversaw, 2019-20, was cut short by the pandemic, and the second season erased completely, since SCR’s return to full seasons in 2021-22, the percentage of new plays is the highest in the theater’s history: just under 43 percent, or six world premieres in the 14 non-holiday, non-outdoor and non-theatre for young audiences shows produced.
Of those six world premieres, Christine Quintana‘s dual-language “Clean/Espejos” became the 10th SCR play to earn the LADCC best Southern California world premiere.
Reinforcing Ivers’ commitment to new plays: On March 8, 2020, the day California shut down, he made a call to the person whom he wanted to write the play that would greet a live audience when that time finally came.
“It was a strange time for me since the pandemic was underway and I was having cancer again,” says Richard Greenberg, SCR’s most commissioned and produced playwright (13 and 10 respectively). “Plus, this was before I discovered an anti-anxiety medication that I adore. So, I thought I wasn’t going to write because what’s the point? I didn’t even know if I'd ever be able to leave my apartment again.
“But then he called and said ‘I would love it if you could write me a one-man play’ because he always wanted to, apparently, act alone on stage. So, I said, 'OK.' please give me something to do so I don't freak out.
“I thought I’d have something to do with my days. But you know I had a wealth of feelings to write out of at the time. So I started writing out of that moment and that was very helpful.”
Greenberg’s “A Shot Rang Out,” starring Ivers, opened on the Segerstrom Stage on Oct. 2. 2021.
Ultimately, new plays stay pivotal
Ivers has also consolidated all of SCR’s new play initiatives under one umbrella, called the Lab@SCR, which has expanded some programs, like now offering commissions to mid-career playwrights and partnering with Playwrights Horizon to create a $60,000 Pinnacle Commission for writers of “remarkable achievement.”
Moving forward, Ivers said the pandemic has only strengthened his, and SCR’s, commitment to new plays.
“I would say coming out of the pandemic, the one area of focus I have leaned on the most has been to make sure the Lab@SCR is still the most prolific part of our producing arm,” he said. “We have not pulled back at all.
“There is a generation of playwrights that are putting out some cool stuff. And we have the top agents in the country sending (plays) to us all the time. I think part of that is because they know we’re looking at them, we're putting our money where our mouth is. Being able to sustain, even in small amounts, artists by putting resources in their pockets is one of the great privileges to be serving this institution.”
And don’t think those playwrights don’t appreciate it:
“It’s harder than ever for playwrights to sustain a life in the theater creatively, financially everything,” said playwright Charlie Oh. “But I do hope to be able to build a life as a theater artist for the long haul. And it’s incredibly meaningful when an institution like this helps support that.”
Oh received the first professional production of his young playwriting career last year with “Coleman ‘72.” “It was a really collaborative process between the playwright and director and gave us the space to tell the story we wanted to tell while also being a resource and sounding board when we needed to. I never felt intimidated even though it was my first production. Everyone did a great job of empowering me.”
“The question of will anyone want to do my plays again is always a question, I think, of any playwright,” said Burgess. “But with COVID and with two children, and with theater having a hard time right now … (SCR ) has been a lifeline, frankly.”
Click here to read PART 1: "SCR at 60, Part 1: Committing to New Plays, Eventually.”
