Tyrants, Yuppies and the Bard

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

San Diego is not what most people, even most San Diegans, think of as an artsy town. It is celebrated for sun and surf and margaritas, for driving with the top down and perpetual pursuit of youth. The city's Balboa Park is full of museums, but at least one of them, the San Diego Museum of Art, is not above erecting a giant outdoor cutout of the Cat in the Hat to lure spectators to an exhibition of the drawings of Dr. Seuss. This, then, is not the sort of place where a culture vulture might expect to find one of the nation's leading regional repertory companies. And he wouldn't -- he would find two.

For a half-century, with occasional interruptions, the city's drama scene has been highlighted by the Old Globe Theater. Offering mostly outdoor Shakespeare and classics, the Old Globe has grown from a summer festival into a year-round operation with three stages, a $6.4 million budget and a 1984 special Tony Award. Its success has helped spawn a lively local theater community, including the regionally acclaimed San Diego Repertory. A gap remained for those seeking new and avant-garde work, but that was filled in 1983, when the La Jolla Playhouse opened on a suburban campus of the University of California at San Diego. Although the playhouse has staged musicals (including 1984's Big River, which went on to win seven Tony Awards on Broadway, and a 1985 reworking of Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along overseen by the composer), most of its summerlong schedule consists of unfamiliar plays or eccentric looks at familiar ones. Against all odds, the company is becoming a financial as well as artistic success.

This year the La Jolla roster has included a commedia dell'arte farce, The Three Cuckolds, starring Mime Bill Irwin; Shout Up a Morning, a musical based on the work of Jazzman Cannonball Adderley that went on to a limited run at the Kennedy Center in Washington; and the U.S. premiere of Odon von Horvath's Figaro Gets a Divorce, a work of protest written in 1937 in Nazi Germany. Currently playing are Gillette, a comic adventure set in a Wyoming boomtown, and a modern version of the Greek tragedy Ajax, directed by Peter Sellars and imported from Sellars' now defunct American National Theater in Washington.

Of these, the most important literary event is Figaro. Horvath was 30 in 1931 when his sardonic Tales from the Vienna Woods won him Germany's Kleist Prize. But Hitler's rise to power aborted Horvath's career, and his reputation has | re-emerged only since the late 1960s. Figaro imagines the principal characters of Beaumarchais's 18th century farce The Marriage of Figaro thrust into a postrevolutionary modern world. Count Almaviva is a tyrant on the run, his wife a conniving businesswoman, the valet Figaro a nationalist longing to return to his newly free homeland, and his lady's-maid wife Susanna a loyalist clinging to the old social order.

At La Jolla, Director Robert Woodruff and Translator Roger Downey added evocations of Imelda Marcos and of assassinated Nicaraguan Dictator Anastasio Somoza: a suitcase filled with shoes and black brassieres, Latin-style music pulsing along a castle wall painted with austere political slogans. But rather than a satire, the production was a dreamlike allegory about the corruption of all plutocrats and of all firebrands. Woodruff and Set Designer Douglas Stein offered dazzling visual imagery, from a demented New Year's Eve ball to a row of garret apartments that appeared, suffused with golden light, halfway up the back wall of the stage. This technical facility never overwhelmed the text. The finale, when Figaro (Tony Plana) returned to join the junta and declared that the real measure of progress would be if the life of Almaviva (Olek Krupa) was spared, was a simply staged moment of glowing humanity, edged with doubt about whether Figaro's decency would prevail.

The Old Globe's season contains no such archival curiosities. Instead it features star turns by Brian Bedford in Richard II, Earle Hyman and John Vickery in Julius Caesar and Paxton Whitehead in a revival of Beyond the Fringe. But the repertory also meets one of Artistic Director Jack O'Brien's longstanding goals, a world premiere of a substantial new play staged by him. The work, Emily, depicts the comic misadventures of a female yuppie, a hard- working stock trader who refuses to acquire furniture, artwork or a steady boyfriend for fear of being tied down. She picks up a waiter who is an out-of- work actor; he refuses to be bought or treated as an object, and they embark on a classic screwball-comedy romance, unable to live with or without each other.

Playwright Stephen Metcalfe (Strange Snow, The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers) risks cartoonish farce in scenes between Emily and her detached, all- business father; meetings between Emily and her brittle, suicidal mother come close to soap opera. Metcalfe binds the play's kaleidoscopic moods with chatty monologues by the central character. In a role that could easily become unlikable, Madolyn Smith, best known as the star of the CBS-TV mini-series If Tomorrow Comes, enlists playgoers' sympathy from the first moment and charms them right through her final perplexed, ingratiating grin. She is so appealing, so candid and self-critical and spunky, that at times it is hard to tell just how good the play is. In San Diego, it feels terrific.