Q&A; / ANDREW BARNICLE : Theater’s Director Takes Stock

Andrew Barnicle’s Laguna Playhouse office overlooking the lobby of the Moulton Theatre has the lived-in look of a happy home. Daylight floods in through a long bank of windows. The wall opposite his desk is laden with books from floor to ceiling. Piles of original scripts, most of them unsolicited, stand in any empty space at hand.

As the Playhouse’s artistic director for the past two seasons, the tall, strapping ex-Chicagoan has produced 11 Mainstage offerings, directed four of them (“On the Town,” “An Enemy of the People,” “Bus Stop” and the current “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), designed the sets for two (“The Diviners” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs”) and acted in two (“To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” and “True West”).

During this period, the 73-year-old community theater in Laguna Beach has reached an all-time high of 8,814 subscribers (an increase of 10%). It has also set box-office records for single-ticket sales and is projecting total annual income of nearly $1.1 million for the 1992-93 season, solidifying its position as the county’s second-largest theater company (after South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa).

These numbers, achieved in the midst of a severe regional recession, are astonishing enough. But by any measure, Barnicle’s thriving partnership with executive director Richard A. Stein, who came to the Playhouse in 1990 from the Grove Shakespeare Festival in Garden Grove, has to be accounted a major success.

When Barnicle, 42, was appointed to take over from longtime artistic director Douglas Rowe in July, 1991, Stein, 40, already had established a firm business hand at the theater. But the Playhouse’s new direction as a producing organization had yet to be determined. Now, on the verge of his second anniversary, Barnicle says that direction is clear. He spoke to staff writer Jan Herman last week about it and the theater’s day-to-day operations:

Q: How would you characterize what you’ve done here so far?

A: I’ll tell you what I haven’t done once in two years is lose my temper. I haven’t had a shouting match with anybody yet, which tells me things are going pretty well.

Q: If you had to point to a major achievement, what would it be?

A: Most important, we’ve been able to mix up the programming more than had been the case here. We’ve done Shakespeare and Ibsen and even (Sam) Shepard, and we’ve been able to pull them off. The strong box office proves there are new ticket buyers out there who are interested in coming to this theater. So I have a certain confidence in our programming, which was one of my major concerns when I came here.

Q: Why was that a concern?

A: Well, I thought the programming might have to be limited, that I was going to have to be overcautious about the plays I chose. The subscribers were in place already and the tendency is to give them something they want to see; you’re concerned that if you do something a little progressive, they might balk. But I felt that being too market-driven was not going to help the organization in the long term. I wanted to work toward opening up the programming, to do the kind of plays I felt needed to be done, not just plays that would sell a lot of tickets.

Q: Yet you ended up selling a lot of tickets anyway.

A: Yes, but much of that had to do with more aggressive marketing techniques. We’re doing things we didn’t used to do in terms of customer service, such as follow-up phone calls on subscriber renewals, advertising exchanges with radio stations, things like that. Marketing and service go hand-in-hand. And we’re managing to do a competent job producing the plays, both in terms of cost control and making sure the productions are good.

Q: Have there been any programming disappointments?

A: You never get everything you want. Whenever you put plays together for a season you say, “Boy, I wish I had this or that.” But I no longer feel there are categories I can’t enter. There are categories I won’t enter because of my own judgment, but not categories that someone else is telling me to stay away from.

Q: What would you like do, specifically, that you haven’t done?

A: We need to branch into more ethnic-oriented material. I’d like to do some August Wilson plays. But I don’t have the actors. Whatever I choose, it has to be something we can do well. I’m still relegated to a talent pool of local actors for the most part. We make it clear in our audition notices that we’re open to actors of all ethnic cultures. But they don’t show up.

And it’s not just ethnic.

Any kind of specialty role in a play is a problem. If I need a Lenny for “Of Mice and Men,” let’s say, and if I don’t have an actor for that role in my sights, I can’t choose to do the play because the odds are great that a Lenny won’t show up at the auditions.

Q: What other factors influence your choices?

A: I could make a list of the 10 plays I’d most like to do and find out that the rights are not available to us for any of them. So my seasonal list goes through about six metamorphoses. “Lend Me a Tenor,” “I Hate Hamlet,” “Breaking Legs” and “Rumors” are all plays I thought would be appropriate for us to do. But we can’t get the rights to them.

Q: Why not?

A: Because we’re surrounded by professional companies who may want to do them. We’re not real high up on the pecking order for relatively new plays. It’s not a matter of us not wanting to pay royalties. It’s a matter of where the people who control the rights want the Southern California premiere to be.

If a play has had a New York or London production, and if any one of the top four or five professional Equity companies in Southern California has expressed an interest, the author or the agent or the licenser is not going to give the play to a largely subscribed non-Equity community theater in Laguna Beach.

Q: What else have you learned about the Playhouse?

A: The first year was mostly spent finding out what we were capable of in-house. We have a limited number of people on our staff, 10 full time and two part time. That’s small compared to other theaters that produce as much as we do. This season, we put on five Mainstage shows and four Youth Theater shows for a total of 178 performances. There were only four or five days during the course of our entire 10-month season when we didn’t have either a performance, a rehearsal or a set turnaround.

I had to learn that humongous multi-set plays with big backstage crews were not going to be our forte. I’m not budgeted to pay backstage help. Meanwhile, relying on volunteers to get us through our heavy production schedule is risky at best. So there were two choices: Either pay more money to backstage help or start choosing plays that are smaller or at least more manageable. I did a combination of both.

Q: But hasn’t scenic design been a major strength over the years?

A: Scenically we’re fine. We have a full-time professional staff building the stuff. It’s getting the people to move the scenery around backstage that’s tough. We only have a two-day tech (technical rehearsal) for our shows because most of our people work during the day. We usually can’t do these techs during the weekdays so we have to do them on weekends, and it isn’t easy to find volunteers able to commit to the entire schedule.

That means we have to work in teams. One guy says, “I can be here Tuesday, Friday and Sunday.” Another guy says, “I can be here Wednesday and every other Saturday.” When you have two days to tech and six people to teach one job, it’s virtually impossible. So one of the lessons I’ve learned is bringing the shows down to our grasp.

Q: Which shows have been the most satisfying to you?

A: “True West.” I think that was the best-done production. It was approached correctly. It was well wrought. And it worked. (Barnicle played one of its two roles.) I also think “The 1940s Radio Hour” was well done from beginning to end. It certainly proved popular at the box office--it set a record. I also prefer to think that “An Enemy of the People” was the most substantial theatrical experience, but I’m not sure it was as well done as “To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday” or “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

Q: What is the programming rationale behind next season’s offerings?

A: Balance. Eclecticism.

I started out wanting to have a big, happy holiday show. So “Oliver” makes perfect sense. By having the Youth Theater and an ensemble of talented kids who are well-trained, we’re in a position to do a musical like that. The season builds out from there.

I want to open with something that is certainly snappy. They’ve never done an Orton here. “What the Butler Saw” represents a combination of two things: It’s a farce, first and foremost, a door farce with funny people running back and forth, changing their clothes and misidentifying each other; and it has an undercurrent of social commentary, which can be either forgotten or neglected by people who just want to enjoy the farce or can be absorbed for a more serious theater experience.

I personally find farce to be the most profound type of theater. I think it has more to say than high tragedy, mostly because people are willing to listen to it. I’m going to direct it, and I’m going to push hard for fast, funny laughter. But I’m not going to cut it. That’s kind of one of my rules: I won’t take the edges off of things. If they’ve got sharp edges, then they’ll have them when they go out there.

Later in the season, I’ll direct “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (a transvestite sendup of Gothic melodrama and Hollywood horror films). I think it’s time we did Charles Ludlam. There are many playwrights who are neglected. That’s where I look for plays first of all. I like to do either the more neglected works of the more famous playwrights--like Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah Wilderness,” which will close the season--or the more famous works of the more neglected playwrights.

Q: How will you pick the original play?

A: We’ve collected more than 200 scripts--mostly unsolicited--over the last year and a half. They just come in because we’re listed (in trade publications) as accepting scripts. But when we said we would do an original play next season, they suddenly started pouring in.

I have 10 readers, each reading 15 plays. They will make first and second recommendations and they’ll be writing comments on everything. Then I’m going to read the top 20 or 30 scripts and pick five for staged readings in June and maybe into the summer and fall. Hopefully, something will be good enough. But we’re not going to pick a winner just to call it a winner. It has to be right for us.

If there isn’t anything, we’ll do one of my backup titles. At this point I have two backups, “Mass Appeal” and “Talley’s Folley.”

Q: Are you looking for local playwrights in particular?

A: We’re not going to be provincial about this. I don’t care where the play was written. I don’t care if it’s Idaho or Cleveland. If the playwright happens to live around here, great. That would be an advantage because we could work more closely together. But we’re not worried about that.

Q: Given your predilection for farce, does the script have to be a comedy?

A: Not at all. We’re putting it in our January slot, which is where we do our more thoughtful works.