A stage to the world

It is a well-known tale that Jesus actually was a woman.

At least he was in the 1936 Pageant of the Masters.

Three of the annual masterpiece’s most ardent champions — past and present directors Don Williamson, Glen Eytchison and Diane Challis Davy — were honored at the Festival of Arts’ annual membership luncheon, which this year celebrated the pageant’s 75th birthday.

Pageant scriptwriter Dan Duling, who has held the role for the past 28 years, shared a stack of little-known tidbits with the crowd about the pageant’s early days, trials and successes.

He is currently writing the first official history of the organization, and drew from his research in preparing the speech.

“It began with a march down Coast Highway,” he said.

Characters like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Whistler’s Mother paraded toward the pageant site to attract viewers.

Duling described the makeshift stage as “very much like an outhouse.”

The Pageant has closed with a living picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” nearly every year since 1936. Pageant creator Roy Ropp had trouble finding the perfect Jesus while casting the role, and eventually offered it in secret to Mrs. Harry Gordon Martin, a Festival board member.

Since those early, scandalous days, several other actors have taken the helm, including three who were honored at the luncheon: Charles Thompson, a 30-year veteran of the role; Tony Loesch, a nine-year veteran who still dons the robe each summer, and Frank Daniel, now in his 21st year of playing the Son of Man.

Festival Board President Wayne Baglin served as the Master of Ceremonies at the annual membership luncheon, held at Tivoli Terrace, which he said was like a family reunion.

Duling, when introducing the directors, noted the huge time commitments they made.

“Art and theater do not confine themselves to 9-to-5 workdays,” he said.

Orrefors crystal awards etched by Festival exhibitor Jude Taylor were presented to the three directors, who in turn have run the pageant since 1964.

Williamson began working with the pageant’s originator, Roy Ropp, in the 1930s.

“Don really is our link to Roy Ropp,” Duling said.

“He was a wonderful man,” Williamson recalled of the first director.

Three decades later, he took the reins, and directed the pageant from 1964 to 1978.

“I worked 14 years as an architect, and then I thought I could work as an architect and do this, too. Ridiculous. So I stopped being an architect,” he said.

But the architect still remained inside of Williamson, who designed the Irvine Bowl stage, Forum Theatre, exhibit structures and Tivoli Terrace.

“We live with the fruits of his architectural labors,” Duling said. “We truly owe an amazing debt to Don.”

Three generations of Williamsons volunteered for the pageant.

Williamson was the first to suggest a “builder”-style tableau vivant, in which the picture is assembled in front of the audience.

Williamson handed the reins to Eytchison, who directed from 1979 to 1995, when he was just 23 years old — and had only ever seen the show at the age of 11.

“If Don was the master of the pageant, Doug was the impresario,” Duling said.

Eytchison brought emotion and feeling to the pageant, but was terrified when he began at the prospect of maintaining Williamson’s level of quality.

“It was a much more difficult thing than I had imagined,” he said. “Everyone in the community had an investment in this project.”

The former director now resides in Arizona, but during his tenure at the pageant, he improved safety procedures and faced the pageant’s largest challenge: the flood that followed the 1993 fires.

Eytchison said he was ready to move on to another opportunity when the fires happened.

That day, when the fire was approaching the bowl, Eytchison and a small group of volunteers stood in the bowl with fire hoses.

At one point, when he was ready to throw in the towel, Eytchison looked up and saw the residents who lived up the hillside had formed a human chain with hoses.

“We stayed all day,” he said.

People Eytchison didn’t even know stopped by to help.

But the true catastrophe for the pageant was the flood that followed.

“We lost everything,” Eytchison said. “They were finding gallon jugs of makeup at Main Beach.”

A mountain of mud 4 feet high and solid as concrete stood in the office and backstage areas, he said.

But next summer, the show went on.

“Basically, I never saw the man sleep during the entire time he worked there,” Duling said.

Volunteer groups worked in shifts, 24 hours a day, to restore historic documents recovered from the debris.

“Without the people, there’s no pageant,” Eytchison said. He was again reminded of the place’s importance to the community.

“I remember the great camaraderie that we all shared in the restoration effort,” said Challis Davy, the current director, who began her role in 1996.

She received a festival scholarship after graduating from high school, and took the directorial helm after a stint as Eytchison’s assistant director.

Challis Davy, a Laguna Beach High School graduate, is the 2008 recipient of the Laguna Beach Arts Alliance Art Star Artist of the Year Award.

Her touches have included the reintroduction of themed shows and the addition of live performance elements to the production.

“Through her, there has been a sense of reinvigoration, which inspires so many of us. She is truly a woman of the theater,” Duling said.

“I think we are in excellent hands for the future.”

She attended Williamson’s shows when she was a child, but never expected to follow in his footsteps.

“Glen and I both benefited a whole lot from Don’s great knowledge,” she said.

She hopes that the level of volunteerism continues into the future.

A birthday cake dotted with white chocolate shells and coral was served after festival board member Pat Kollenda led the attendees in singing “Happy Birthday” to the pageant.

Longtime fixture David Young, who has served the organization in various capacities for over 50 years, remembered the first pageants he was involved with.

“They were just all working hard and having a wonderful time doing it,” Young said.

He was inspired by the volunteer spirit he saw — and in his more than half-century with the organization, spent more than half of that serving on the pageant’s production committee.

“I really got in there and worked,” he said.

He was also instrumental in the organization’s multi-year lease negotiations with the city.

“You can see we did the right thing,” he said. “There’s no place on earth where an organization has done that much for the city.”

This year’s pageant, “All the World’s a Stage,” will be held from July 9 to Aug. 30. Tickets are $20 to $90; for more information, call (800) 487-3378 or visit www.lagunafestivalofarts.org.