Small Change for a Big-Budget Playhouse : New Artistic Director of Laguna Group Likes the Way Things Are Going and Will Focus on 2nd Stage

LAGUNA BEACH —  Andrew Barnicle, who takes over Monday as the new artistic director of the Laguna Playhouse, has a firm fix on what he wants for a 71-year-old theater organization that regularly fills 90% of its seats.

“This playhouse is top of the line in terms of national community theaters,” the actor, director, designer and teacher said. “Whoever’s in my position ought to work very diligently to keep it that way.”

Barnicle, 40, won’t have a great deal of time for reflection. Starting next week, he’ll begin casting for the Sept. 5 season opener, Leonard Bernstein’s “On the Town,” which he also will direct. He’ll design the following production, “The Diviners,” by Jim Leonard Jr., slated to open in October.

Understandably, the appointment of a new artistic director raises the question of whether he will be tinkering with a well-oiled machine, a successful 418-seat theater with a $1-million annual budget.

“The only changes you’ll see are the ones reflected by my own personal taste, and I don’t think it’s that different from what was already here,” Barnicle said.

“Just the way I go about producing a play is liable to be different than the people who’ve been here before, and people I might bring in. . . . I can’t even begin to tell you what those changes may be. I just know the way I do things and, if they’re different from the way other people did, so be it.”

But Barnicle, who will be commuting from his Oceanside home, insists that the changes won’t be that great.

“I’m not here to inflict any radical change on what’s happening on the main stage” of the playhouse’s Moulton Theatre, he said, “either in the choice of plays that they do or in the way that they do them. For me, the only new look is going to come in that second stage if we get it rolling.”

And the second stage is where Barnicle hopes to make his mark. Under consideration for nearly a decade, the idea of a second stage is for a smaller theater where more experimental works could be performed. A considerable amount of money has been raised for the project--nearly $900,000 in cash and pledges is in hand--which was stalled when plans to use the General Telephone Building in downtown Laguna Beach fell through.

At a retreat last October, the playhouse board reaffirmed its goal, voting “to acquire a site and establish a professional second stage” within three years, at an estimated cost of $3 million.

“The second stage will provide whatever opportunities we have to spread out a little bit into regions that we haven’t traveled before,” Barnicle said. “If both of those venues were working side by side, I think the place would be complete.”

A second stage is critical, Barnicle said, in order “to provide a counterpoint to the large-scale, mainstream productions that we do here, one that allows us to continue on the main stage to do the large-scale, older plays.”

At present, he said, the playhouse is “a little bit incomplete. It needs that second stage so that it can incorporate the entire community. . . .

“We need to reach . . . the people who are going to want to deal with the more social- and political-issue plays,” he said. “If we’re truly serving the community that’s something that we’re going to have to do.”

For now, “the most difficult thing is finding the right location” for the second stage, Barnicle said. “It’s a tight real-estate market, it’s an expensive real-estate market. . . . That’s our only challenge at this point, is finding that building. Once we find the building, I think finding the remainder of the funds won’t be a problem. I think there’s enough community support and need for it.”

Barnicle succeeds Douglas Rowe, who once said his “greatest failure” was to “galvanize the board” into purchasing a site for the second stage. Rowe served as managing director of the playhouse from 1964 to 1966, and as artistic director from 1976 until June of this year, when he retired.

In 1990, the board hired Richard A. Stein to be the playhouse’s first executive director, above Rowe. Later that year, Rowe announced his retirement and Stein oversaw the search for his replacement, who has been signed to a one-year contract.

Barnicle praised Rowe, who still serves the playhouse’s board and still lives in Laguna, and acknowledged his contribution to the playhouse.

“He’s obviously had a tremendous impact on this whole theater community,” Barnicle said. “I have nothing but the highest respect for that. He’s been very gracious to me. . . .

“He screwed the nuts and bolts on to this place really tightly,” Barnicle said. “I’m here to make sure they don’t loosen up. . . . I have inherited a place that’s on very solid ground, and I intend to keep it that way.”

Rowe said the reason he resigned his post was to devote more time to his professional acting career and to several play-writing projects. In recent years, Rowe had a number of roles in television movies and, with Mark Turnbull, wrote a musical which had a short run at the playhouse entitled “Dora Hand,” a Western based on life in Dodge City.

For his part, Barnicle said he does little play-writing, apart from a “drawer full of first acts.” And although he was a professional actor for more than a decade, he said, “I’m not ambitious as an actor. It’s not my intention to put myself on stage here or to be running around, trying to do different things.

“This is definitely a full-time job. It was a little easier for Doug to do that because he’d been here for so long he understood the ins and outs of this place. I’m going to be learning them, and so it will be quite a while before I even ask for time off to do any kind of outside work. . . . Certainly not the first year.”

Barnicle’s professional acting career in New York left him frustrated, he recalled.

“I was building up great credits, but I wasn’t earning a very good living,” he said.

In 1985, he accepted an offer from United States International University in San Diego, where he was “able to teach, direct and act--earn a better living than I even had purely as an actor--and live in San Diego, and I can’t complain about any of that.”

Ultimately, Barnicle became head of theater at the financially troubled school, while at the same time serving as artistic director of the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach and acting in Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” at the San Diego Repertory Theatre.

Barnicle has a strong academic background, including a master’s degree in theater design from the University of Illinois and course work toward a doctorate at Wayne State University in Detroit. His dissertation is on 19th-Century American drama, which he expects will be reflected at the playhouse.

“I have a tendency toward more classical literature, and we will be working from the classical repertoire a little more than has been in the past here. So, you can look for some 19th-Century works, some 18th-Century works and maybe some Renaissance stuff. I’m not in a hurry to do Shakespeare here, but after I’ve been here for a while and I see what the capacity is to do it, I wouldn’t be afraid to do it, if I felt like it.”

One example Barnicle cited was Augustin Daly’s “Under the Gaslight,” which he appeared in a Soho Repertory production in New York. The play features a heroine who rescues a disabled Civil War veteran tied to the railroad tracks, and a suffragist line from the vet: “And these are the women that ain’t to get the vote?”

“A good old-fashioned melodrama does have a social statement to be made--albeit one that is 150 years old,” he said. “There are universals there. I have great respect for those plays, and I intend to start putting one in every season. Maybe not a melodrama, but certainly something from prior to the turn of the century.”

Barnicle was less certain about how much original material would be produced at the playhouse, which established the Douglas Rowe Endowment for Orange County Playwrights as an ongoing tribute to the outgoing artistic director.

Such an endowment “implies that we have a heavy commitment to original work,” Barnicle said. On the other hand, “Original stuff to me is only good if it’s as good as the stuff we ordinarily do,” he said.

“Just because it’s original doesn’t mean that we’re going to do it.”