O.C. THEATER / JAN HERMAN : Barclay Will Turn Pro for ‘93-’94

If all contracts are signed as expected, the Irvine Barclay Theatre will mount a 1993-94 professional theater series highlighted by a new monologue by Spalding Gray, of “Swimming to Cambodia” fame.

The modest subscription series would also include a touring production of “Hamlet” by the Orinda-based California Shakespeare Festival and a Teatro Campesino presentation of Luis Valdez’s latest play, “Bandido” (currently being developed at the Mark Taper Forum’s New Work Festival in Los Angeles).

Each show would be booked for one night only, but at least it’s a start on improving the Barclay’s most obvious programming deficiency: professional theater.

“One of our priorities for the next 12 months is to increase the level of risk capital available,” IBT president and chief operating officer Douglas C. Rankin said in an interview last week.

“Any way you look at it, that’s what it comes down to--risk,” he said. “Next year the board of trustees is looking to put $150,000 into programming.”

In the roughly 2 1/2 years since it opened, the Irvine Barclay has been generous to a fault with programming across the spectrum of cultural interests. Every imaginable ethnic constituency, from the local community and elsewhere, has had the chance to strut its stuff.

The politics of inclusion is more than alive and well at the $17.6-million facility: It is fairly bursting with correctness, a proud smorgasbord of the American dream intended to recognize every nook and cranny of our society.

If an ethnic group is inclined toward musical or terpsichorean expression and has not found a niche at the Barclay, chances are it can’t muster a quorum or it doesn’t exist.

This month’s Barclay offerings alone illustrate the point. On Thursday, in a presentation sponsored by UC Irvine Cultural Events, the American Indian Dance Theatre will perform with singers and dancers representing 15 tribes. Last week, students of the Irvine Chinese School celebrated the Luna New Year. A couple of weeks from now, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Foundation will present its singers.

Yet in all this thriving activity, there’s been precious little of that basic artistic endeavor: professional drama.

It is the one area where the managers of this audience-friendly, 756-seat venue can be accused of not coming close to fulfilling their mandate. Of 185 or so performance dates in the 1992-93 season, only one was reserved for a drama troupe at the professional level: Mummenschanz, the Swiss mask-and-mime company (scheduled for March 8).

Nobody is more aware of the lack of such programming at the the Barclay than Rankin.

“Quite frankly,” he said, “theater hasn’t been one of our stronger suits.” But there has been little he could do about it, given a host of inhibiting factors.

For one, he said, UCI and the various community producers--which together were granted 90% of the performance dates this season--”haven’t been coming to us with professional theater.” Moreover, “there’s relatively little out there that is touring. Unlike dance or music, theater doesn’t tour easily.”

According to Susan Lee of the League of American Theatres and Producers in New York, a handful of non-musical plays are currently on the road: “Breaking Legs,” “Catskills on Broadway,” “Lost in Yonkers,” “Love Letters,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” and “Tru.”

Given their expense and their customary engagements of a week or longer, however, none of these would have fit into the Barclay schedule even if Rankin had been inclined to book any of them.

“Another consideration,” he said, “is what kind of professional theater should be presented here? With a Tony Award-winning company just five miles down the road, (South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa), it makes no sense to try to present the sort of thing they do.”

Thus, the Barclay, so far has chosen to invest in what Rankin calls “programming for families,” by which he means children’s theater. During the first half of the current season, for example, no less than 30 performances dates were given over to children’s theatrical events.

Rankin in the past has booked such touring troupes as the Children’s Theatre Co. of Minneapolis and the Seattle Mime Co. (doing “Pinocchio”) for one-nighters. Just recently, the theater hosted San Diego County’s Little Broadway Productions, which did eight shows of “Beauty and the Beast” for school groups.

Perhaps more important, the Barclay has encouraged local amateur producers by helping to underwrite their projects as silent partners.

“We assisted (Irvine-based ) Theatrefaire for Children with the financing of ‘Peter Pan’ as well as ‘Treasure Island,’ ” Rankin said.

This season, as it did last season, the Barclay put up about $50,000 to help develop its own programming. The money came either from residual funds or from sponsors it found for specific productions, Rankin said. That is a pittance, though, compared to the Barclay’s projected gross budget for fiscal 1993, which he estimates at roughly $1.7 million.

Rankin is not dismayed by the disparity, even considering the subsidy of $650,000 that was provided to the Barclay last year by the city of Irvine and UCI, which are partners in the theater with the nonprofit operating company.

“The progression is pretty standard,” Rankin said. “In the beginning, resources go to getting the place built; then they go to utility bills and maintenance; then, if you get to that level, they go to securing and stabilizing funding for presentations.”

HERR PROFESSOR: With the recent appointment of German drama theorist Robert Weimann as a full professor in the UC Irvine drama department, the UCI School of Fine Arts hopes to establish the first doctoral program in drama theory at an American university.

Weimann, 62, is an expert on Shakespeare who has written nine books and scores of articles, some of which have been translated into more than 20 languages. He has held distinguished visiting professorships at Harvard University and UC Berkeley, among other places, and has lectured at Oxford and Cambridge universities in England.

“He was attracted here by the idea of building a doctoral program from scratch,” said Stephen Barker, who chairs the drama department. “Universities like Yale and Harvard give doctorates in drama. And so do four schools in the UC system--UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara. But ours is the first proposal for a doctorate in drama theory anywhere in the country.”

The highest graduate degree currently obtainable at UCI’s School of Fine Arts is a master of fine arts, which is a practical rather than scholarly degree. It is given in performance fields (dance, theater and music) or in studio arts (painting, sculpture, ceramics and video).

Barker says final approval of the proposed doctoral program at various levels of review in the UC system could take up to 18 months. But he is confident that with Weimann providing the scholarly heft “we have the critical mass to move it ahead.”

In case you wondered, drama theory is broader in scope than drama criticism. A theorist analyzes the conditions surrounding a theatrical event--historic, sociological, psychological, philosophical and so on--as well as the texts themselves.

Also, in case you wondered, the salary for full professors in the UC system starts at about $85,000.