THEATER NOTES : USC’s Lawns Entice Padua Hills Festival

Padua Hills Playwrights Festival is probably the most peripatetic of L.A.’s better-known theater institutions. Over the course of 15 seasons, the festival has used 11 locations.

This year, once again, Padua Hills has a new home--the University of Southern California (see adjacent article) . Why the wanderlust? Does the festival’s penchant for doing site-specific works somehow mandate a search for different sites each year?

“That’s a justification for moving,” said artistic director Murray Mednick. But it’s nothing more than a rationalization, he added. “It’s not fun to move around all the time. There are advantages to it, but there are more advantages to continuity. People need to know where to find you.”

Mednick felt that location was one of the problems of last year’s festival, which took place at the less-well-known Woodbury University in Burbank. Another problem was that Woodbury, a design and business school, lacks a theater department. “We had to rent and scrounge everything,” Mednick said.

By contrast, USC--complete with theater department--can provide more in-kind services. And because it’s “a major university, closer to the heart of the city,” more people will know how to find the festival’s public performances, Mednick predicted.

Mednick said that the USC architecture reflects “a certain kind of Americana that’s very interesting as a backdrop” for the Padua plays. “There’s lots of glass, angles, lawns. We didn’t have lawns at Woodbury. The USC look seems right for the ‘50s-ish scenes and the political awareness that’s apparent in the plays.”

Still, Mednick said he would gladly have returned to UC Northridge, the last semi-permanent Padua home (1989-91, just before financial problems suspended the festival in 1992-93)--if the 1994 earthquake hadn’t wreaked havoc on the campus.*