Casting New Light at SCR’s Second Stage

Change is in the air at South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage--and not just the recently announced expansion that will take it from 161 seats to 300.

Second Stage traditionally has been reserved for new and rising authors. David Hare, whose 1995 play “Skylight” opens Friday in that venue, is neither.

His much-praised, much-cursed “The Blue Room,” starring Nicole Kidman, and “The Judas Kiss” already are on Broadway, and Hare plans to have two more works on the Great White Way this year, with Dame Judi Dench in “Amy’s View” and Hare, himself, performing his solo “Via Dolorosa.”

“Skylight,” by contrast, is an intimate drama and not the sort of public and political play upon which Hare has built his reputation. His chosen director is SCR’s artistic director, Martin Benson, who typically chooses plays that are more intellectual and on a bigger canvas.

Even the casting avoids the faces usually seen at SCR.

Cindy Katz,, who plays “Skylight’s” quietly embittered teacher, Kyra, has been at SCR before, mostly in classics such as Moliere’s “The Misanthrope,” Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” (as Kate) and Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” Her co-star, Martin Jarvis, who plays Kyra’s restaurateur ex-lover, Tom, is making his SCR debut in “Skylight,” as is fellow cast member Lars Carlson.

Katz herself is struck by the sense of going against expectations that this production seems to represent. She noted that Benson, who last year staged Eugene O’Neill’s grand piece of Americana, “Ah, Wilderness!,” “usually doesn’t do British or chamber plays, and this is both of those in one. I think because it is a change for him, he’s stimulated by it.”

And, as a preview of what Second Stage audiences might see, Katz added that “from the very first day of rehearsals, [Benson] was into the sexual dance between Tom and Kyra, and not emphasizing the intellectual side of it.”

But, because this is David Hare, the intellectual side is there--just further in the background than in such past, sometimes polemical works as “Plenty,” “A Map of the World,” “Pravda” and “Racing Demon.”

The British-born Jarvis is well-acquainted with this earlier Hare and the national sociopolitical climate he responds to: The actor recently worked on the British TV adaptation of Hare’s “The Absence of War.”

“Like much of his earlier work,” Jarvis said, “ ‘Absence’ was funny but purely political, written as a depiction of the Labor Party’s ousting of Neil Kinnock as party leader. There is the political background to ‘Skylight,’ but it is much more about these people, how they handle guilt and the extraordinary problems of a tripartite relationship.”

As the play opens, Kyra is living alone in a cold, cold-water flat in a crummy section of north London and teaching poor kids in an even crummier section of East London.

She left Tom’s bed and restaurant unannounced a few years before, when his wife, Alice, found out about their affair. Tom has suffered triply--from Kyra’s absence, Alice’s death from cancer and his son Edward’s (Carlson) acrimony. He arrives at Kyra’s flat for some kind of reconciliation--or, just maybe, a renewal of old passions.

Katz said she’s glad she didn’t see the Mark Taper Forum’s fall ’97 production “so it didn’t prejudice me in any way. But when I read the play, I knew I must do this.

“Without being too revealing, Kyra’s a woman I really understand. Her complicated problems mostly stem from her difficulties with commitment, and that’s a problem usually written for male characters. It’s refreshing to see Hare reverse that and reveal that women can have this same problem.”

In separate phone interviews, both actors brought up George Bernard Shaw--one of the most revived playwrights at SCR--in comparison to Hare.

“This is David Hare dividing himself into two,” said Jarvis, “rather like Shaw. Tom is this man prospering from Margaret Thatcher’s Britain but who [still] has limitless abilities to give. Kyra is terribly serious about injustice, her hatred of the [political] right, but tends to treat people as symbols. Hare’s cleverness lies in observing that there are good and bad things on both sides.”

Katz hears echoes of Kyra in “Shaw’s women, who are more complete than most women you see on stage or on film--they’re not idealized, they’re human, with ideas of their own. The play is about the fronts we put up, our survival walls, and Kyra’s seriousness and vehemence is part of that front.”

Like their characters’ separateness, Katz and Jarvis arrive at this from different worlds of the theater.

Katz, a Yale graduate, has performed up and down the elite roster of U.S. theater, from Seattle’s Intiman and New York’s Lincoln Center to the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, Yale Repertory and Los Angeles’ Westwood Playhouse (now the Geffen).

Jarvis makes a career of crossing the Atlantic, at one moment on London’s Almeida Theatre stage in Shaw’s “The Doctor’s Dilemma,” and another moment recording radio plays for National Public Radio and L.A. Classic Theatre Works.

“These productions are always like arranged marriages,” noted Katz, “and at first when I heard I was going to play opposite a British actor, I thought, ‘Oh God, we’ll have this political diatribe.’ But [Jarvis] isn’t like that at all--he’s emotionally pretty raw.

“We’re alone on the stage for a long time, and we have to keep this ball going between us, or else the ball just drops. [Jarvis] is always there, batting it back to me.”

* David Hare’s “Skylight,” South Coast Repertory Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Previews tonight and Thursday. $18-$29. Regular run opens at 8 p.m. Friday. Continues at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $26-$43. Pay what you will performance ($5 minimum) is Saturday at 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. (714) 708-5555.