READING SOMETHING INTO IT

Ten years ago, a South Coast Repertory audience had a mostly miserable time listening to a staged reading of Donald Margulies’ new play, “Heartbreaker,” and expressed its discontent in the feedback session that followed.

But two of the play’s dozen scenes played well. Margulies kept those, threw out the rest and reworked “Heartbreaker” into “Sight Unseen,” which had its world premiere at SCR two years later and became a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

In 1995, Richard Greenberg, a well-established playwright from New York, brought his new play, “Three Days of Rain,” to SCR for a public reading, albeit with great misgivings.

“I thought the script was in pretty shabby shape,” Greenberg recalled, but he said the audience loved it. “I found that startling, but it was helpful, even invigorating.

“It enabled me to return to the play with confidence and enthusiasm. [The audience] was ahead of me, I think,” Greenberg said. “They were able to penetrate what was wrong to get at what was essentially right.”

Greenberg’s play had its world premiere at SCR in 1997 and was a Pulitzer finalist the following year.

This year, Margaret Edson’s “Wit,” another play first produced at SCR and first heard in a reading there, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Writer Laid Bare

Playwriting hell, it might seem, is facing an audience that has come to dissect one’s work when it is not even finished. Naked and still subject to revision, it is read without benefit of scenery, costumes, stage lighting or actors who know their lines by heart.

No sooner has the last speech been spoken than the author, perhaps a writerly type who doesn’t like to be the center of attention, is ushered onto a bare stage to be barraged with the first things that pop into the paying public’s mind.

Nothing hellish happened last Monday night at the start of a new series of NewSCRipts play readings, but it looked a lot like purgatory for a time as playwright Stuart Spencer and director Olivia Honegger sat side by side onstage listening to comments from an audience that had just seen four actors, outfitted only with street clothes and scripts propped on music stands, as they read Spencer’s new play, “In the Western Garden.”

Honegger sat with her body twisted at a glancing angle from the audience of about 300, many of them avid playgoers who attend all of SCR’s regular plays. Spencer, close-cropped and dressed in workman’s clothes, held a clipboard, his body square to the crowd and set in an armored posture--the seated equivalent of a football blocking back poised to meet a blitz.

Under the ground rules announced by moderator John Glore, SCR’s literary manager, audience members would speak their minds, praising or criticizing as they saw fit. The single constraint was that they must react only to what had been presented rather than trying to rewrite it on the spot. The playwright and director would take it all in and say nothing.

The consensus was that “In the Western Garden” was enjoyable but not altogether clear. The viewers’ main objection was that the play’s three sections, each depicting different characters in different times and places, were not well-linked to form a unified whole.

As the discussion continued, it became obvious that the play’s themes had hit home concerning the role of art and how it has changed between the time of Michelangelo, who cut a cantankerous figure in Act I, and the modern era, represented by the battling fictional American modernist painter and postmodernist installation-maker of Act II.

Spencer and Honegger began to smile and relax. Their grins widened when a man, apparently not an artist himself, spoke emotionally of how the play had reflected mistaken choices in his own life, and a woman extolled the piece’s “poetry” and the virtues of plays that are a bit elusive rather than laying everything out for instant absorption.

The subtitle for this installment in the NewSCRipts series was clearly “All’s Well That Ends Well.”

Writer Can Hear What’s Right, Wrong

Staged readings with audience response may be uncomfortable for playwrights, but those involved in shepherding new plays into being in Orange County say it is a vital step in the process.

This is true not only at SCR, where the playwrights frequently have national reputations, but in grass-roots theaters where the writers often are getting a first taste of how their words sound and how they affect people when set loose from the page.

“Writing a play is a brave act. To be a playwright, you have to exhibit bravery,” said Eric Eberwein, director of the Orange County Playwrights Alliance, one of several local groups committed to fostering new plays and using the staged reading with audience comment as a tool to improve them.

“I’ve had very positive feedback and very negative feedback at times, but you have to be willing to hear it,” Eberwein added. “The audience does not know everything, but you certainly can gauge the effectiveness of the play.”

In a telephone interview a few days after the reading of “In the Western Garden,” director Honegger, who lives in Los Angeles, said the comments had been far more gratifying than excruciating.

“It’s exactly what we wanted,” Honegger said. “What more can you ask from a reading than for people to get so passionate? Art isn’t meant to please or appease, in my eyes. I was so happy because people were on their toes, thinking. I felt held really accountable for certain choices [as the director]. It was fun.”

Spencer, a New Yorker who left for a European vacation after the reading, could not be reached. But Honegger said Spencer had e-mailed her saying he was pleased with the reading and discussion. “The questions that arose,” Honegger said, “were the very questions we were tackling in two days of rehearsals.”

Glore, who alternates with SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch in moderating the NewSCRipts sessions, said that since the series began in 1985, some of SCR’s most acclaimed productions have benefited from the reading process--in some cases because they were instant hits, in others because they were flops.

In all, 70 plays had been read in the series before “In the Western Garden”; 31 went on to full productions at SCR, and an additional 24 have been staged elsewhere--an overall batting average of nearly 80%.

Constructive, Not Destructive

Glore says the ground rules and moderator’s guidance at the SCR feedback sessions prevent the contentious scenes he has witnessed at readings elsewhere.

“They can easily turn into free-for-alls, the audience browbeating the playwright, telling him how he should fix his play,” Glore said. “There’s an element that wants to be noticed--the intellectuals or would-be playwrights who want everyone to know how smart they are.”

Greenberg, who has put four of his plays through public readings at SCR, says he stands at the back of the theater, marking audience reaction during the reading. “It’s the moment when you find out if you’re speaking to yourself,” he said, “or speaking to others as well.”

But the audience isn’t speaking to him when it’s time for the feedback session. Greenberg leaves the building, preferring to take a walk or have a drink at the nearby Westin South Coast Plaza. He gets a report on the session later from the SCR staff.

Enduring the “round-table assassination” of his work through three years as a student at the Yale Drama School taught Greenberg that he didn’t have the makeup to face his critics if he didn’t have to, and SCR makes the playwright’s onstage presence optional.

“I want to write my play and not the play everybody voted on,” he said. “It’s not because of reasons of individualism, but because if plays are any good there’s a presiding intelligence that stays firm, and often playwrights are made infirm by a constant battery of points of view and opinions. That can be very dangerous.”

Less-established playwrights seemingly would be most vulnerable to the concerns Greenberg raises about undue influence from an audience.

But Christopher Trela, founder and president of New Voices Playwrights Workshop, says the group’s readings at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse draw an audience more interested in nurturing new work than in denting a budding playwright’s ego.

“It’s a little scary, but by and large audiences are supportive,” he said. “Rather than tearing it apart, they’re trying to help you understand what did and didn’t work.”

Trela said audience feedback at a reading of his first full-length play, “Bang,” encouraged him to take more authority over his work: “I had characters quoting Shakespeare and things like that, and they told me, ‘Trust your own voice, trust your own writing.’ ”

The county’s newest grass-roots playwrights organization, the Berubians, also is about to embark on a regular schedule of public readings in downtown Santa Ana. The group will take a less formal approach to feedback, adjourning for refreshments afterward and allowing audience members to approach playwrights individually.

Chris Berube, the group’s artistic director, thinks audiences feel forced to state opinions at formal public input sessions, and hopes the relaxed atmosphere will lead to “more useful feedback.”

For playgoers, the feedback sessions can provide the fun of more drama and illumination after the evening’s featured drama is done.

“I prefer these to the [fully produced] plays sometimes,” said Vicki de Reynal, an SCR regular, as she left the theater after the Spencer play’s reading. “It’s a two-for-one show, because of what you get from the audience.”

Mike Boehm may be reached by e-mail at Mike.Boehm@latimes .com

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Staged Readings: Plenty to Choose

South Coast Repertory NewSCRipts Series. Dec. 6, Jan. 31, April 24. $8. Additional new plays will be read in June during the annual Pacific Playwrights Festival at SCR. 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Information: (714) 708-5555.

Orange County Playwrights Alliance. Semimonthly readings on Saturday afternoons at the Vanguard Theatre, 699A S. State College Blvd., Fullerton. $5. (714) 526-8007.

New Voices Playwrights Workshop. Monthly staged readings on Sunday nights (dates vary) at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse, 661 Hamilton St. $5. (949) 650-5269. New Voices information line: (949) 225-4125.

The Orange County Playwrights Alliance and New Voices Playwrights Workshop will stage a joint program of public readings of Halloween-themed 10-minute plays, Oct. 23 at 2 p.m. at the Vanguard Theatre, and Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. at the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse.

Second Stage Theatre. Home to the Berubians, a new playwrights group. “Meet the Berubians,” an evening of comedy sketches, Fridays and Saturdays, Oct. 22-Nov. 13. 8 p.m. Chris Berube’s full-length play, “A Question of Faith,” will be read in Sunday matinees during December. 2122-C N. Grand Ave., Santa Ana. (714) 545-3852.

Other theaters that host staged readings include Stages, 400 E. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton. (714) 525-4484, and Alternative Repertory Theatre, 125B N. Broadway, Santa Ana. (714) 836-7929.