SCR leaders to step aside

This corrects an earlier version.

Their theater production company started out with $17, a station wagon, and a collective vision to change American theater. Forty-six years later, South Coast Repertory boasts a three-theater complex, plays that have garnered awards — including a Tony — and an annual budget of $9 million.

On Thursday, South Coast Rep co-founders David Emmes and Martin Benson announced they are stepping aside to make room for a new artistic director to lead the acclaimed Costa Mesa theater production company, which began in Newport Beach in 1964.

Now is the time to provide for the repertory’s future by finding a successor with the same vision, Emmes said in an interview Thursday.

“All these years of having accomplished a great deal and created a remarkable arts organization, it would be irresponsible not to provide for its future leadership, and we thought while we are not quite ready to retire and walk away, the idea that we should have a successor was one that we came up with,” said Emmes, 71.

He and Benson, who have shared artistic directorial duties at South Coast Rep, will stay on in their positions until a new art director is announced. They will continue to play an active role in assisting the new artistic director in finding and developing plays, and they’ll continue to direct productions.

In 1964, Emmes and Benson, who is now 72, were two state college graduates with no money or experience. But they had imagination.

“I had gone to Harbor High and Orange Coast College and knew that Orange County was a vibrant place,” Emmes said. “And it struck us that if we were just college graduates, if we came to Orange County, we’d have the chance of growing and fulfilling the dream.”

The dream was to give everyone access to the arts, which, as Emmes puts it, is the road to understanding the world.

The duo are credited with being a force behind the “resident theater movement” in the 1960s, where young artists no longer wanted theater to be defined by Broadway.

“Art deals with the life of feeling and so you have this huge area of knowledge, which, if one can access as an individual, it helps you understand your world more fully,” Emmes said. “It helps you understand yourself and your relationship with other human beings.... So it’s important that all Americans should have access to the arts. Therefore, theater needs to be made available to people throughout the country.”

Working together, Emmes and Benson built South Coast Repertory from the ground up, said Rick Stein, executive director of Arts Orange County, a countywide arts council.

“They founded what is arguably one of the best regional theaters in America,” Stein said. “They started with very little in makeshift quarters and built it up over the course of 40 years into a really marvelous, major professional theater company that is really the envy of theater artists everywhere.”

Over the decades, South Coast Rep has staged a litany of productions featuring some of drama’s most famous plays, including works by George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Miller and Tom Stoppard.

Emmes has won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his direction of Shaw’s “Philanderer.”

For his part, Benson earned acclaim for directing five of Shaw’s major plays, including three L.A. Drama Critics Circle Awards for “Major Barbara, Misalliance” and “Heartbreak House.”

In 1988, Benson and Emmes received a Tony Award for Outstanding Resident Professional Theater. In 2008, they were recognized with the Margo Jones Award for their lifetime commitment to theatrical excellence and for fostering American playwriting.

As Emmes sees it, a new artistic director will be someone who shares his and Benson’s values: a person who gives literature great importance and “someone who shares the artistic importance of theater and understands that he or she will make future decisions based upon what’s happening in the world at the time, because you want theater to always be relevant and reflective of what’s happening, and that’s a way of helping to understand what’s happening to us as a people, as a country.”

The repertory’s board of trustees will form a search committee to look for Emmes and Benson’s successor.

The repertory will have its pick of the most talented people in the theater world to take Emmes and Benson’s place, said Wylie Aitken, president of South Coast Repertory’s board of trustees.

“Because they’ve created one of the finest theaters in America, we’re going to be able to draw the finest talent to this job,” Aitken said. “It will allow us to select a new artistic creative director who will certainly be one of the finest in America.”