SCR Show Must Go On Despite Tony Thrill

Martin Benson was sitting behind his desk Friday in Costa Mesa, but it was not quite business as usual. “You can pull me down from the ceiling by my ankles,” he said.

Benson had learned the day before that South Coast Repertory, which he co-founded with David Emmes 24 years ago in a converted five-and-dime store, had won a Tony Award as the best regional theater company in the nation.

“You dream about this stuff,” the artistic director said. “But when it happens, it hits you totally by surprise.”

When he took the Thursday afternoon phone call from the Tony Award committee in New York, Benson recounted, he thought it was a technical services company trying to sell him electrical duct tape (“I used to do tech stuff backstage.”). After realizing that the most prestigious award in the theater community was being offered, he interrupted a meeting Emmes was having at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

“I phoned over there and told him I was going to make a prediction that we were going to be in New York on June 5,” Benson recounted. “He said, ‘What are you talking about?’ I said, ‘Accepting the Tony Award,’ ” and making speeches--a la Oscar--on national television.

For all the excitement, there were no signs of the previous night’s champagne toasts. No corks in the corners. No pink elephants floating in the halls.

Benson was getting ready for a run-through of “Dog Logic,” which he is directing. Dramaturge Jerry Patch had just found a sound cue for the play, which was to open that night on the Second Stage. Emmes, who is SCR’s producing artistic director, was in a marketing meeting. Guest director David Chambers was meeting with a designer about “Golden Girl,” an upcoming Mainstage production.

“You find yourself thinking back to where you were 20 years ago,” said Patch, who joined the company in 1967, “and it makes you realize how far you’ve come. It’s sort of being stamped ‘USDA Choice.’ ”

The Tony will look good in a trophy case, but will it do anything practical for SCR? Or is it just a high-toned “feel-good” award?

“I expect we’ll get faster looks at scripts,” Patch said. “A very big agent who shall remain nameless called me about one the other day. I was interested. But she didn’t know who we were. I expect she will now.”

At the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago, which won a regional theater Tony Award in 1985, development director Judith Simons said, “We milk it for all it’s worth.” That means mentioning it at every fund-raiser, she said, bannering it in the company literature, highlighting it in all applications for corporate or foundation grants.

“Like any Tony Award, it is a recognition of tremendous accomplishment,” said Harvey Sabinson, executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers, which ratifies the award on the recommendation of the American Theatre Critics Assn. “Contributors to that theater have to be damned impressed by that award and conceivably they will increase their support. I would say that is its major importance.”

Nevertheless, Bill Eaton of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, which won a regional Tony in 1984, noted that the award did not have an overnight impact in financial terms. More important, he said, was “the instant credibility” it conferred.

Paul Lubin, artistic director of the Circle-in-the-Square in New York, which shared the first regional Tony in 1976 with the Arena Stage in Washington, agreed with Eaton. “You can’t quantify it,” he said. “You still have to advertise in the paper. But it didn’t hurt. We’re still here.”

Adrian Hall, artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., which won a Tony in 1984, believes SCR’s recognition augurs an artistic explosion for “the whole California movement” of nonprofit theaters similar to the Chicago theatrical renaissance of the early 1980s.

But he found it a wonderful irony that the Tony Award, which is the quintessential New York symbol of success in the commercial theater, has had to recognize the excellence of such far-flung regional theaters such as South Coast Repertory.

“These Tonys come from your Nederlanders and your Shuberts,” Hall said, referring to the producers’ league. “Sometimes I think they wouldn’t even be giving out these (regional) awards if Broadway wasn’t in such bad artistic shape.”

Times staff writer Herman Wong contributed to this story.