By the time you read this, San Diego’s Common Ground Theatre will have opened its 2006-07 season at downtown’s New World Stage with a play called “Four Queens ” No Trump,” a piece about a group of women who meet every Friday to play cards. Each of the girls represents a queen from the deck, and each has a chance to reminisce on the hands they were dealt in life. The show closes Oct. 15, giving way to Ion Theatre’s “The Glass Menagerie,” Tennessee Williams’ account of a crumbling St. Louis Family.
The plays couldn’t be more disparate in their construction and intent, but the element that unites them also weighs in the changing shape of the city’s core and the choices that propel it. In a short four months, New World Stage has become a de facto anchor in the reflection of those choices. Granted, the theater seats only 74, but it compensates through routinely large crowds. Near-capacity patronage marked a recent second-weekend performance of The Collective’s “Edward II” by Christopher Marlowe, the troupe’s infancy and the play’s relative obscurity notwithstanding. And Ion’s “All in the Timing,” a six-skit David Ives work largely unheralded beyond its award-winning run off-Broadway, enjoyed a similar response this summer.
“We’re more than shocked,” said Claudio Raygoza, Ion Theatre’s executive artistic director. “We haven’t had to go to many groups looking for a space. People have been coming to us, wondering when [the stage] is available.”
Glenn Paris, Ion’s producing artistic director, added that the theater enjoys community support in less conspicuous ways. “All the seats were donated,” he noted, “and so many people seemed willing to volunteer their time right away. There were extraordinary donations and volunteers.”
Raygoza and Paris, seasoned theater professionals who between them have spent six years in San Diego, said it’s too early to cite or speculate on the venue’s annual budget.
New World Stage, at 917 Ninth Ave., sits in a 3,600-square-foot building erected in 1948. The latest prior occupant was a landscape architecture firm, which left the venue about 18 months ago. High ceilings add to the space’s bulky feel; a gigantic rear widow overlooks considerable storage, office and party capacity. A ramshackle chain-link fence abuts the nondescript front patio “” but like the interior, this area brims with possibilities for design.
That potential, of course, is no better than the turnouts that fund it. And with downtown’s recent feverish condominium development, there’s always the chance those audiences could dematerialize with one swipe of the wrecking ball. But Raygoza sees a different side to the equation “” the condo community’s swelling numbers, he said, could work to the theater’s benefit.
“The developers aren’t selling to a residency base,” Raygoza said. “They’re selling a lifestyle. The people who buy condos aren’t interested in a yard and a driveway and all those things. They want the convenience and prestige of [a downtown address].
“And the developers can’t sell a downtown lifestyle if they don’t have anything in the downtown.”
“You have to take the chance and do what you have to do,” Paris added. “We think downtown needed more cultural diversity than the [San Diego] Rep[ertory Theatre] and the ballpark and the symphony.” The Gaslamp Quarter, he said, is among San Diego’s most lively attractions “” but like the downtown theaters that have come and gone, the Gaslamp had to start somewhere.
So did the new cultural boom that the downtown renaissance has generated “” and look what’s happened. Higher-end nightclubs hold art exhibits and wine tastings. Sophisticated paintings and drawings find their way onto the funkiest restaurant and coffee shop walls, and they’re often for sale. New condo owners are taking greater care in their choices of decorative art “” as oil painter Eliza Tolley told Downtown News last August, “They don’t want to be selling their department store prints at a garage sale in five years.”
If that attitude translates to a long-term taste for the performing arts, New World Stage will have hit its stride in plenty of time.
More information on the venue is available at newworldstage.org, iontheater.com or 619-374-6894.