Stage Director Steven Albrezzi Finds Laughs in SCR’s Back Yard

Director Steven Albrezzi’s fascination for back-yard plays probably arises from a suburban childhood in upstate New York. Whatever the reason, he said, his latest outings seem to form “my back-yard opus.”

At South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, he is directing the world premiere production of Mark Stein’s “At Long Last Leo,” which had its first previews on the Mainstage over the weekend and opens its regular run on Friday. It unfolds in the back yard of title character Leo Beagle’s seriocomic family--”far from Seattle,” as the stage directions put it.

Last summer, at San Jose Repertory, Albrezzi staged a revival of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” which is set in the back yard of the tragic Keller family “on the outskirts of an American town” that Miller does not further identify.

“Back yards are the safest place in our lives as children,” said the stocky, 36-year-old director. “Back yards are what we, as adults, are looking to make of the world. After growing up in these secure, ideal surroundings, we try to reconcile the difference between them and the world.”

In “All My Sons”--a tragedy about a son whose father puts business before moral responsibility--such a reconciliation turns out to be impossible. Things are considerably brighter in “At Long Last Leo,” a comedy of ideas revolving around Leo’s effort to change the world with a 638-page manifesto he has written.

Miller and Stein unquestionably hail from different parts of the dramatic spectrum, but the settings of their two plays--the psychic distance between them notwithstanding--are remarkably similar for what they represent. Both typify homey ambiance, neighborly spirit, cherished warmth. Both are metaphors for the American myth--a bucolic dream of innocence that is largely fading (if not already gone) from reality.

As several stagehands put finishing touches to the set of “At Long Last Leo” last week, Albrezzi stood at the rear of the theater admiring the storybook charm of Cliff Faulkner’s scenic design.

“I wanted it to have the composition of a child’s drawing because there is such simplicity and childlike wonder in the play,” he said, gazing at a grassy terrain with a tree, a swing, a flagstone path, a picnic table and a weathered fence, all gently dominated by a two-thirds scale, ‘40s house of pale yellow clapboard.

At the same time, Albrezzi added, Faulkner was asked to create a set that did not stint on highly realistic details. The director showed off the results with a tour of the house interior. The doors and windows work. Even walls that the audience will not see have been covered with wallpaper.

“I’m going to take out a mortgage on this house and have it moved to Van Nuys,” he quipped, especially pleased that the grass in the yard feels so good you can almost smell it. The back-yard setting for “All My Sons” called for a metamorphosis from the optimism of a Norman Rockwell illustration to the disenfranchised feeling of an Edward Hopper painting, Albrezzi said.

With the set for “Leo,” the director and Faulkner wanted something as evocative as “a child’s iconograph.” They took their starting point from Grant Wood, the painter best known for “American Gothic” but steered clear of his dourness.

“After all,” said Albrezzi, “this play deals with hope as a theme--the delicate filament of hope in the world today and just how vulnerable that filament is. I think Mark has taken a world of ideas and dramatized it in a funny, sweet way without hitting you over the head.”

This is not the first Stein play that Albrezzi has directed. He and the playwright began working together in 1981 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where Albrezzi staged Stein’s “Groves of Academe” for the Humana New American Play Festival.

The play, about a thorny teacher-student relationship, won the theater’s highly regarded Heideman Award (based on a national one-act play contest) and gained Stein his first widespread recognition.

“We’d never met until the opening night,” Albrezzi said. “ ‘Groves of Academe’ was a catalyst for both of our careers.”

Thus launched, their collaboration has been fairly steady ever since.

In 1983, Albrezzi directed Stein’s “Goodbye Moscow”--about a Soviet emigre family trying to adjust to life in America--at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia. The following year they did “Smoke,” an abstract work, at People’s Light and Theatre Company in Malvern, Pa. Also in 1984, they restaged “Groves of Academe” at New Playwrights’ Theatre in Washington (where Stein lives) along with Stein’s one-act comedy “The Library of Congress Talent Show.”

Albrezzi, who looks like a professor on sabbatical in his gray sweat shirt and well-trimmed beard, said that in college he wanted to be a playwright but found he had better luck as an actor--at first.

“I went to New York City and got Equity jobs,” he said. “The trouble was I discovered I was a pretty mediocre actor.”

Albrezzi developed an off-Broadway play called “Baseball Wives,” which displayed his talent for directing and drew him to the attention of the Louisville theater. Its artistic director, Jon Jory, hired him to stage productions there as well as for a series of international tours during the early ‘80s.

“He simply fed my career,” Albrezzi said. “There are a handful of regional theaters in this country that do that sort of thing. Louisville is one of them. So is South Coast.”

Albrezzi directed Michael Frayn’s “Benefactors” on SCR’s Second Stage last season, which won a Drama-log Award for ensemble performance.

A year-and-a-half ago, after living in Manhattan for a decade, he moved to Hollywood with playwright Trish Johnson, his wife. “We took a good look at our lives and saw that the biological clock was ticking away,” he said. “We wanted a child and a place to raise it. Our fourth-floor walk-up in the pantry of Hell’s Kitchen just didn’t seem right for that kind of thing.”

Today, they have a 13-month-old daughter, Francesca, and a house in Van Nuys. If nothing else, he said, she will have a back yard to grow up in.

In the meantime, Albrezzi and Stein are maintaining their connections back East. When “At Long Last Leo” ends its scheduled 5-week run on the SCR Mainstage, it will get a reading in December at Playwrights Horizons for a possible New York production.