Theaterfest Director Puts His Energy Where His Heart Is

SANTA MARIA, Calif. — In a 1971 production of “Hamlet,” Jack Shouse had only four days to rehearse his role of Guildenstern. On opening night, he went onstage with the first letter of each of his lines written on his hand for easy reference.

Nevertheless, this “Hamlet” turned out to be a seminal event--the first time that Santa Maria’s Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts (PCPA) ventured into Solvang, now the second home of the annual PCPA Theaterfest.

Seventeen years later, Shouse, 43, is now in his third season as the artistic director of the year-round PCPA and its summer Theaterfest. Rehearsal opportunities have changed in the interim.

Shouse rehearsed “Sweeney Todd,” which he’s directing this summer, for 130 hours. It opened in Santa Maria last weekend, and on Friday it opens in Solvang.

Long ago, the PCPA became Central California’s most significant theatrical enterprise. This year its budget is $2.4 million. Its summer repertory includes 137 performances of six shows: “Sweeney Todd,” “It’s a Bird . . . It’s a Plane . . . It’s Superman,” “The Tempest,” “On the Verge, or the Geography of Yearning,” “Pump Boys and Dinettes” and “Of Mice and Men.”

But the growth of PCPA has not been without stress. In 1983, PCPA founder Donovan Marley abruptly left to take over the Denver Center Theatre Company. Another old PCPA hand, Laird Williamson, succeeded him reluctantly for a year. Then an outsider, Vincent Dowling, took over and lasted little more than one stormy season, before being replaced by Shouse.

When Dowling left, he said the administrators of Allan Hancock College--the community college that houses the year-round operations of PCPA and provides a big chunk of its income--saw PCPA as a conservatory with a professional theater attached, while he saw it as a professional theater with attached conservatory.

How does Shouse see it?

“As a unique hybrid,” he replied. Neither the conservatory nor the theater takes precedence over the other? “That’s right.”

Still, as he discussed a building proposed for the lawn just south of the PCPA’S Marian Theatre in Santa Maria (pending the passage of a state bond measure in November), Shouse emphasized that it will be “a new primary teaching space.” Yes, it will include a “black box” theater that will provide “the opportunity to work on pieces that are new, untried, unproven, controversial.” But “every space we use, except Solvang, is a teaching space,” he added.

If the new building becomes a regular source of new plays, it would be an important addition. No new plays are in the Theaterfest repertory this season. Shouse said this isn’t a policy: “I just couldn’t find one this summer that made me say, ‘We’ve got to do this.’ ”

And not quite as many old plays are in the repertory this summer either. The number of simultaneous Theaterfest productions has dropped from a high of nine in 1985, to six this summer. “People were literally working morning, noon, and into the wee hours of the night” when eight or nine plays were on at once, said Shouse. “It was physically problematic for people. Now we’re working toward quality as opposed to quantity.”

Aside from the possibility of the new facility in Santa Maria, it appears that the Theaterfest is not about to grow any bigger. Shouse has no plans to export any of his productions, and declined to participate when last summer’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was transplanted to the Westwood Playhouse under private auspices.

Ambitious plans to add new theaters in Solvang, announced in 1979, have all but disappeared.

“There is no reason why Solvang can’t be like Ashland (Oregon, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), in the sense of support from the business community,” Shouse said. “I just wish the people (in Solvang) felt the same way. When you throw stones in the water, sometimes the ripples are felt more on the edge than they are close to the center.”

In PCPA’s case, this means that Shouse sometimes feels that theatrical folk from elsewhere appreciate the Theaterfest more than Solvang itself does.

Nevertheless, the 717 seats in tourist-oriented Solvang are generally filled more than the 448 seats in Santa Maria, which recently suffered the effects of layoffs at nearby Vandenberg Air Force Base and in the oil industry.

Despite such setbacks, Shouse said he has never felt the sort of pressures that have recently afflicted the Grove Theater Company in Garden Grove, where community leaders have attacked programming as too high-brow.

“If you let people know what they can expect,” he said, “there is an audience for just about everything. Remember that a portion of this audience has been seeing live theater with more frequency than most people in metropolitan areas.

“Some of my best friends are real cowboys,” he added. “They’ll love a ‘Pump Boys,’ but they also found ‘Midsummer’ a delightful evening.”

Shouse himself is from Central California, the son of farmers who immigrated from Oklahoma to the San Joaquin Valley. He grew up near the town of Strathmore, but he accompanied his father on monthly business trips to Los Angeles, where he was introduced to live theater. “I saw all of the shows at the old Biltmore,” he recalled. “When I was in the first grade, I did a set design for an earthquake scene in India.”

It was in design that Shouse got his master’s degree from San Francisco State, following undergraduate work at Cal State Fresno. Soon thereafter, in 1968, he took an acting job at PCPA. He’s been there ever since.

“I have literally done it all,” he said. “I know that the kid who makes Sweeney’s razors is as important as the director--and (the students) hear that from me.”

Shouse interviewed more than 600 actors who wanted to be at PCPA this summer, including 100 professionals. “There are still all these young people who would kill or die to do theater,” he said. “And after a summer here, they know if they want to do this (for a living).”

But Shouse doesn’t claim that PCPA gives its students a realistic slice of life in the theater. “This is an oasis,” he said. “The stereotypical pressures of the commercial theater world and of education-only institutions are not pressures here. The only pressure here is that you must be absolutely committed to what you’re doing.”