Directing Her Talents to New Plays

Lisa Peterson is a quiet, affable woman who admits, right off the bat, that she’s a bit uncomfortable in the suit she’s worn to accommodate a photo shoot today. To hear her tell it, the hiking boots on her feet are probably closer to who she really is.

Laid-back ways aside though, Peterson, 35, is also one of the fastest-rising directors of her generation. A versatile talent who has worked consistently in several of the country’s best regional theaters during the last decade, she’s staged new works by some of today’s most popular playwrights, including Tony Kushner and Athol Fugard.

Initially, focusing on new plays was a career move. “That is really the way a director in New York can make a name for themselves,” says Peterson, seated in her office at the Mark Taper Forum. “I just struggled my little way up the ladder at various places simultaneously, directing mostly new plays and some literary revivals.”

But Peterson’s emphasis on new plays hasn’t been only a matter of career building. “It’s more exciting to work with living writers than dead ones,” she says. “They’re my favorite collaborator in the theater. I like designers and actors, but I love writers. They fascinate me.”

What’s more, Peterson has figured out how to translate that fascination into a nose for new plays that’s much in demand. A former associate director at the La Jolla Playhouse and currently resident director at the Taper, she returns to the Playhouse on Sunday to open its season with the West Coast premiere of Fugard’s latest play, “Valley Song.”

The play, which is Peterson’s fifth Playhouse staging--and will be staged by Fugard himself at the Taper next year--is a two-actor drama, set in South Africa today, about a “colored” (mixed-race) teenager (Akosua Busia) who aspires to be a singer, her grandfather (Max Wright) and a white author (also played by Wright) who wants to buy their land.

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Raised in Aptos, Calif., near Santa Cruz, Peterson became interested in theater in high school. She was an undergraduate at Yale from 1979 to ‘83, originally with the desire to be an actress.

During those years, however, Peterson was bitten by the directing bug. “I took a class, did a scene, turned the light switch on and off in the back of the room and people laughed,” she says. “It was an immediate passion.”

After Yale, Peterson moved to New York and took an internship in casting at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. Then, for the next seven years, she made her living as a casting director while pursuing directing on the side.

Ensemble Studio Theatre was a good launching pad for other reasons as well. “It turned out to be a place where there were a lot of writers and directors around,” Peterson says. “That was an introduction to the whole world of working on a new play.”

After a couple of years at Ensemble Studio Theatre, Peterson was invited to stage a couple of short pieces in the theater’s annual one-act marathon. She also became a member of the company.

During that period, Peterson spent her summers at the Hanger Theatre in Ithaca, N.Y., where she staged her own adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “The Wave,” with music by David Buckman.

The production was later restaged in Manhattan by the New York Theatre Workshop. “That was the beginning of my relationship with NYTW, which is now my primary theater relationship in New York,” says Peterson, who has staged four plays at the workshop, including her Obie-winning 1991 production of Caryl Churchill’s “Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.”

Peterson also first met Fugard at the workshop. And not long after that, she caught up with the South African playwright in La Jolla. He was there for a staging of his “My Children! My Africa!” and she had gone to talk with the theater about a job.

Peterson became associate director at La Jolla from 1991 to ’94. “I was there as another voice, in terms of what programming we should be doing,” she says. “I also had to lead discussions after plays and put my two cents in in terms of marketing.”

While there, she also directed. Writing about Peterson’s 1994 production of Kushner’s adaptation of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Setzuan,” The Times’ Laurie Winer said Peterson “knows how to keep an audience entertained.”

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Developing new plays is Peterson’s primary focus in her current job at the Taper. “I think of this as a sort of playwrights’ liaison,” she says. “I advocate for new work getting to the mainstage. I work on the New Works Festival. I was involved in season planning and I’ve ended up running the main writers’ group for next year.”

Conveniently, the La Jolla job was a good prelude to Peterson’s two-year half-time position at the Taper, which began a year ago. “Here there are all these programs in place,” she says. “So it’s possible to actually do some of the things we could just talk about at La Jolla in terms of new plays.”

Peterson is also able to pursue her own long-term projects at the Taper. “There are a lot of plays that I’ve been involved with that are about to be done, some of them here maybe, some of them other places,” she says.

“It’s only just started for me . . . that I’ve been working with a writer on a play for over a year and then it will be [staged].”

She’s also learning more about how large theaters operate. “Working inside an institution like this or La Jolla or [New York Theatre Workshop] is a way of studying and trying to understand the place that theater has in this country now,” Peterson says.

“Ultimately, I may want to try running one myself, although I have mixed feelings about that,” she continues. “I don’t want to become an artistic director right away, but I may want to do that 10 years down the road.”

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* “Valley Song,” La Jolla Playhouse, UC San Diego campus, La Jolla. May 19-June 15. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. $19-$36. (619) 550-1010.