SCR Commissioned Pair of Pulitzer Drama Finalists

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa scored big in the 1998 Pulitzer Prizes, despite not coming up with a winner.

Two plays commissioned by Orange County’s professional resident theater company and produced there last season--Amy Freed’s “Freedomland” and Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain”--were named as two of the three finalists for the Pulitzer in drama.

“It’s as close as you can get without having to buy new clothes,” Greenberg, 39, said Wednesday from his Manhattan home. “But I was really pleased.”

The drama jury recommended the finalists to the Pulitzer Board, without indicating any preference for one over the others. The prize went to Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive,” which originated at the Vineyard Theater in New York.

“How about that?” SCR producing artistic director David Emmes said Wednesday. “We knew Richard and Amy were both nominated, but the feeling we had was that Paula Vogel’s number would come up.

“Our expectation was that she would get it,” he added, “because she not only had a very successful off-Broadway play but she’s been toiling away in the vineyards for a long time--not that Richard hasn’t.

“The great and pleasant surprise is that we had two finalists and that Amy, who hasn’t been at it as long as they have, was among them,” Emmes said.

Freed, 40, said from San Francisco that she was in “a state of disbelief” when SCR called her. “I was stunned and immediately exultant,” she said. “South Coast has changed my life.”

SCR previously had a Pulitzer finalist in 1997 with Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories,” when the Pulitzer board elected not to give a drama prize, and in 1992 with his “Sight Unseen.”

Earlier this season, Greenberg’s play won the Ted Schmitt Award for best new play produced in Los Angeles and Orange counties. It is the top writing prize given by the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle. Subsequently, “Three Days of Rain” was staged in New York by the Manhattan Theatre Club in a somewhat rewritten version.

*

Greenberg, 39, gained national prominence in 1988 with “Eastern Standard,” a satirical comedy that premiered at Seattle Repertory and went to Broadway. The playwright is an SCR favorite who has had three other premieres in Costa Mesa: “The Extra Man” (1991), “Night and Her Stars” (1994) and his adaptation of Marivaux’s “The Triumph of Love” (1997). He will have another with his latest play, “Hurrah at Last,” when it opens at SCR in June.

Freed, who had only two full-length plays produced before “Freedomland,” is no stranger to prizes, either. Her second play, “The Psychic Life of Savages” (1995), won the New York Arts Club’s nationally prestigious $10,000 Joseph Kesselring Award and the Washington Theatre Society’s Charles MacArthur Award for outstanding new play.