An ‘offbeat gem’ founders in Laguna

If audiences had heeded the critics, the Laguna Playhouse would have prospered with “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” the theater’s first attempt to delve into the experience of a nonwhite immigrant group in America.

Lonnie Carter’s play, closing tonight, depicts the struggles and vitality of five Philippine farm laborers who inhabit a California bunkhouse during the Depression. The Times’ Don Shirley said it packs “a rejuvenating jolt.” Paul Hodgins of the Orange County Register praised it as an “offbeat gem of a comedy” that takes audiences “convincingly inside another culture without making it feel exotic or forced.” But the ticket-buying public shrugged.

Richard Stein, the playhouse’s executive director, wouldn’t give attendance figures but said “Magno Rubio” would fall “substantially short” of what the nonprofit theater had banked on at the box office. That’s despite a one-performance extension of the run tonight, for which a Philippine American cultural group, FilAm Arts, bought half the 420 seats in the house. The production features four of the five actors from the Obie-winning original staging last year by New York City’s Ma-Yi Theater Company.

Stein, who imported the play after being smitten by the Ma-Yi production, blamed not the ethnic subject matter for the disappointing sales but a balky economy that he said has left most of the Laguna Playhouse’s shows over the past year -- and those of many other regional theaters -- short of their box-office marks. He said enthusiastic audience reaction, rather than the show’s inability to draw enough nonsubscribers, was the truest measure of its success. The numbers notwithstanding, he said, the venture made it likelier that the playhouse will program more plays showing less familiar worlds or using unconventional, nonrealistic dramatic devices akin to those deployed in “Magno Rubio.”

-- Mike Boehm