FOR DOUGLAS THEATRE’S FIRST SEASON, SIX FIRST STAGINGS

A season of six premieres, including works by Charles L. Mee, Jon Robin Baitz and Charlayne Woodard, will open the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Center Theatre Group’s new Culver City venue carved out of the old Culver Theater and devoted to the development of new plays.

The six 2004-05 productions are “all capable of a berth at the Mark Taper Forum” -- Center Theatre Group’s flagship venue in the downtown L.A. Music Center -- artistic director-producer Gordon Davidson said. “But they’re in an early stage of development.” Budgets for Douglas productions will be more restricted than those at the bigger Taper.

Five of the six plays are by Los Angeles writers. The only exception is the opener, “A Perfect Wedding” (Nov. 7-28), by Mee. Davidson, who will retire from the Center Theatre Group helm at the end of the year, will stage this latest comedy from the Brooklyn-based author of “Big Love,” “Wintertime” and “The Berlin Circle.”

Davidson said Mee’s play, set in a mystical forest in the present day, makes a nod toward “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Referring to his upcoming career change, he added, “Maybe that’s what I’m doing: going into the woods and finding freedom.”

Mee’s play was commissioned by the Taper and developed in the theater’s 2003 New Work Festival.

Baitz (“The Substance of Fire,” “Three Hotels”), a familiar Taper playwright, is writing the second production, “The Paris Letter” (Dec. 12-Jan. 2), about a Wall Street mogul whose attempt to stay in the sexual closet begins to crumble along with his career.

Nancy Keystone’s “Apollo -- Part 1: Lebensraum” (April 10-May 1) follows the careers of space scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph from Nazi Germany to the U.S. through text, image, movement and music. Keystone’s Critical Mass Performance Group, a collaborator on “Apollo,” is best known in L.A. for “The Akhmatova Project” in 2000.

Chay Yew’s “A Distant Shore” (May 22-June 12) is set in a small Southeast Asian country in both the early ‘20s and the present day. Yew directs the Taper’s Asian Theatre Workshop and adapted “The House of Bernarda Alba” for the Taper in 2002.

Two kid-friendly productions are also being offered as subscription options. Woodard, best known as a monologuist (“Neat,” “In Real Life”), has written “Flight” (Jan. 22-Feb. 13), a slavery-era story intended for theatergoers who are at least 10. Unlike her previous Taper shows, “Flight” won’t feature Woodard as an actor.

“The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip” (March 5-19) is aiming at an even younger audience -- 6 and up. Based on a book by George Saunders about goat farmers whose animals are threatened by shrieking orange creatures called gappers, the production is a musical with a score by David O and Doug Cooney. It will also tour to schools.

The possibility of opening the Douglas with the same controversial play that had opened the Taper in 1967, “The Devils,” had crossed Davidson’s mind, he said, and a number of plays that would have some relation to current events crossed his desk as candidates for the opening slot. But he ultimately decided on Mee’s play because he wanted something more “celebratory, about the nature of freedom.”