Something ‘Old,’ Something New?

Star turns by Debbie Allen and Frank Langella and the West Coast premiere of the off-Broadway hit “Old Wicked Songs” will be among the offerings of the Geffen Playhouse’s second subscription season, which was announced Monday by producing director Gilbert Cates.

“Old Wicked Songs” will open the season with an Oct. 8-Nov. 2 run. Jon Marans’ tale about a frustrated American piano prodigy who goes to Vienna to study with an elderly teacher will be staged by its original director, Seth Barrish.

“Peter and Wendy,” Lee Breuer’s adaptation of the Peter Pan story for the experimental New York troupe Mabou Mines, will not be part of the subscription package but will be offered at a discount to subscribers during its Dec. 4-28 engagement. Seen earlier this year in New York, it features actress Karen Kandel performing many roles, along with a troupe of white-clad puppeteers who manipulate Japanese bunraku puppets, accompanied by a Celtic score written and performed by violinist Johnny Cunningham. Breuer, co-founder of the New York-based Mabou Mines and a graduate of UCLA (which owns the Geffen), last week won one of the 1997 MacArthur Fellowships--the so-called genius grants.

Allen will star as Harriet Tubman, the famous runaway slave and abolitionist activist, in the solo show “Harriet’s Return,” by Karen Jones Meadows, in a Feb. 4-March 1 run. Allen has worked with Cates before--as choreographer on five Academy Awards shows that he produced. The show was produced in 1995 at the Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey, but has since been revised; this will be an entirely new production.

Langella will play the Captain in August Strindberg’s “The Father,” as adapted by Richard Nelson, April 8-May 3. Langella performed in this version of the stormy marital drama on Broadway last year, and the same director, Clifford Williams, will stage it again.

A fifth, yet-to-be-announced show will conclude the season, June 3-28.

Cates said the final play will be something the theater produces instead of imports; he plans to repeat a pattern of producing two and importing two that he believes worked last season. Currently contending for that last slot are a classic and a never-produced play.

Eventually Cates hopes a 99-seat theater will be erected above the east wing of the main stage, as part of a $5-million renovation that might begin in about two years. A second space would enable him to produce more new and experimental works, he said. In the meantime, his play development director, Michael McLain, is reading a lot of new plays. And “Harriet’s Return” will be like a new play for him, he said, because he didn’t see its earlier production.

The first season’s subscriptions rose to 9,500--approximately 50% of the available seats. Total attendance averaged around 70% of capacity. “Love! Valour! Compassion!” was the biggest hit.