By Melonie Magruder
Lookout Staff

January 6, 2012 -- When Mark Twain was informed, more than a hundred years ago, that his obituary had been published in the New York Journal, his reported waggish response was, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Co-Artistic Director of the venerable Santa Monica Playhouse, Chris DeCarlo, might have said the same thing this week when queried about the impending demise of the playhouse, reported in local news sources last month.

“No, we haven’t given up,” DeCarlo replied in queries to the immediate health of the theatre company that launches its 52nd year in the city this month. “But sometimes you need to let people know you need help. So we issued a plea to help get us through the end of the year and the community came through.”

Like arts institutions of all stripes these days, the Santa Monica Playhouse has suffered with the downturn of the economy, despite the company’s careful stewardship of revenue streams. And even though the playhouse’s receipts were slightly better than those of 2010, they still were down 25 to 30 percent, according to DeCarlo.

“For about 40 years, we did actually survive just on box office,” DeCarlo said. “Then we expanded to a conservatory and benefit sponsorship and even renting the theatre out for special events. It’s been tough, but we scraped by.”

The Santa Monica Playhouse is known as much for its program of (youth and adult) actors’ workshops as its constantly rotating calendar of family-oriented and classic theatre fare. But as DeCarlo pointed out, they are also responsible for staging a number of never-before-seen-in-L.A. productions and world premiers.

In February, J-Powers’ (aka John Powers) world premier of “Pentagon Papers” will open. Powers’ dramatization of Daniel Ellsberg’s infamous whistle-blow on the government’s lies about Vietnam should make for some powerful theatre.

It's it's appropriately being staged in the very city where Ellsberg, who had worked at RAND, leaked the papers. The play is representative of the kind of cutting-edge production that first attracted DeCarlo to the playhouse.

“I grew up in Santa Monica and was acting since I was six,” DeCarlo said. “But when I was 16, I saw a production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ and it changed my life.”

Years later, DeCarlo would invite the famed French absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco to present his seminal surreal dramas, “The Lesson” and “The Bald Soprano” in Santa Monica.

“We’ve done a lot of ‘firsts’ in L.A.,” DeCarlo said. “But because we’ve been around so long, people think ‘Oh, they do that kids’ theatre,’ or ‘they do those old plays.’ But you’ll see some great, cutting-edge stuff here all the time. We constantly have to reinvent ourselves.”

For one performance this month (before the production heads to The Montreal Comedy Festival), Kelly Carlin will present a one-woman, multi-media memory trip about her father, the late iconic and iconoclastic comedian George Carlin.

For a limited run this month, Carol Jean Delmar’s Opera Theatre Ink company will present a medley of scenes from some classic English-language theatre titles, including Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” George Bernard Shaw’s “Saint Joan” and Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.”

But the Playhouse also has an eye out for its future audiences. So throughout January, they are offering “Enchanted Fairytale Interactive Holiday Theatre.”

Designed as an adventure for four to 10-year-olds, the Fairytale company members will find out what fables the audiences are familiar with and from there, craft an interactive theatre experience where participants don makeup, create props, improvise scenes and come up with a story to perform. DeCarlo characterized theatre as a way to counteract the limiting effects of the boob tube.

“Television has an adverse effect on people’s capacity to engage in something that takes longer to tell than two sentences,” DeCarlo said. “I tell my students all the time, ‘It takes time! It takes time to develop something people want to watch!’ But if you are patient, and your voice is nurtured, you come to realize your sense of self and community.”

DeCarlo is not breathing easily, though. He said funding was a constant challenge and is still seeking donations and contributions from the community to keep the playhouse thriving.

“There are a lot of arts opportunities in LA and a lot of them are free, which we can’t compete with,” he said. “But good theatre is transcendent. I mean, you can do stuff in theatre that you could never do in real life.”

For production schedules and further information, visit the website www.santamonicaplayhouse.com.