Editorial: Pair created artistic greatness

After a 45-year run, the curtain has come down on one of the greatest acts in Orange County.

Martin Benson and David Emmes, the co-founders of South Coast Repertory, earlier this month announced that they were giving up their main roles at the acclaimed Costa Mesa theater company. They are stepping aside to make room for a new leader who will take on South Coast Repertory’s artistic directorial duties, which Benson and Emmes shared, with great success, all these years.

The duo will linger in the wings, more or less in an emeriti role. After a new director is picked, Benson and Emmes will help their successor find and develop plays, and they’ll continue to direct some of SCR’s productions. Yet we couldn’t let this news of a regime change at South Coast Repertory pass without paying tribute to Benson and Emmes, who are nothing shy of arts pioneers in Orange County.

They’ve left a deep imprint on the community and have put Costa Mesa on the cultural map as a regional arts destination. Through their collective vision and relentless independent spirit in helping to change American theater, Benson and Emmes have built South Coast Repertory from a makeshift company operating on a shoestring budget into a powerhouse in Southern California.

It’s heartening to see that some theater companies can still succeed and make money these days when many famous ones, like the legendary Pasadena Playhouse, struggle to keep the lights on.

Benson and Emmes are credited with being a force behind the “resident theater movement,” which sprang up in the 1960s when a new generation of stage and dramatic arts radicals sought to break Broadway’s grip on American theater. Benson and Emmes founded South Coast Repertory in 1964. In November of that year, the company staged its first production, Moliere’s “Tartuffe,” at Newport Beach’s Ebell Club. The company later rented a two-story marine hardware store on Balboa Peninsula, converting it into a 75-seat proscenium stage. During the company’s lean early years in the ’60s, Benson, Emmes and the others who worked at South Coast Repertory held down day jobs. They worked after-hours at SCR for no pay out of their love for the theater.

Now, Emmes and Benson’s award-winning company calls a three-theater complex in Costa Mesa home and commands an annual budget of $9 million. Not bad for two graduates of San Francisco State University, who started their theater production company out of a station wagon and with a budget of $17.