Investing in the Future of the Theater : Center Theatre Group mentoring program helps to build a solid writing pool for tomorrow’s stage.

Kelly Stuart, like many writers, has a certain routine.

She rises early, checks husband and children, then heads for the neighborhood Winchell’s. Not necessarily for the doughnuts, but for a certain form of isolation and creative solitude. And for three hours of writing in longhand one of the two plays she budgets herself to write each year.

Three hours later she’s home and submitting her Winchell’s longhand to her computer. The rest of the day belongs to family.

The routine repeats daily.

She says she is determined to see her plays staged, not necessarily in the Equity-waiver small houses where she has had some work produced, but on a main stage.

A major theater.

The Taper just might do.

In one sense, she already is at the Taper, each week at that theater’s annex building just north of the Music Center where the experimental, year-old CTG Mentors Playwrights Project meets, another example of how mentoring is being used increasingly in various phases of entertainment and the arts.

Like other mentoring projects, the Center Theatre Group’s program is designed to put relatively inexperienced but promising writers in contact with more experienced professionals, to learn more about their art, to interact with others in the theater, to come in from the cold of their often self-imposed literary gulags. It is one of many projects that CTG has developed in the nurturing of new talent in the 25 years it has been at the Music Center.

On another level, the CTG program hopes the mentor program will help develop Los Angeles playwrights. It is an investment in the future of theater, an insurance policy of sorts that pays off in redeemable scripts. One CTG official prefers calling it the writing pool of the future.

The Los Angeles playwright faces constant professional and emotional turmoil. There are the nearby temptations of television with its heightened appetite for the spoken word. There are the movies with the constant temptation of large paydays while being writer to the stars. And there is the undertow belief that you’re really not a playwright until you get your work on a New York stage.

Mentoring might calm that turmoil.

The CTG program started early last year with 16 participants selected by a script-reading jury evaluating more than 125 submissions.

Oskar Eustis, the Taper’s resident director and director of play development, says the mentor program has only two major requirements:

* The writer has to be from Los Angeles.

* The writer has to be in the early stages of a playwriting career. Age or seniority doesn’t matter. Related professional or work experience doesn’t matter, either.

“It becomes an entry level for a relationship with the Taper,” Eustis says.

Unlike mentor programs in television and movies, this program is not always one-on-one. It is more a many-on-one experience with the participants meeting each week with a faculty that is constantly changing.

When Irene Fornes, the Cuban-born writer, was a CTG mentor, the workload intensified, with the writers working in groups several times each week. “She didn’t use criticism,” Kelly Stuart says of Fornes, “so much as opening us up creatively.”

One tutor had them read extensively into the autobiographies of theater people.

Another lectured on political theater.

One had the writers read their scripts and then the group would respond critically.

Another mentor preferred to meet individually with the participants to go over their scripts.

Howard Stein, the retired dean of the Columbia University theater department, lectured on the writing process, rewriting and focusing.

Playwright Eduardo Machado conducted writing exercises similar to the Stanislavsky method actors endure.

Writers in the program receive a $1,000 stipend, the mentors a salary during their stay, which lasts at least six months. The budget is $60,000, one that survived during recent recession-induced cutbacks.

The program’s greatest value is in talent developed and stagings for the future.

Two plays written by its participants are being considered for the Taper main stage.

In June, readings of the plays by the current participants will be held by Taper, Too at the John Anson Ford Theatre.

Also next month, Eustis and staff will evaluate the mentor program and possibly reshape it when it starts again in the fall.

Meanwhile, scripts are in transit. It’s a plus Stuart says she didn’t expect when she entered the program. “It really surprised me that the mentors would take the trouble of sending our scripts to other theaters. Los Angeles is often considered regional theater cut off from elsewhere. But one of the mentors recommended my work to nine theaters. That’s hard to beat. And they all responded.”

She sees another gain. “The writers felt bonded. Everyone’s work is so different yet we learned from each other. Sometimes there were a lot of arguments and discussions. Things came up about our work that we never might have considered. We may have argued but our meetings often went outside of the sessions into personal talks. We got to know each other.”

When Eustis came to CTG two years ago from San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, he was charged with developing a commissioning program for new works. His assignment spread onto three tiers--a mentor program, a straight commissioning of certain writers for new plays, and a large-scale commission for a major writer whose work had not appeared at the Taper.

But first of these would be the mentors.