Way Off Broadway Playhouse

In a thoughtful and entertaining show at the Way Off Broadway Playhouse, Mark Turnbull offers the bittersweet reflections of a genuine artist who should have become rich and famous but didn't. Poet, songwriter, singer and jazz guitarist--a modern troubadour of sorts--he started out in a blaze of glory. If early promise meant anything, Turnbull was destined for big things.

"Cheaters," a talky comedy about infidelity, is not exactly a play for the '90s--1960 would be more like it. The play is so dated it's almost quaint, in an uneven production at the Way Off Broadway Playhouse. Michael Jacobs' play, a conventional homage to middle-aged wife swappers, is tame even by current, TV sitcom standards. The plot is an arabesque of cheatin' hearts. Two married couples are unaware that they are having congress with each other's spouses.

The theme of Way Off Broadway's Christmas play, "Greetings," is a familiar one: Thanks to the intervention of a knowing and superior spirit, a troubled humanity recognizes the triumphant joy of living, where once it saw only empty failure. Such tried-and-true holiday classics as "A Christmas Carol" and "It's a Wonderful Life" have generated plenty of warm tears and cold cash with this formula. Playwright Tom Dudzick may be bound for a similar harvest: On Dec.

It's a touchy subject, but a weekend visit to Way Off Broadway Playhouse, the aptly named theater-amid-the-warehouses, compels us to bring it up. Life for theater artists in Orange County can be a real blessing, and not in the sense of the life behind "the Orange Curtain" that so many Angelenos perceive. One person's isolation can be another person's safe harbor, a place to get one's bearings away from the high-risk artistic battlegrounds.

The Yuppie Years seem to be fading into the sunset. "For Rent" signs plaster the fronts of the apartment building they bought. Their "in" eateries are slowly diminishing. Some of them have even hit the streets, like May Logan in Richard Greenberg's "Eastern Standard," at Way Off Broadway Playhouse. May (Jan Tiehen) is not a disenfranchised yuppie, though.

The Commie menace marches on--if not in reality, at least in "Red Scare on Sunset." Kitschmeister Charles Busch spares no effort to parody Hollywood cliches in his 1991 spoof of movieland pinkos during the early '50s. Now on view at the Way Off Broadway Playhouse in Santa Ana, "Red Scare" takes us back before the Reagan revolution to the McCarthy period and shows the Evil Empire spreading its poison propaganda through dread Stanislavski method actors and other nefarious agents.

Richard Dresser's "Better Days" is about economic hardship, the homeless, hunger, looting, arson and assorted other cheery subjects. Now, is this a play for the holidays or what? You bet, says Tony Reverditto, founder of the Way Off Broadway Playhouse where "Better Days" opens tonight. Things are so bad in Dresser's twisted comedy that Reverditto, who directed the production, says anyone who shows up just has to feel good about his own life, no matter how grim.

Operations at South Coast Repertory, the largest theater company in Orange County, have been largely unaffected by the rioting in Los Angeles, an SCR spokesman said Friday, adding that the theater's two current shows are expected to continue this weekend as scheduled. "Our main concern was whether the actors who live in the city would be able to get down here with the curfew on," said spokesman Cristofer Gross. "So we've decided to put them up around here overnight."

W. Stuart McDowell's arrival this week at the Grove Shakespeare Festival to take the reins as artistic director was a big event, but not the only recent managerial development there. McDowell said Tuesday that Grove managing director Barbara G. Hammerman, until now a part-time employee of the theater, became a full-time staffer on April 1, when his own appointment took effect.

Shakespeare Orange County, a recently formed professional troupe at Chapman University in Orange, raised $2,850 on Sunday at a lecture it sponsored by Charles Vere, Earl of Burford, who claims that his ancestor is the real author of Shakespeare's plays. SOC artistic director Thomas F.