Laguna Playhouse may not have a managing director or permanent artistic director at the moment, but it does have an in-house star.
Though not a formalized role, comedian and actress Rita Rudner has become the theater’s most recognizable face across the last decade.
From performing her one-woman comedy shows — most recently on New Year’s Eve — to starring and writing world premieres plays — the newest, “Staged,” begins Wednesday, Jan. 25 — Rudner and her husband, director Martin Bergman, find the century-old theater, just up PCH from their longtime Monarch Beach home, their venue of choice.
During a recent remote interview, the duo effortlessly finished each other’s sentences while talking about their relationship with the theater and the upcoming “Staged.”
They were joined by college-age daughter Molly, helpfully honchoing the technical mysteries of Zoom, as well as Betsy, an adopted rescue pup with quite the backstory from Rudner: “on the streets”; “starving”; “broken leg”; “saved by The Little Red Dog, a Laguna Beach rescue organization.”
The new comedy exists in large part because of Rudner and Bergman’s affection for Laguna Playhouse.
“It’s my favorite,” Rudner says. “I get to work with all of my friends, my husband, and, after all, it’s in my neighborhood.”
“We love the current administrative group,” Bergman adds. “They (management) and audiences usually seem very receptive to what we’re doing.”
An example of the friendly relationship in action was seen in early March 2020 (cue ominous background music) when Rudner jumped in as a save-the-day casting substitute for Melanie Griffith in what turned out to be the pandemically abbreviated mounting of Neil Simon’s “Barefoot in the Park.”
During the next two years of social shutdown, Rudner wrote a memoir, “My Life in Dog Years” (“Martin helped me because he is smart and knows about grammar and punctuation”), plus, she notes, “like others we did 47 jigsaw puzzles.”
Early last year, with signs emerging that COVID-19’s grip on live entertainment might finally be easing, a creative opportunity emerged.
“The Playhouse reached out and basically asked if we had anything we’d like to do,” Bergman says.
It was a logical ask: the duo has an established track record writing and staging for the theater. Most recently was 2018’s “Two’s a Crowd,” the self-described “comedy musical” that then moved to New York, with Rudner playing a lead in both productions.
“Staged” plumbs the inner workings of a failed show business marriage that spectacularly blew apart on-stage and what happens, 20 years later, when the principals reconvene to try and work with each other again.
From Rudner and Bergman’s long time working and socializing in Hollywood, an immediate question: is the story based on anybody we’d know?
“We have known many couples who have not lasted,” says Bergman. “We are a strange case because we have been married (in 1988) for decades now.”
Rudner jumps in: “… I think Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton might be the most famous version of this.”
Hollywood royalty past, the two Liz-and-Dick marital meltdowns of the ‘70s remain the Adam and Eve of Hollywood tabloid togetherness wreckage, looming above Brangelina or Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, debacles of more recent times.
“Rita has a joke,” Bergman says. “ ‘A Hollywood marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.’”
The couple’s process for this and other movies and plays they’re written together during the past 35 years is equal parts talk and type, and repeat.
“We have a two-sided desk, so I sit on one side, him the other. Or while we’re walking on the beach, we’re constantly figuring out what we like, what works,” says Rudner.
The lines-go-in-and-lines-go-out process continues through rehearsals now happening in Laguna Beach.
“I’d say the script we have now, 75-80% will be what people see,” Bergman says, who is now in his hands-on directing role. “Rehearsal is so key, the chance to get to see and hear what things are working, what aren’t, how the timing of dialogue is really falling.”
“The 48th jigsaw puzzle?” he muses.
“Even up to previews, too, when the audience is the only judge,” Rudner says.
“I always say an audience doesn’t get together and decide how they’re going to react. (An audience) is the most honest response you can ever get.”
Another facet of the play is the kind of observational asides about life that course through Rudner’s comedy routines.
A one-liner example in “Staged” is the demonic current-life specter of QR codes as substitutes for paper menus in restaurants.
“That was one of Rita’s,” says Bergman and his wife takes over, a mixture of mock alarm with a trace of real outrage on her face.
“I was in Honolulu doing this guest star thing for the reboot of ‘Magnum P.I.’ I sat down for lunch, but no printed menu, they told me to scan the thing and then download the app and … I gave up! I got up and left and got something pre-made at the drugstore downstairs in the hotel.
“I didn’t know that there was a possibility now that I could fail lunch!”
Happily, the twosome is finding things going much better with the show.
“We have fun every day,” says Rudner. “And at this stage in both of our lives, it’s for things that are fun.
“I’ve worked hard enough where I could say, ‘No, I don’t wanna do that.’
“And yes, I do wanna do this.”
‘Staged’
Where: Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach
When: Jan. 25-Feb. 12. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 5:30 p.m. Sundays. Additional performances on at 2 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26 and 7:30 p.m. Feb. 7. There will be no performance on Sunday, Feb. 12 at 5:30 p.m.
Tickets: $50-$75
Information: 949-497-2787; lagunaplayhouse.com
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