Martin Benson, a founder and longtime artistic director of South Coast Repertory, a nationally renowned regional theater in Southern California that won a Tony Award in 1988, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Huntington Beach, Calif. He was 87.
Justin Krumb, his stepson, said the cause was probably a heart attack.
Mr. Benson and David Emmes, friends and former theater students at San Francisco State College (now University), started South Coast Repertory in 1964 and developed it as a home for classic works and newly commissioned plays and musicals. As Orange County’s first professional theater, it filled a void.
“We’ve always been a theater of literature,” Mr. Benson told The New York Times in 1988. “Shaw, Synge, Wilde and new playwrights.”
South Coast’s many world premieres included Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Wit,” Donald Margulies’s “Sight Unseen,” Craig Lucas’s “Prelude to a Kiss” and Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” — all of which went on to Off Broadway and Broadway runs. Sam Shepard’s “True West,” with Ed Harris and John Ashton, made its Southern California premiere in 1981. Ten of Mr. Greenberg’s plays were commissioned by South Coast and had their premieres there.
Mr. Benson directed 119 productions and won seven Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards: three for plays by George Bernard Shaw, whose works he specialized in, and the others for “Wit,” Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” John Millington Synge’s “The Playboy of the Western World” and Sally Nemeth’s “Holy Days.”
Jerry Patch, South Coast’s resident dramaturg, praised Mr. Benson’s intensity as a director, which he said reminded him of men he had known as a teenager who tinkered for hours beneath their cars.
“He brought that same kind of focus,” Mr. Patch said in an interview. “When he was directing a play, that was pretty much all there was in his life — morning, afternoon, evening, rehearsals, all that. He was really monocular.”
Mr. Patch and Mr. Emmes both said that Mr. Benson was a playwright’s director who did not call attention to his work with flourishes but rather was guided by the scripts.
“As a result,” Mr. Emmes said, “his oeuvre of Bernard Shaw was so alive, so dimensional and always so true.”
In her review of Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” in 1991, Sylvie Drake of The Los Angeles Times, who once called Mr. Benson a “Shavian master,” wrote that he “not only catches all the notes, but has assembled a stalwart company of slick and savvy actors that knows just how to pluck them.”
In 2010, Mr. Benson restaged Shaw’s Edwardian comedy “Misalliance,” which he had directed in 1987, using the same impressive set from the earlier production, a grand solarium that plays host to an acrobat, an aviator and a gun-wielding intruder.
“Some people think it’s wordy, but how many plays have an airplane crash and a young man screaming and crying because he doesn’t get his way?” he said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “It’s got Shaw’s brilliant wit and his interesting take on the title — misalliances — the gulf between parents and children, men and woman, rich and poor.”
Martin Edward Benson was born on March 15, 1937, in Oakland, Calif. His father, Martin, who was nicknamed Bull, was an electrician on shipyards during World War II and later worked on the cyclotron at the radiation laboratory at the University California, Berkeley. His mother, Jean (Budge) Benson, was a homemaker whose brother Don Budge was the first tennis player to win the Grand Slam. (Mr. Benson was an avid tennis player up until two years ago.)
In his teenage years, Mr. Benson built and raced dragsters under the name Bill Venom. His skills would prove handy years later when he constructed and painted theater sets, made props and designed costumes.
The South Coast concept came to life in the early 1960s at San Francisco State, where both Mr. Benson and Mr. Emmes had small roles in student plays, giving them time to chat backstage.
“It was the serendipity of the two of us sitting offstage while waiting for our small parts to be called onstage,” Mr. Emmes said. “We talked about the professional resident theater movement” — also referred to as the regional theater movement.
They followed the lead of existing regional theaters like Arena Stage in Washington and Alley Theater in Houston, and that of two San Francisco State teachers, Jules Irving and Herbert Blau, who ran a theater company called the Actor’s Workshop, which was known for its experimentalism.
Mr. Benson graduated from San Francisco State with a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1963. He and Mr. Emmes (who had graduated in 1961 and earned a master’s there in 1962) began their theatrical odyssey that year by staging Arthur Schnitzler’s play “La Ronde” at the Off-Broadway Theater in Long Beach and produced three more plays at the theater the following summer.
Later that year they moved to Newport Beach, where, at a club, they staged Molière’s “Tartuffe” as the first official South Coast production.
In 1965, they converted a marine hardware store into a 75-seat theater, and opened with a production of “Waiting for Godot”; two years later, they added another with 217 seats in a former dime store. (They closed the original location in 1968.) They stayed in Newport Beach until 1978, when a 507-seat theater, funded by a $3.5-million building campaign, was built in Costa Mesa, about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and have since expanded into a three-stage complex called the Emmes/Benson Theater Center.
In their division of responsibilities, Mr. Benson was the artistic director who directed (and who occasionally acted and designed sets and costumes) and Mr. Emmes was the one who handled South Coast’s business side (and also sometimes directed).
“It’s a left-brain, right-brain sort of thing,” Mr. Benson told The Times in 1988. “David is logical and organized. If I’d been alone, we’d be doing theater in a warehouse.”
That year, South Coast received the Tony Award for excellence in regional theater.
Winning the award “was a staggering experience,” Mr. Emmes said. “It helped us in terms of the rest of the world seeing South Coast Repertory as an award-winning theater company.”
The two men stepped down as artistic directors in 2011 but both continued to work there. Mr. Benson directed his last play, John Patrick Shanley’s “Outside Mullingar,” in 2020.
Mr. Benson’s marriage to Pam Krumb ended in divorce; his marriage to Wendy Wickstrom ended in her death. Justin Krumb, his stepson, is his only immediate survivor.
South Coast’s devotion to the development of new plays has been fueled by money from an endowment fund that pays writers and helped establish a major hub for dramatists.
“We’re like hard-line communists — true believers in the regional theater movement,” Mr. Benson told The Times in 1993.
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