The La Jolla Village Playhouse has commissioned a play loosely based on San Diego local Andrew Cunanan, best known for murdering fashion tycoon Gianni Versace and four others before killing himself in 1997. Described as a new music theater piece, the play, called Disposable, has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and will explore issues of power, race, class, money and fame in contemporary society, as well as media sensationalism.

Des McAnuff, artistic director for the La Jolla Village Playhouse, stressed that Disposable will only be loosely based on Cunanan’s life. “It’s not by any means a biography of Andrew Cunanan,” he said. “The character won’t be called Andrew Cunanan and it may well, as it develops, borrow inspiration from other events. So it’s not a history or a documentary.”

Cunanan graduated from The Bishop’s School in La Jolla in the 1980s and was a longtime resident of Hillcrest. After his cross-country killing spree ended with the shooting of Versace outside his Miami mansion in 1997, Cunanan committed suicide while hiding on a houseboat before police could arrest him.

McAnuff does not expect that the play’s creators will interview local people who remember the incident or friends of Cunanan for the piece.

“We described this as loosely inspired by the life of Andrew Cunanan, so I don’t anticipate that kind of research,” he said. “And certainly the specific victims of Cunanan will not be portrayed in any way in this piece — which could be an entirely legitimate piece in itself, but that is not what this is.”

The creators of the play are Playhouse director Michael Greif, writer Jessica Hagedorn and composer Mark Bennett, who have collaborated on past Playhouse projects. Hagedorn, a highly respected writer and lyricist, was a National Book Award nominee for her book Dog Eaters, which the Playhouse performed several years ago. Greif is an Obie award-winner and Tony and Drama Desk award nominee, who directed the highly successful Rent on Broadway. Bennett is also an Obie award winner and a well-established, internationally recognized composer.

“I think this is a team that has really extraordinary credentials, and there is a real pedigree on this project,” said McAnuff.

Disposable will include elements of multi-media and music, but will not be a conventional musical.

“Obviously it’s going to be a very serious piece; it’s a serious topic,” said McAnuff. “One of the things that I like to point out is that musicals from time to time do take on serious subjects. While this is not a musical, music certainly lends itself to serious subjects. For example, Sondheim’s piece Assassins is about presidential assassins, from Lee Harvey Oswald right through to contemporary times. We did Tommy here a number of years ago, which, again [Disposable] is not going to be anything like Tommy, but it’s worth pointing out that Tommy is about a severely traumatized child. Music theater can take on serious topics. The opera does it all the time.”

Disposable will be developed along the same lines as The Laramie Project, written in 2001 by Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, which chronicles the town of Laramie, Wyoming, a year after the savage beating of Matthew Shepard in 1998. The creators interviewed 200 Laramie residents then used eight actors to embody over 60 different people in their own words.

“I think one of the most extraordinary evenings I’ve spent in the theater was for The Laramie Project, which we did here a couple of years ago,” McAnuff said. “Who would think an evening about a hate crime would turn into one of the most powerful evenings of theater in recent memory. So I have great faith in artists, and I expect them to enlighten me.”

Though several local publications have already written editorials critical of Disposable’s subject matter, McAnuff said the public’s reaction to the announcement has generally been supportive. “If you say this is a musical about Andrew Cunanan, that is going to conjure up all kinds of weird images in people’s minds, but that’s really not what it is,” he said. “If people are picturing somebody dancing across the stage singing about their latest victim, obviously that’s not what we’re doing. I think people that are aware of what is really going on here are by and large very supportive.”

McAnuff also explained that it is unusual to announce an upcoming play before the writing is complete and the play has gone through at least a preliminary series of readings, laboratory work and developmental workshops. Word spread quickly about Disposable after the National Endowment for the Arts announced its grants earlier this year and an article reported inaccurately that the play would be released next fall.

“The play is not scheduled for next fall at all,” said McAnuff. “All this came out right after the NEA announced some of these grants, and [word of the play] came out in another publication. One of the papers here saw that publication and took information from it even though it wasn’t accurate. The play has not been written yet and has not been scheduled, and what we expect it to do is go through a developmental process. If and when it is produced it would be several seasons from now.”

McAnuff estimated the play may be ready for production in 2006, but emphasized that it is impossible to gauge. The media attention Disposable has already garnered, however, is significant in itself.

“That game that kids play called Telephone, this goes on in the American media far too much,” he said. “What is ironic about this subject is that one of the themes [the play] is about is the tendency to sensationalize these stories in our culture. And that is, to some extent, what is happening with this already. It’s ironic, to say the least.”

McAnuff said that the immense public interest in the production is something the Playhouse should be grateful for. “Having people interested in the theater is always a good thing. It could be something extraordinary — who knows? They [still] have to write it, but my fingers are crossed that they will come up with something insightful that will provide a meaningful evening.”