Two Tales of One City

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

As producer Diane White of the Los Angeles Theater Center gets into her car, watched by two bulky parking-lot security guards, a rat scurries across the back alley toward the courthouse-like former bank building that houses the L.A.T.C. A block away, streetlights glint on the grimy marquee of a shuttered porno cinema. A few evenings before, L.A.T.C. artistic director Bill Bushnell was accosted by a gang of toughs as he left for an opening-night party, but he got away without incident. Although patrons rarely encounter trouble, it is little wonder that even Bushnell refers to the theater's environs as "Skid Row."

Yet what appears on the L.A.T.C.'s stages -- from classics and European avant-garde imports to new works by Los Angeles playwrights and projects from black, Asian and Hispanic theater labs -- is so compelling that within three years of opening, it has grown to a thriving four-theater complex with 26,000 subscribers that earns half its budget from ticket sales. Playgoers readily brave the neighborhood to see the L.A.T.C.'s feisty, political and customarily left-of-center offerings.

About a mile away, in a plaza of cultural palaces around a gushing fountain, patrons stroll into the white marble monument that houses Los Angeles' older, more conventional-seeming Mark Taper Forum. Visually, the contrast between the Taper and the L.A.T.C. is stark. But the ferment, the embrace of the new and the political consciousness are much the same at both. Throughout its 21-year history under artistic director Gordon Davidson, the Taper has thrived on controversy. FBI agents, for example, sat alert at the opening of Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in 1970, hoping to nab the priest as an escaped felon. Currently the Taper is offering Nothing Sacred, an adaptation of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons that hauntingly echoes U.S. political dialectics of the '60s, and Davidson is developing a script about the political resurgence of Fundamentalist Christianity.

The L.A.T.C.'s Bushnell readily concedes an inspirational debt to Davidson, and to Joseph Papp, whose Public Theater in Manhattan is a similar urban complex. But Bushnell has fashioned an institution all its own, against perhaps tougher odds than faced either of the others. Like the Public, the L.A.T.C. tends to excuse artistic lapses on the grounds of good intentions: its present offering of a black South African tract, Bopha!, performed by the authors, is exuberant but crude. The other show now running, however -- the debut of Kingfish by local writer Marlane Meyer -- is an adroitly staged, intelligently acted and gut-thumping depiction of mankind at its most predatory.

Kingfish is a sardonic homosexual love triangle. The characters are a ravaged, prissy-elegant middle-aged photographer (Hollywood veteran Buck Henry), a chilly CIA agent (Sam Anderson) and a ditzy, petulant muscle-boy prostitute (Merritt Butrick, in a striking star turn of alternating vice and victimization). The play is a series of enigmatic, off-center vignettes of selfishness, loneliness and casual brutality bred of despair. Nominally realistic, the plot veers off into absurdism: the title character is a dog that likes to discuss current events, and the animal is represented by a black box with a rope for a tail and a jagged hole full of green light for a mouth. Every character onstage knows, yet denies, that this is actually an inanimate object rather than a pet. Believing in its dogginess is just one in a welter of expedient lies that these people live by.

Director David Schweizer shrewdly opts for a staged-reading style of presentation that emphasizes the play's metaphoric intent rather than its moments of naturalism. Schweizer himself is visible throughout, seated on a catwalk, reading aloud the stage directions; a few feet away sits an actor who provides the snuffles and howls of the pseudo dog. If the stage were actually filled with Oriental rugs, television sets and bars stocked with glassware, as specified in the text -- rather than the photographs of them that are fleetingly projected onto the floor -- spectators would probably see Kingfish as an unconvincing problem drama instead of what it becomes, a chilling cautionary fable.

A Turgenev adaptation might easily seem more suited to PBS's Masterpiece Theater than to the yeasty political traditions of the Los Angeles stage. And indeed, that is what resulted when playwright Brian Friel adapted Fathers and Sons for Britain's National Theater in 1987. But Nothing Sacred, by Canadian dramatist George F. Walker, persuasively makes the debate among student anarchists in 1860s Russia echo that among Marxist collegians of 1960s America. Film star Tom Hulce (Amadeus) is impressively showy as the charismatic yet destructive Bazarov. As the admiring friend he visits at a decaying country estate, Corey Parker (Biloxi Blues) is a well-intentioned, quietly compelling Everyman with whom audiences can identify. Walker risks big themes: the conflict between valuing the heritage of the past and envisioning the ideal of the future, and the debate over whether it is possible to take the best of the past without inheriting its cruelty as well. This is the stuff of enlightened discourse in any democracy, and on the eve of a presidential election, Nothing Sacred demonstrates enduring political vibrancy on the stages of La-La Land.