Breaking Free: The South--and More--on Stage : “Audience-Friendly” theater permeates Southern theater communities

The city comes as a lovely surprise: warm, lush, green, wooded and--clean. No graffiti here, or almost none. Amazing.

You can get around Atlanta on a friendly convenience called MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority). Or, of course, you can drive. Traffic is heating up around here, but even rush hour remains manageable. Atlanta’s Buckhead area in the city’s heart has a spectacular array of well-kept lawns, tall trees and stately mansions. If it isn’t always the Old South we’re looking at, the New Affluence has retained a seductive veneer of Southern grace.

And Southern theater? . . . It is partly haunted by the same veneer and partly working to break free of it. Those who practice theater in this Southeastern corridor say they feel good about it.

They said it at a seminar called “Southern Voices . . . Who’s Listening?” held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Theatre Critics Assn. in this city late last month.

They talked about an upswing in the arts, and about the sheltered freedom here to try and fail, living being cheap and state and county arts support generous.

But they also talked about de facto segregation (in the city and their audiences if not in their theaters), about the absence of black critics on white papers and about regionalism as a resistance movement to fight homogenization of the culture.

“If you’re a sculptor from this area,” said panelist/playwright Jim Grimsley, “you may create something that will be appreciated all over the world, but the clay will be from here.”

Yet behind the candor, one sensed a degree of wishful thinking. And what could be seen on Atlanta’s stages in the five days that the critics’ meeting lasted reinforced this perception.

Audiences are lean and hard to get for anything but the Academy and the Alliance Theaters. These remain the undisputed flagships.

Frank Wittow, founder and artistic director of the Academy since 1956, had a stylish production of Craig Lucas’ “Three Postcards” (which premiered at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa in 1987) on one stage and Roberto Athayde’s stinging political parable, “Miss Margarida’s Way,” on the other. The Academy is finding its 1988-89 season to be its best ever, with sales expected to top 31,500 tickets--or a 24% improvement over last year.

At the Alliance, which claims to be playing to 93% capacity and to derive 60% of its income from earnings, “Amadeus” and “Driving Miss Daisy” were the attractions. Indeed, Miss Daisy is an Atlanta dowager and playwright Alfred Uhry is a native.

With the possible exception of “Three Postcards,” these are safe mainstream choices, reflecting the criticism most often leveled at Atlanta’s audiences by its theater critics: That of a “lingering conservatism” favoring shows that don’t rock the boat. A day-trip across state lines to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival suggested that this preference for passivity extends beyond city limits.

The 17-year-old Shakespeare festival, which started in Anniston, moved five years ago into a state of the art $21.5 million two-theater complex outside Montgomery. It’s an idyllic setting, amid the greenest fields and shimmering ponds. Yet at what might be viewed as a crowning moment in this theater’s evolution, founding artistic director Martin Platt is leaving.

“It’s partly the 17 years,” he said diplomatically, “partly a desire to move to a more culturally driven community.” On view was his final show: a traditional but striking “Cyrano de Bergerac,” with a gifted Greg Thornton in the title role. A classy farewell to arms. Platt, a native of Beverly Hills, leaves July 16--the end of the season--for points North and East. Meanwhile, the search is on for a replacement. Unofficially, the word is that the board wants someone who’ll provide “audience-friendly” Shakespeare.

And so it goes. Is it that Southern audiences have avoided exciting new theater or that the new theater has failed them by not being exciting enough? It’s an old chicken-egg question, but the truth is that most of what passed for new or experimental on the Atlanta boards the week of the critics’ meeting was remarkably unprepossessing.

Take Richard J. Allen’s “The Man Who Killed Rock Monenoff” at Theatre in the Square (in the Atlanta suburb of Marietta). It follows the permutations of a dim and corpulent young man who accidentally runs over a rock star and kills him. This new play by the associate head writer for NBC’s “Days of Our Lives” aims at satirizing trash TV, yet resorts to sitcom tactics to get the job done--down to a woman born to shop and a cloyingly kooky love interest. At intermission a portion of the audience defected to a city-sponsored jazz concert on the square. Not good manners, but an option on a warm night.

Seven Stages, lodged in a former movie house, is a theater dedicated to the development of new plays. It’s been recognized for its work in the field. The name, we’re told, comes from the magical qualities attributed to the number seven, not from a count of playing areas. But the magic wasn’t working. Its production of Athol Fugard’s “A Place With Pigs,” mounted by director Levi Lee, had a terminal case of the cutes and pseudo-Slav accents that traveled all over the map.

It didn’t help that the two-character comedy is third-rate Fugard (which explains the paucity of productions it’s received). But Brenda Bynum was too young for the role of the Russian peasant wife whose army-deserter husband has been hiding in the pigpen 40 years. And as that husband, Seven Stages’ artistic director Del Hamilton was hammier than the piggies with whom he shared quarters.

For this visitor from a strange land, three things stood out in the parade of shows: Excerpts from “The Wizard of Hip,” a swaggering one-man chronicle of growing up black in America, written and performed by Thomas W. Jones III; a Mossoviet Theatre of Moscow production of Ludmila Rasumovskaya’s “My Dear Helena Sergeevna” presented at the Alliance--and Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts.

The excellence of the work of New York-born Tom Jones, who is artistic co-director with Marsha A. Jackson of Atlanta’s 10-year-old Jomandi Productions Inc., suggests that this black theatre has earned its stripes, support and leadership position in this city.

Jomandi is largely a family affair, dedicated to new work and the exploration black culture. The name itself is a family acronym: JO for Jones, M for Mother (Jones’ mother Angeline who, until recently, was president of the board), AN and DI for sisters/board members Andrea and Dinah. But the goals are aggressively universal, addressing, says the 32-year-old Jones, “the reference of Afro-Americans” everywhere.

The Mossoviet play, “My Dear Helena Sergeevna,” was a visitor at the Alliance. It was performed by a strong Soviet cast (which included Elena S. Bondarchuk, daughter of Sergei Bondarchuk, creator of the unforgettable Soviet film of “War and Peace”) and was spoken entirely in Russian, with an introduction in lively fractured English by its director, Eugene Lazarev.

The play takes a surprisingly candid look at declining values among Soviet university students in the ‘80s--as capable, it seems, of self-destruction, greed and violence as their American counterparts. Written in the same dramaturgical key as David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly,” the piece was banned in the pre-glasnost USSR--a fact that infused it with instant notoriety.

Few indigenous Atlanta institutions, however, can compare in scope and pioneer work with its Center for Puppetry Arts. A visit there is a perpetual revelation. Aside from the 11-year-old center’s record of community service (as a workshop, resource, educational tool, theater and museum), it hosts puppet artists from across the nation, providing a safe haven for experimentation with adult themes, ideas and new materials.

Director Vincent Anthony sets the tone and has succeeded in rallying richly deserved support for this often underestimated art form from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as state, county and city agencies. Such inventive masters as Janie Geiser, Eric Bass, Paul Zaloom, Jon Ludwig and Bruce Schwartz have all come through here at least once.

At the time of this visit, Ludwig was putting together an environmental piece called “Heaven/Hell Tour.” It was set to 90 minutes of rap-rock, reggae and Philip Glass music, with such things as a lumpish Everyman, a vox Dei and a Tower of Babble with a myriad flapping tongues. “The whole thing,” Ludwig said, “is like Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood. In heaven everyone gets a new car. In hell everyone gets a new car but there’s no place to park.”

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Next to this unfettered imagination, the Colla Family Marionettes, an almost 100-year-old company of puppeteers imported from Italy by Charleston’s (S.C.) recently completed Spoleto festival, seemed pale.

A brief swing through that historic city during this annual event’s opening weekend delivered the Collas from Milan, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s “Eleemosynary” by Lee Blessing and a preview of the Graciela Daniele-Astor Piazzolla-William Finn “Dangerous Games,” a joint production of Spoleto, the American Music Theater Festival and the La Jolla Playhouse.

The Collas seemed much the product of the century from which they sprang (in 1890). For their version of the story of Christopher Columbus (requiring no text), the puppets wore richly detailed costumes, performed in front of elaborately painted flats on carefully scaled mini-furniture. But the movements were largely restricted to a primitive shuffle and undeviating raising and lowering of the arms. The effect was one of slavish devotion to inert realism.

Blessing’s “Eleemosynary,” not unlike his “A Walk in the Woods,” is a slight but enjoyable play for three voices, with a wit that’s sharp and dry. It has a forgiving theme at its heart, clever lines in its throat and, in this production, fine actresses at its service. Eileen Heckart, Joanna Gleason and Jennie Moreau played a grandmother, mother and daughter who learn with difficulty how to live with and/or accept one another.

In the end, though, the piece that really took it away was “Dangerous Games,” a daunting and fantastical creation in two parts in which Finn’s minimal wordplay, Piazzolla’s native Argentine rhythms and, above all, Daniele’s sinuous choreography, coalesced to create a smoldering spectacle performed by terrific tall dancers.

The first part, “Tango,” is a smoky collection of territorial imperatives, cockfights, pas de deux and menages a trois. The second and more exceptional “Orfeo,” is a recreation of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend in the context of the “ desaparecidos “ or the “disappeareds” of Argentina.

The analogy doesn’t entirely work, but there is some stunning choreography in the process, with a galvanic use of whips and an arresting singer/dancer in Ken Ard. A slightly revised version opens in La Jolla next Sunday.

By the time the festival closed on June 11, box-office receipts had set a record at $1,501,197 (up from $1,325,394 in 1988). But at 82,341, attendance lagged behind last year’s nearly 84,000 people. (Higher ticket prices made the difference.)

The $300,000 deficit (out of a budget of roughly $4 million) reported after the first weekend remains to be fixed. The festival has until Aug. 31--or the end of its fiscal year--to complete its fund-raising. It has ended in the black for the past three years and a spokesman for the festival said the expectation was that it would do so again. Two gifts of $50,000 each are on the horizon, and festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti is a man of boundless passion and faith who has managed to make it work for 13 years.