92 Year in Review : The Cover Thing : Hail the Taper Two : Two memorable Taper offerings, ‘Angels in America’ and ‘The Kentucky Cycle,’ met controversy head on

On the night of Nov. 8, after having spent the day watching Tony Kushner’s two-part, seven-hour “Angels in America,” I read that Scott McPherson, the talented author of “Marvin’s Room,” had died of AIDS.

McPherson, 33, had written several plays, but only “Marvin’s Room” (which has not played Los Angeles) had come to national attention. It was not about AIDS, it was about redemption--a funny, cutting tribute to the gallantry of the sick and the lessons they might teach the healthy.

The loss of McPherson seemed particularly keen juxtaposed as it was with the experience of sitting through Kushner’s double play, not accidentally subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” The coincidence of those events highlighted the exponential blight of AIDS on the national conscience and its increasing hold on the consciousness of the American artist.

So it’s not too surprising that in such a narrowly contested election year, AIDS and politics were the theater’s hottest topics. They bookended the year in the form of two mega-events. In February at the Taper we were treated to Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle,” which tore apart the poisoned myths of young America--and in November at the same theater we had Kushner’s “Angels.” Both were lengthy two-parters that grappled with fact and fiction, bringing history and politics to their knees. In the context of a simple yet masterful structure, they showed uncommon vigor in the writing.

“Angels” flirted with the danger of putting heavenly hosts and political icons on stage (such as Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg), and “Cycle” glued us to our seats with its take on the violence against land and people that fouled the country’s history. “Cycle’s” richly deserved Pulitzer was a sur-Prize: the first to be given to a writer for a play that had only been seen outside New York City.

These two shows dominated the landscape. And while “Cycle” was only partially workshopped at the Taper (the full production came from Seattle’s Intiman Theatre), and “Angels” was hammered out at San Francisco’s defunct Eureka Theatre and Taper, Too (with a full production of its first part having been staged in London first), both plays are benchmarks for the Taper that sheltered and nurtured them.

Throw in Sybille Pearson’s “Unfinished Stories,” a probing piece about three generations of fathers and sons battling for connection and cultural identity, and you have the high points of a self-respecting Taper 25th anniversary season.

But this doesn’t take away from the stark reality that, with last year’s collapse of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the city is back to having only one major-league theater--at least when it comes to the marriage of experiment and production. And while the Taper has managed to hang on to its New Work Festival (which resumes in February under Taper associate artistic director Robert Egan), its experimental Taper, Too season is on indefinite hold, as is its Literary Cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante.

The latter lost its venue when the Itchey Foot closed. One doesn’t miss the third-rate food, but one does miss the mostly first-rate work that appeared on that postage-stamp stage, including this year’s haunting performance by John Belucci in “James Agee: A Heart’s Eye,” a sterling adaptation by Emmett Jacobs and Tony Plana of Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

Davidson has said he hopes to find another home for the cabaret, but it’s a significant loss when stacked on top of the disappearance of LATC, which had been a caldron for new work, and the shelving of Taper, Too, however temporary. Even the suspension of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival amplified the void, despite the altogether too ingrown ways that contributed to its problems.

As a result, the only place left to dare to fail in this town is on the 99-seat theater circuit, which is roughly where we were seven years ago. And a handful of self-subsidized companies have been daring to do just that with considerable success. This may explain the small-theater movement’s durability in the face of staggering odds--from the sheer competition for time, space and money, to the virtual impossibility of making any sort of real living at it.

Some of the older groups beat the odds by being self-sustaining co-ops, such as Company of Angels and Theatre West, whose track records are dotted with real achievements. Some, like the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, sustain themselves on a mix of rentals and productions (Beth Hogan’s performance in a flawed “Ivona, Princess of Burgundia” remains indelible). Still others have developed loyal followings that sustain them (East West Players; the Colony Studio Theater, which had a very young, very fresh revival of “Candide” this year; Theatre 40, which scored an election-year bull’s-eye with its revival of Maxwell Anderson’s congressional comedy “Both Your Houses”).

The brash younger ones, like the Pacific Theatre Ensemble, A Noise Within (specializing in the classics), West Coast Ensemble and the Actors’ Gang, have been flexing their muscles for some time, tackling an increasingly wide variety of material and managing, with encouraging regularity, to deliver the goods.

Of these, the Gang, which has the backing and blessing of founding member Tim Robbins, is perhaps the most political. Its output this year, in its first permanent space (2nd Stage), has soared, becoming more audacious and assured. These actors are applying their thumb-nosing deconstructivism to an expanding range of political issues from classic alienation (a “Woyzeck” reconceived by Han Ong) to male-female attitudinal politics (“Hysteria”), violence (“Blood! Love! Madness!”) and to poking good-humored fun at themselves (“Klub”).

In a dissimilar vein of defiance, Highways in Santa Monica (at the 18th Street Arts Complex), headed by Tim Miller and Linda Burnham, has secured a prominent place in the community as a magnet for radical artists and a hotbed of politicized, gay performance art.

Among the newest of legit companies to take up residence at the Highways complex is Cornerstone Theater, an unusual group of young artists dedicated to redefining theater’s relationship to community. After traveling all over the country making theater in small towns with the participation of the local citizenry, they have chosen to settle in the L.A. area, where they worked with the senior citizens of Angelus Plaza on “The Toy Truck,” a modern update of a 1,600-year-old Sanskrit play, and at Highways itself, where they staged their own, highly iconoclastic version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Meanwhile, the real politics of theater in this town remained remarkably impotent, as exemplified by the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, trapped between a sociological ambition to support ethnic and community-oriented projects (an impulse that only intensified after the April riots) and its mandate to help artists.

The two don’t mix well. With its overemphasis on political correctness, the Cultural Affairs Department continues to confuse art and social therapy. It has mishandled theaters whose achievements were not recognized as fitting the narrow definitions of its goals (Stages and Shakespeare Festival/LA come to mind) and it is mired in the bureaucratic maze of trying to resolve the vacancy problem at the LATC complex.

Those efforts are proceeding, with at least eight companies (including the Taper and the Bilingual Foundation for the Arts) still interested in some sort of coordinated occupancy. But it is too soon to articulate what shape such a consortium might take or who would be footing the bill.

Except for Ian McKellen’s vaulting performance in the Royal National Theatre’s highly politicized “Richard III” at UCLA (nearly wrecked by the Royce Hall acoustics) and the freshness of the touring company of Kander and Ebb’s “The World Goes ‘Round” at the Henry Fonda, the Los Angeles mainstream scene offered no surprises. It was in an all-too-familiar holding pattern of imported Broadway hits and humdrum revivals.

The Pasadena Playhouse, having suffered changes of artistic leadership, settled for a string of crowd-pleasers--typified at the low end by “Oil City Symphony” and at the high by Maltby & Shire’s “Closer Than Ever.” In between were such iffy tries as the rare revival of Preston Sturges’ “A Cup of Coffee” and a knotty “David’s Mother.”

The appetite for well-done frivolity, however, thrived unabated. “Forever Plaid,” a forever winner that played Pasadena last year, has been in continual residence at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills since March. And riding a crest of trendy popularity was the episodic “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” the year’s silliest high-profile success. It opened in April at the Westwood Playhouse, drawing crowds through October. Both shows are minor industries that appeal to baby boomers of various generations, however little substance they may possess beyond the froth of their momentary implosions.

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa consolidated its position as a polished purveyor of semi-classic revivals--particularly with Moss Hart’s “The Man Who Came to Dinner” on its Second Stage--and as a developer of new or almost new plays, including, notably, Roger Rueff’s “Hospitality Suite” and Jon Bastian’s “Noah Johnson Had a Whore.”

The Center Theatre Group-Ahmanson chalked up 2 1/2 pluses at the Doolittle Theatre with Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation” and Terrence McNally’s weaker “It’s Only a Play,” while the Ahmanson Theatre itself continued playing host to “The Phantom of the Opera.”

Among major musical revivals, only “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Chicago” at Long Beach Civic Light Opera managed to register on the theatrical Richter scale. But all year long you could have made your way to “Club Indigo Revisited,” Gregory Scott Young’s maverick explosion of Tin Pan Alley song and dance at Burbank’s tiny Golden Theatre, simply by putting an ear to the ground and following the joyful noise. “The Secret Garden” was a gorgeous but cool customer at the Century City Shubert, sandwiched between those umpteenth self-respecting reruns of “Cats” and “A Chorus Line.”

To find anything really super-exciting musically you had to head south for the La Jolla Playhouse. In July, it produced a new version of the Who’s rock opera, “Tommy,” that dazzled with the sheer bravura of its staging. It did almost as much with a witty Art Deco version of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” in November. But Athol Fugard, who announced he was making La Jolla his new American home, offered only a disappointing “Playland.”

Dark horses? There were a few: “Melody Jones,” the introspective take on life in a gay bar and burlesque joint outside Buffalo, was a well-structured and -presented adaptation of David Galloway’s novel at the Cast Theatre; “Wrong Turn at Lungfish” at the Coronet, with George C. Scott giving a very large performance in a very small play; a post-L.A. riots version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” bursting with life from Shakespeare Festival/LA.

The Inner City Cultural Center worked mostly on getting its Ivar Theatre up and running, and one-person shows everywhere continued to proliferate.

The golden-throated Avery Brooks in “Paul Robeson” at the Westwood cranked up the bigger-than-life passion and pain of the man. Charlayne Woodard (“Pretty Fire” at the Fountainhead and the Odyssey) and Jan Munroe (“Nothing Human Disgusts Me” at the Burbage) turned subjective experience into something artful, bright and deep.

Others used the one-person format for more overtly political and complex statements. John Fleck’s “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell” at Taper, Too was an investigation into what defines (or destroys) identity. Ron Vawter’s “Roy Cohn/Jack Smith” at the Museum of Contemporary Art was a mesmerizing stare at the ravages of social disapproval on wildly different gay men: Cohn, who denied his gayness, and Smith who flaunted it, with remarkably similar results.

Which takes us back to AIDS and politics. On the back of the program for Vawter’s one-man show was a quote from T. S. Eliot, which read in part:

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us--a symbol:

A symbol perfected in death

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well. . . .