Pain, Gay Love, and a Gentle Musical

Fulfilling his promise to present provocative and eclectic theater on the Westside, Geffen Playhouse producing director Gilbert Cates announced that the theater’s first full season will include plays about a dark historical figure, gay love and a classic fool from Jewish literature.

The Geffen’s season will open with a new play about the Marquis de Sade, “Quills,” on Oct. 9. It will continue with Terrence McNally’s Tony-winning “Love! Valour! Compassion!” in December, as well as an as-yet-unannounced production in March, and Robert Brustein’s adaptation of an Isaac Singer short story, “Shlemiel the First,” in May 1997.

Located in the 499-seat UCLA-owned hall formerly known as the Westwood Playhouse, the Geffen appears to be attracting the types of plays and talent that traditionally have gone to the Mark Taper Forum.

Most of McNally’s recent work (“Master Class,” “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” “The Lisbon Traviata,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”) was introduced to Los Angeles at the Taper, and “Love! Valour! Compassion!” director Joe Mantello worked at the Taper last year, staging “Three Hotels.” “Shlemiel the First” director David Gordon also worked at the Taper last year, staging “The Family Business” there.

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said all three of the Geffen’s announced plays had been offered to the larger Taper first. Both Davidson and Cates discouraged the idea that they’re now rivals.

“Good theater begets good theater,” Davidson said. He acknowledged that “there isn’t an infinite audience. There’s a danger that people will settle” for whatever theater is closer. “But how else are we going to have an informed audience if they go to only one theater? We’re all trying to work together. We’ll try not to bump into each other.”

Cates said he was “delighted” when it appeared that a new Taper wing would open not too far away, in Santa Monica (a plan since stalled), and he wishes there were five other theaters in Westwood alone. If his own theater “appeals to people who like the Taper, great. But I’m not intentionally going after the Taper audience. I’d like to encourage a younger audience to go to the theater. I like being in a university area. I like that we have 25,000 students across the street.” Like the Taper, the Geffen will offer discounted student tickets.

Just as the Taper opened its first season with an eyebrow-raiser, “The Devils,” 29 years ago, Cates too selected a potentially controversial play to open his first full season. He described Doug Wright’s “Quills” as “in the Grand Guignol tradition, with a lot of blood, guts and gore. Most of the audience will be riveted, but more than one or two might leave.” The play “confronts a major issue on everyone’s mind--the price you pay for censorship,” Cates said. It was previously produced at the New York Theatre Workshop and received the 1995 Joseph Kesselring Prize.

The second play, McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” will skip the Taper for only one reason, Davidson said: “It just wouldn’t work as well on our thrust stage” as on a proscenium stage, like the one it used in New York or like the Geffen’s. “After talking with the director and the designer, they didn’t know how to do it without totally re-conceiving it [at the Taper],” Davidson said.

“That’s very bizarre,” responded McNally’s agent Gilbert Parker, when told of Davidson’s comment. “I can’t imagine why it couldn’t be done there.”

Cates said Mantello spent time at the Geffen planning how to make it work there. He also said much of the New York cast Mantello directed will probably play here, and are reprising their roles in a film version Mantello will shoot this summer. But don’t expect Nathan Lane to re-create his New York role at the Geffen or in the movie--he’s on Broadway starring in the hit revival of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

Three previously unproduced scripts are under consideration for the Geffen’s third slot, but Cates said a decision probably won’t be reached until late summer. One of those under consideration is a solo star vehicle, but Cates cautioned against thinking that the Geffen programming will be driven by Hollywood stars because of his own movie and TV credits.

“Some big-name stars of modest ability” have asked him for a chance to do shows at the Geffen, Cates said, but “this is not a retirement home for actors who want to get serious.”

The season’s final show, “Shlemiel the First,” is a klezmer musical (a genre that was often represented at the erstwhile Westwood Playhouse). It was originally staged at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., which is run by the show’s adapter, Brustein, who said that Cates first approached him about it nearly two years ago. Cates said the show is “sweet and gentle and speaks to everybody.”

The first phase of physical renovations of the theater, previously planned for this summer to the tune of $1 million, has been postponed. Cates said much of the work would have to be duplicated two years from now, in the $3.5-million second phase, and he couldn’t get a guarantee that the first phase would be completed in time for the season to begin.

Cates said the Geffen is projecting a $1.5-million gap between revenues and expenses during the coming season, despite music mogul David Geffen’s gift of $500,000 a year for the next 10 years. However, Cates expressed confidence that the theater’s board can fill the gap. And Cates is doing his own fund-raising too: “You know anyone,” he asked, “who wants to name a bathroom?”