With ‘Pearls for Pigs,’ Richard Foreman will introduce L.A. to his sensory-overload style, in a work attacking his own ambivalence. What we have here is a man . . . : Trapped in the Theater

For the past 29 years, Richard Foreman has been writing, directing and designing plays for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater--more than 50 to date--while also occasionally lending his distinct directorial touch to other people’s texts or operas. In the process, the 60-year-old, perpetually disheveled theatrical auteur has become famous as a comic existentialist in New York art-world circles and along the European festival circuit. Not bad for a shy, brainy, nebbishy guy with a basset-hound expression whose work is all about sex, and who, during a recent interview, said bluntly: “I don’t like the theater.”

Now, Los Angeles will for the first time have a chance to sample the obsessive, disorienting, autobiographical work of this man who won a $345,000 MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 1995. For five performances, beginning Wednesday, Foreman’s “Pearls for Pigs” can be seen at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, presented by the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts. This 75-minute play, performed without intermission, stars David Patrick Kelly, as the Maestro. Kelly is a Foreman veteran whom film audiences may also remember from his feral performances in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” and “Twin Peaks.”

“The Maestro is kind of a stand-in for me,” explains Foreman. “He is ranting about being trapped in the theater, about which he has great ambivalence. The play is really about my own ambivalence about making theater and the illusory nature of theater. Is that good, is that bad? Is it seductive, is it disgusting? Does it turn you on? Does it make you sick? I just want to look at all the different combinations. It’s almost Nietzschean, to dance with all the contradictions.”

L.A. is the fifth stop on an international tour that began in Hartford in April. The play has been seen in Montreal, Paris and Rome; after L.A., “Pearls for Pigs” moves to Portland, Ore., then Hanover, N.H. (home of Dartmouth College) and finally New York, for a four-week run in December. Critic Alvin Klein, writing in the New York Times after the Hartford opening, said the show “demands openness and rewards it bountifully.”

Like all of Foreman’s work, this play does not have a linear structure, although the Maestro is the protagonist. Three other characters have smaller speaking parts: the Maestro’s therapist, and Pierrot and Colombine--the latter two being stock figures from the 16th century Commedia dell’arte tradition. In addition, four other clown characters are silent, sinister figures who wear funny hats, beards and plastic buttocks. Their function: to move scenery and prod the other characters into action.

As one would expect from a dramatist whose recent work includes “The Mind King” (1992), “My Mind Was a Sledgehammer” (1994) and “Permanent Brain Damage’ (1996), “Pearls for Pigs” is another cerebral journey into the unconscious.

“Most of my plays have a circusy or carnival kind of atmosphere to them,” he continues. “There are a lot of ideas that are being juggled, but audiences are not expected to know the source material. Nor are they supposed to come and follow an intellectual argument as they would in a Tom Stoppard or George Bernard Shaw play.

“Before Eisenstein made movies, he made theater, and he always used to talk about his desire for a theater of attractions. Like going to a fair, your play showed off this moment, then this moment and this one. That’s sort of what I do. I’m not interested in creating a terribly intellectual event that one has to think about. If I want to think, I don’t go to the theater, I’ll read a book. I want the theater to be sensory experience.”

Indeed, there is no mistaking a Foreman production. His aesthetic bombards the viewer with visual, verbal and auditory information. His sets are stunning assemblages, filled with the kitschy detritus of rampant consumerism: fake Oriental carpets, chandeliers, clocks, plates, LPs, chalkboards, letters from the alphabet . . . you name it. Then there is Foreman’s by-now-trademark use of strings, which crisscross the space. These are both a visual reference to circus aerial acts’ rigging--Foreman’s earliest theatergoing experience was the circus--but also they are surveying devices that measure the distance between characters, both physically and mentally.

Dialogue is peppered with cryptic aphorisms and giddy non sequiturs. At one moment in “Pearls for Pigs,” for instance, the Maestro says, “My poor brain has been damaged by life; that’s why I’m not a good conversationalist.” At another: “Without promises, choose any direction you like ‘cause I butter my hair with grease.” Foreman’s actors tend to deliver their lines in a menacing, metronomic monotone, while moving cautiously through the cluttered environment they inhabit. Often, the actors cling to walls, as if to steady the disequilibrium.

The events are always punctuated by Foreman’s use of blinding light and weird, occasionally abruptly jarring music. As a result, he has been reluctant to tour his work until now, because he believes his plays are integrally connected to the physical space in which they are created. But when producer Jedediah Wheeler, a seasoned promoter of experimental work and the manager of composer Phillip Glass, came forward, Foreman decided to try it out. The show is being presented in association with the Hartford Stage Company.

Asked why he took on the project, Wheeler said simply, “I have always been addicted to theater people who are completely manic. For me, Foreman is the great theater wizard of our time. I want to produce and present American artists in their own country in their own time--those artists with a singular and complete vision. There isn’t a tremendous support system for them outside of New York City. No one knows who this great man of theater is, and that is a tragedy. This country should know how damn imaginative our artists are.”

“My plays don’t reach out and say, ‘Love me,’ like a lot of theater--even avant-garde theater--does,” says Foreman, whose home base is a 76-seat theater on the second-floor meeting room of St. Mark’s Church on the Bowery, an Episcopal church in New York’s East Village. “It is always, ‘Can you take this?’ I like the atmosphere of threatening, because I like to threaten myself in the sense of, ‘C’mon, Richard, wake up, do better, be alert.’ That’s why I also look for a certain intensity in actors, especially in the men, of people that look like they are knowledgeable who are being eaten up inside.”

And the women performers? “It’s a classically male-chauvinist thing to say,” Foreman admits, “but, frankly, I look for women who turn me on. I think eroticism is why people go to the theater. Even plays that on the surface don’t seem to be erotically based I think are sexual visions. We are still living in a world where sex exists as a problematic source of energy. It is naive not to deal with that.”

Foreman was born in New York City and grew up in Scarsdale. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University in 1959 before earning his MFA from Yale School of Drama. He has lived with the same woman for the past 30 years: actress and visual artist Kate Manheim, who played Foreman’s alter-ego in many of his earliest plays. Her father, now deceased, was the noted German-language translator Ralph Manheim.

It was Ralph Manheim’s translation of “Threepenny Opera”--and the savvy of producer Joseph Papp, who asked Foreman to direct the show--that helped establish Foreman among the top tier of stage directors. Foreman’s 1976 production of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill classic starring Raul Julia, first presented for free in Central Park and subsequently on Broadway, is still remembered vividly by New York theater audiences. It would also mark the beginning of a fruitful relationship with Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival. Foreman has directed plays by, among others, Vaclav Havel, Moliere and Botho Strauss for the festival’s Public Theater.

Foreman was subsequently commissioned to direct operas, notably Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus” for the Paris Opera and Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” at the Opera de Lille. He will return to Lille next spring to stage Brecht/Weill’s “Mahagonny,” a show he says he has longed to stage for 30 years. His own work, however, always comes first. At the moment, Foreman is immersed in rehearsals for his latest play, “Benita Canova,” which was inspired by the paintings of Balthus. It opens in New York at his theater Jan. 8.

Why make theater if he’s so ambivalent about it? “I stay in the theater partially by habit,” Foreman says. “It’s hard to give up what you know. I honestly perceive myself in a very precarious position, as if I’ve gotten away with something and that people will soon turn against me and say, ‘We were wrong, he’s just a phony.’ That’s my psychology. I genuinely feel insecure.

“I also stay in the theater because the social interaction is very necessary for me,” Foreman continues. “I’m a very asocial person. I am even shy about calling up people and asking if they want to be in a play. But if I tried to be a painter or if I tried to just write, I could not sustain it, because I do need collision with other people. I may not like going to the theater, but I like trying to make plays of my own. Manipulating that three- dimensional space is something that is deeply in my blood.”

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“Pearls for Pigs,” Freud Playhouse, UCLA. Wednesday to Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2 p.m. $25. (310) 825-2101.