Going, going, gone

For an instant during one of the first L.A. performances of “The Black Rider,” actor Matt McGrath thought he might be witnessing another heart attack in the audience. Like that time on the East Coast, in a different play, when they had to stop the show and call in the medics.

But it soon became apparent that the three people causing the commotion in the Ahmanson Theatre’s front tier were merely sick of what they were seeing. With the first act still in progress, they got up and walked out.

Such interruptions are rare in live theater, so this was a statement -- and a harbinger of more early exits to come. As playgoers continue to abandon seats costing as much as $95, a night with “Rider” has turned into the showbiz equivalent of red states versus blue, two camps seeing the same thing and reaching polarized conclusions.

The highly unconventional musical, which runs two hours and 35 minutes, including intermission, is the concoction of writer William S. Burroughs, songwriter Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson -- famously nonconformist figures from literature, pop music and the stage, respectively. The storytelling is largely oblique and nonlinear, the visuals dazzling and surreal, the songs and dialogue sardonically macabre. The show is playing through June 11 in a 2,100-seat house -- scaled back to 1,600 for this run -- where the 30,000 subscribers are most accustomed to Broadway musicals and revivals of middlebrow comedy.

“Rider,” in all its cracked-cabaret strangeness, is at the Ahmanson because Michael Ritchie, Center Theatre Group’s artistic director, loved it two years ago during a wildly successful stand in San Francisco. He admired how it attracted a diverse audience, including the younger folks theaters covet as they fret over how to replenish their older subscription crowds. “I thought, ‘That’s the kind of audience I want in my theaters,’ ” recalled Ritchie, whose average subscriber in three CTG houses is 51 years old. To draw them in, the company launched a separate website for the show, www.theblackrider.org, and distributed leaflets in rock music clubs.

But what about keeping them there from curtain to curtain? Sales were 70% of capacity through the first 3 1/2 weeks, about 1,120 per show, according to CTG figures. After last week, with attendance declining beyond the run’s halfway mark, the overall average had dipped to 66%. Nightly attrition winnows the audience further.

Walkouts “happen on every show, some more than others,” Ritchie said. He prefers to dwell on the positives: “I’m more compelled by the new people we’re bringing to the theater, and by the strong and devoted audience who are loving it.”

Halfway through the run, there had been 15 requests for refunds, said CTG spokesman Jason Martin, compared to the five to 10 that the Ahmanson box office typically fields during the course of an entire run. “It’s more, but it doesn’t seem like a huge number,” he said.

The show had a smoother ride in San Francisco, where it played the American Conservatory Theater’s 1,050-seat Geary Theater, kicking off the 2004-05 season.

“It was one of the biggest hits we’ve had here,” said Scott Walton, ACT’s director of marketing and public relations. That production, which included Marianne Faithfull as the devil, played to 98% of capacity for a run that was extended two weeks to meet demand, and helped ACT triple its usual rate of new subscriber sign-ups. Still, it wasn’t walkout-free. “I won’t lie to you,” Walton said. “Some of our subscribers absolutely hated it; people were saying, ‘What was that all about?’ ”

ACT’s audience is used to a mixture of classics and new plays much closer to the Mark Taper Forum’s style than the more conventional Ahmanson’s.

That makes it “really a plunge into the unknown for a lot of the audience” seeing “Rider” at the Ahmanson, said David Sefton. As director of the UCLA Live performance series, he annually programs an International Theatre Festival stocked with challenging works. “It would be nice to think this helps the theatergoing audience of Los Angeles be more relaxed about this kind of work, and accustomed to thinking that things can be done in different ways.” But, Sefton added, “I’m not banking on it.”

Two UCLA Live presentations of “4.48 Psychosis,” Sarah Kane’s uncompromising excavation of suicidal depression, mapped the boundary line that adventurous programmers tread between challenging and taxing an audience.

In November 2004, playgoers were enthralled by a three-actor version in English, toured by the show’s original producer, London’s Royal Court Theatre. Less than a year later, in the same Freud Playhouse, there were numerous walkouts when Isabelle Huppert offered her solo interpretation, in French, with minimal movement and sparse English supertitles.

At the Ahmanson, actors in “Rider” say, most of the house is on its feet during final bows -- but by then many other pairs of feet have voted themselves out the door. Most of the walkouts are more discreet than the three McGrath noticed last month during one of the first performances. On a recent Friday night, 10 or 20 people with seats in the front half of the orchestra withdrew under cover of darkness just 20 minutes into the show, availing themselves of a blackout for a scene change. Many more waited until intermission, the polite way to bail on a show.

Based on a German folk tale, “Rider” has a simple enough plot, but the devil here is in the details and digressions. It centers on McGrath’s character, a foppish, outdoorsmanship-challenged clerk named Wilhelm who makes a Faustian bargain so he can take rifle in hand and effortlessly plug every wild animal in the neighborhood. Wilhelm loves a girl, and she loves him, but her daddy, a buffoonish forester, will not abide a son-in-law who can’t shoot.

So forget about such conventions as an uplifting ending and characters you can root for; the dramatis personae are all made up like comically ghoulish refugees from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” As for comprehensibility, attendees who don’t get it are in the same boat as a reviewer who assessed more or less the same production two years ago in London for a British publication, the Stage: “Great set, great lights, great costumes, great music, no idea what was going on....”

Rather than stomach the second act of a show they couldn’t fathom, Dalia Farkas of Beverly Hills, an Ahmanson and Taper subscriber “for umpteen years,” decided with her three 60ish companions that digestion would be the better part of valor. They were off in search of dessert when buttonholed across the street from the theater.

“I’m disappointed,” Farkas said. “I liked the music very much, but I did not expect it to be like Halloween night. I didn’t know where I was. I love musicals and theater, but this was odd.”

They had considered exiting while Act 1 was in progress, she said, “but we owe it to the actors, out of respect, not to make them feel bad.” Farkas found nothing so distasteful in “Rider” as to jeopardize her commitment to the Ahmanson. “In every season there’s always one bugaboo, when you say, ‘Hey, what were they thinking?’ ”

Others abandoned the show at halftime with more of a shrug than a frown. “It was good, it was funny, but almost too offbeat for me,” said Peter Vellenga, as he and his wife, Kim, a couple in their early 30s, strolled arm-in-arm toward their car. “Too long,” said Kim.

Bill Strauss, a goateed Tom Waits fan from Van Nuys, said he and his friends gave the show a shot because “we usually like things that are offbeat. The staging was neat and all that, but there wasn’t anything that caught me up into it.”

Later, however, one could encounter fans who, taking the invitation in Waits’ opening refrain, had “come on along with the Black Rider” for the entire trip and were dismounting energized and happily abuzz.

“It takes a folk tale and makes it into high, high art,” enthused Lisa Derrick, a magazine editor from Los Feliz, whose black gown, black pearl necklace and red shawl had her sartorially in tune with the production’s primary colors. “What shocks me is when people don’t have the patience and sophistication” to hear a play out. “This is not like Podunk. This is Los Angeles.”

Having experienced overwhelming adulation in San Francisco, actor McGrath, who has homes in West Hollywood and New York City, is able to take partial rejection in L.A. philosophically.

San Francisco, he said, offered “the quintessential audience for this piece. People were just eating it up and loving it, so I know that the show does work.”

John Vickery may have a unique perspective as he cavorts through “Rider” as what seems to be an adjutant of the devil -- the actor himself isn’t exactly sure, and says director Wilson didn’t consider the character’s precise identity a big deal. In any case, he’s the one made up and outfitted like Nosferatu, or -- Vickery’s comparison -- the embodiment of Death who plays chess with Max von Sydow in “The Seventh Seal.”

While he was on Broadway originating the role of Scar, the villainous uncle in “The Lion King,” the veteran actor says he used to have fun pointing and snarling from a promontory whenever he spied that rarity, an empty seat. But last year Vickery witnessed a fair number of early exits while playing a stuffy Brit who was the lone quasi-familiar character in the premiere of “Princess Marjorie” at South Coast Repertory. Noah Haidle’s play may have been the most bizarre major-theater show of recent years in Southern California, with young male actors simulating masturbation under the blankets and peeping-Tomming their way through a goofy portrayal of tumescent arrested adolescence.

Among the “Rider” cast, Vickery said, “it bothers us in a general way that we’re not getting bigger houses, but the people who do stay really seem to enjoy it. And actors love shows that audiences either hate or love, so I guess we don’t mind that voting-with-your-feet that much.”

Vickery and Vance Avery, who plays Pegleg, the devil, duck out a side door during intermission for a cigarette, and they can’t help but notice the procession to the parking lot. “We fantasize about chaining them to their seats,” Vickery said with a laugh. “It means you’re getting a passionate response, and if art is about nothing else, it’s about the audience response.”