FURTHER CONFESSIONS OF A THEATERPHILE

Last week’s column ended with our condolences to film critic David Denby, who has a problem understanding what people get out of theater. This week we’ll discuss some of specific pleasures of the stage, with examples from shows playing in Los Angeles at the moment--which also illustrate some of the pains of watching theater.

For example, watching Penn and Teller, the Bad Boys of Magic, at the L.A. Stage Company, one has the uneasy feeling that the next person they will call onstage to help with one of their kinky tricks is . . . you. This is never a problem at the movies, where the people on the screen are in no condition to muscle the viewer into anything--he could wipe them out with one flick of the light switch.

Film actors were there, when they made the picture. Stage performers are there. This is not necessarily an aesthetic advantage, but it does add a certain suspense to the evening. For instance, the viewer knows that Penn (the big guy) and Teller (the little guy) are as vulnerable as he is, whatever the next moment may bring. Rather more so, considering their brand of magic.

OK, says the viewer, the blood in that macabre hand-stabbing bit is probably fake. (These guys aren’t that sick.) But the rope holding Teller upside down in the straitjacket could break. Something could go wrong when he swallows those pins. As for Penn’s fire-eating seance . . . forget I brought it up.

“The question isn’t how we do it,” Penn says. “It’s why we do it.” Right. Because if they slip, there will be consequences. He tries to make us feel guilty for our interest in this possibility, but after all, who issued the invitation?

My point is that the principle applies--to a less painful degree, of course--to all stage work. The simplest cross to the kitchen sink can be messed up or forgotten, to disastrous effect. The circle of fiction is always at risk.

Live theater is a feat. In addition to empathizing with the characters and wondering how the story will come out, the audience is always holding its breath a little as to whether the actors will bring it off. It’s why applause seems so right at the end of a play, a tribute to a sustained display of skill, and so abstract at the end of a movie, where there’s no one to applaud.

For me, Teller worming out of his straitjacket with seconds to spare is a symbol of every stage actor. Theater is an arena and the clock is always running. Talk about grace under pressure. The theater audience responds to both.

John Steppling’s “The Shaper” at the MET Theater had me craning my head to see around the woman in front of me--an especially annoying problem in a small theater. There are sound problems at the movies, sometimes, but you can almost always see.

The MET also happens to be one of the dankest playboxes in town. Steppling’s play was dank as well, the story of a burn-out surfer drifting into a life of petty crime. Zonked-out people (the surfer, his sinister friend, their girls) in a dead-end situation. Depressing.

Yet “The Shaper” held me. Steppling made me recognize his characters and see them as, perhaps, symptoms of a great freeze that was coming over the world. Without quite being able to read his signal, one trusted it as coming from a true place.

Here’s another virtue of the theater. It respects writers. Too much, sometimes, to force them to learn their craft. But at least it gives them the right to their vision, which films and TV tend not to do.

There are dishonest plays, because there are dishonest playwrights. But you can generally trust a stage play to represent the world as its writer (whether Steppling or Neil Simon) sees it. Compare the slasher movies and cute-kid sitcoms that The Industry turns out to order--stuff that its own makers wouldn’t watch themselves.

A cynic would say that theater’s purity comes from the fact that there’s so little money in it. (The MET’s decor attests to that.) It could also come from the theater’s awareness that its artistic capital is words. In any case, I like the integrity.

“Dracula” at Royce Hall, UCLA, offered two problems. The first was a sound system that kept scratching and going out. As distracting as this was for the audience, it must have been worse for the actors, who had to keep plowing ahead without knowing if they were coming across.

The second problem was the fact that the production, a pale shadow of the 1977 Broadway production, wasn’t very good. It was just the sort of road show that films have largely killed--and for good reason. Why pay $15 to see mediocre actors struggling to be heard in a too-large hall when, for $5, you can see first-rate actors bigger than life?

Yet even here we saw the power of the theater to make an audience believe. If Edward Gorey’s batty sets were a joke on the play, there was a quality of obsession here that made them a much more effective background for the story than the real castles and graveyards in the Olivier-Frank Langella film. Artifice has its uses.

It also was exciting to see actors go all the way with their emotions, as melodrama in a large hall allows. The scene where Lucy is whipsawed between her “evil” self and her “good” self did not get laughs, and when the supposedly staked Count Dracula suddenly raised his hand from the coffin, you jumped. As badly told as this “Dracula” was, it put its circle of listeners in touch with a powerful myth. It had size.

“The Show-Off” at South Coast Repertory was another demonstration of the sheer inconvenience of theater. A good movie will be played in a number of houses, and be pretty much the same wherever you see it. What a bore to have to drive 60 miles to catch a play.

Besides, I’d seen the APA production of “The Show-Off” years ago with Helen Hayes--the essence of the adorable small-town grandmother. How could SCR beat that?

By treating George Kelly’s comedy, not as an affectionate look at a simpler time, but as a realistic study of an edgy family in a changing (and not necessarily for the better) America. The humor was still there, but now it was a concerned humor.

Here was another of theater’s strengths: its mutability. “Gone With The Wind” is there forever, but no play ever gets its final production. The script goes back to the shelf, times change, actors change, and the next time we see the play, it says something new, without a word being changed of the text.

Movies, as someone said, are pieces of time. Theater is beyond time. And it dies every night. I once watched a stage carpenter striking a set at the end of a show’s run. “Pretty sad to throw it all away,” I said. “Best moment of all,” he said. “Now we get to do it again.” Theater is a verb.