UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL AT ‘TAMARA’

For all the new shows that open, few stage productions offer the sense of the theater itself starting down a new road. But “Tamara” makes you think.

It has been running in Los Angeles for almost a year, which is the first surprise. With a top ticket price of $50 (now increased to $75), it figured to appeal to people who didn’t mind blowing a lot of money on a night out that was different, if it really was different. But these people were not necessarily your average theatergoers.

By now, though, plenty of average theatergoers have taken the trip through Il Vittoriale, “Tamara’s” marble villa on North Highland Avenue, and they don’t seem to have begrudged the tab. Indeed, some are going back. From being a novelty, this show is settling down to being an institution.

Your reviewer paid a second visit the other night and enjoyed “Tamara” more than when it had opened in May. There had never been a problem appreciating its silky decor, and the heady sense of being transformed into a person who strides through marble halls as though he owned them. But there had been a problem with its ultra-world-weary characters, and its high-glitz dialogue. One was tempted to dismiss Il Vittoriale and its Beautiful People with Alice’s “Why, you’re nothing but a pack of cards.”

“Tamara” revisited seemed a bit more substantial, probably because I avoided the scenes I had previously seen and followed up other leads. (There are scenes popping in every room, and the viewer can pop in and out, too.) This time one was more aware of the political substratum of the tale--that D’Annunzio, for instance, was pursuing women when, as he knew, he should have been helping his country overthrow Mussolini. With fuller information, “Tamara” had a certain dignity.

It also started you thinking about what its narrative methods could mean for the stage. What about this technique of walking an audience through a story, set in a space where it literally might have happened?

The theater purist should be offended by the approach. Imagination--we like to think--provides the theater’s true alchemy. For instance, a contingent from the Royal Shakespeare Company recently performed “As You Like It” with no scenery at all at Occidental College, and we “saw” the Forest of Arden more vividly than when the BBC had taped the play in a real forest.

Rather, we felt the Forest of Arden in a way that we couldn’t on the screen. But supposing that we were to watch living actors performing “As You Like It” in a circle in the middle of a real forest. Would that violate our appreciation of Shakespeare’s text? Wouldn’t the calm of the trees and the purity of the air, instead, complement the text?

Or think of Chekhov. No matter how evocative the design for the first scene of “The Seagull,” haven’t you always wanted to see it played in front of a real loon-haunted lake, with the sun going down--after which, the audience goes up to big house to see the rest of the play?

Would that violate the aesthetic distance that is supposed to be a mark of true theater? I think not. One reason can be seen in “Tamara.” The viewer has to follow the play around the villa on his own legs, and in every room he’s conscious that there are other spectators present as well. These awarenesses have to be filtered out before he can believe the story again. There is still mental work for him to do.

What’s amazing is how quickly the imagination kicks in, when the senses are convinced and the actors are involved in their roles. Being there--and being close--can be very convincing, even when, objectively, you know that the scene is nonsense.

For example, one of the most outrageous rooms in D’Annunzio’s villa is called “the oratory.” It is a big, dark room, lit with flickering church candles. The odor of piety and the odor of sensuality co-mingle here, or so D’Annunzio hopes. He even has his marble tomb here, an altar for erotic sacrifices.

A stage designer probably couldn’t design this room without at least a trace of satire. But standing in the middle of it, you are strangely impressed. Ridiculous as it is, it is not the product of a small imagination. One understands more clearly the appeal of the grandiose Mussolini to his own-at-the-heel countrymen.

An authentic environment also has its effect on the actors. Karen Black’s sigh the other night as she noticed D’Annunzio (Ben Hammer) pursuing a new mistress was so low that it never would have carried on the stage, and might not even have registered on film. But the sigh was felt by those standing close to Black. She was living the role, not merely delineating it.

If you weren’t standing that close, you missed it. That’s the luck of the grab with “Tamara,” a different show for everyone who sees it. This doesn’t need to be true in environmental theater. I recall two shows that made sure that all the spectators saw every scene, although not always in the same order--a Pasadena production of Maria Irene Fornes’ “Fefu and Her Friends” and Robert Benedetti’s “fun house” staging of Kafka’s “The Trial” at CalArts. Perhaps “Tamara” should insist that its spectators share some basic scenes before following their own noses.

What next? One can imagine more “Tamaras,” with the audience in the traditional position of receiving the story, although making its own way through it. But there is another possibility as well. The audience could literally take part in the play.

The model here is the work of San Diego’s Crystal Palace Theatre. One of its pieces--was it a dramatization of “The Scarlet Letter?”--made the audience into a grim Puritan congregation, with the men sitting on one side of the meeting house and the women on the other. We became the social background of the play. Another Crystal Palace piece took viewers through the home of a famous British writer. Then we were allowed to ask questions of the caretaker, whom we spookily came to realize was the writer himself, down on his luck.

One of Crystal Palace’s most famous pieces was “Center Earth Trialz,” where the audience was encouraged (but not coerced) to justify what they had done with their lives so far. Last summer the group even put on a political convention.

Participatory theater can come closer to psychodrama than some theaters like, and it can also encourage audience shenanigans. But when it works, there’s a sense of community about it. Now it’s not just the actors who are the creative ones. And the show truly is different every night.

Moses Znaimer, “Tamara’s” impresario, is planning other “inter-active events,” such as a simulated space-shuttle ride that provides challenges that its passengers didn’t figure on. That approaches the realm of the theme park. But a theme park is a kind of theater. Perhaps the two can create a third form.

Certainly it’s easy enough to imagine Il Vittoriale as the scene of a murder-in-the-library thriller, with the audience putting together the clues and voting on the killer. “Tamara” is not going to put the traditional theater out of business, but it could add to our ideas about what the theater experience is.