STAGE : IL DOTTORE INTERPRETS U.S. THEATER

The invitation, to Dottore Sullivan, was to address the first “Meeting Internazionale di Drammaturgia Sicilia-USA-U.S.S.R.” on “Recent Trends in the American Theatre.” The scene was a cold theater in downtown Catania, known as the Milan of Sicily--a workingman’s town, rather than a tourist spa. The address, delivered one paragraph at a time, with pauses for the translator to put it into Italian, went something like what follows:

. . . You’ll be interested to hear that one of the longest-running shows in Los Angeles is set in Italy. John Krizanc’s “Tamara” isn’t performed in a theater but in a splendid old marble mansion in Hollywood, our version of D’Annunzio’s villa, Il Vittoriale. The audience follows the characters from room to room as they play out their stories--very decadent stories, of which the play officially disapproves. Actually, it presents them as great high-trash fun, like an Italian “Dallas.” And “Tamara” is fun--a “living movie” that a spectator with any sense of fantasy at all can enjoy walking around in.

The trend here is to offer the spectator an experience he can’t get at the movies, and I believe we are going to see more experiments along the lines of “Tamara.” Perhaps eventually the spectator will actually enter into the playing out of the fiction, in which case we approach the realm of theater-of-touch and psychodrama. If these possibilities rub you profoundly the wrong way, this merely proves that we are talking about true experimental theater here, not about warmed-over Grotowski.

The second play I want to mention is “The Debutante Ball” by Beth Henley. It concerns a pathologically eccentric family gathered together for the debut of the younger daughter into Hattiesburg, Miss., “society.” I didn’t believe this play and gave it a poor review in the Los Angeles Times.

This made no difference to the fate of the production, which will have its allotted run at South Coast Repertory. Compare what happened when Henley’s previous play, “The Wake of Jamey Foster,” opened on Broadway. It got a bad review in the New York Times and closed in one night. The trend here is structural and it is not new. But since it remains a surprise to many of my friends in New York, perhaps it will be news to you as well. There is an American theater--as distinguished from the Broadway theater. I refer to the constellation of professional theaters from New England to California. We don’t know whether to call them regional or resident theaters. In Italy you would call them permanent theaters-- teatro stabile.

These theaters include South Coast Repertory; the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York; San Francisco’s Magic Theatre, which our best American playwright, Sam Shepard, has adopted as his home theater; Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, whose house playwright is David Mamet; Boston’s American Repertory Theatre, which this year brought us the American premiere of Robert Wilson’s “the CIVIL warS,” and the Actors Theatre of Louisville, whose annual Festival of New American Drama offers more new scripts in one week (as one critic recently said) than Broadway offers in one season.

That’s sad, but it isn’t the national calamity that it would have been back in the 1950s, when Broadway was the only market a serious playwright had. From the playwright’s point of view, it may even be a good thing.

Even in those days, there was something soul-eroding about the excitement of having a Broadway hit--and the despair of having a flop. A new book that’s just come out on Tennessee Williams, George Spoto’s “The Kindness of Strangers,” tells what the hit/flop syndrome did to Williams. It can be said to have killed his contemporary, William Inge.

Today, the atmosphere on Broadway is even more neurotic. One of our best American set designers, Ming Cho Lee, recently said that the first item of business when you start rehearsing a Broadway production is to protect yourself against being cast as “the victim,” the person who will be blamed if the play flops, as most plays on Broadway do.

Certainly the most obvious “victim” is the poor playwright who got everybody into this mess in the first place. Now some playwrights may rise to this kind of pressure, but I’m not sure that the finer-grained ones do.

Compare the saner climate at a subscription theater like South Coast Repertory, where a new play will be be there for its promised run, no matter what the critics say. Now there is no need to find a victim. Now the director and the designer and the playwright can afford to say to each other: “I don’t know. What do you think?”

The atmosphere can even become too supportive, but that’s another speech. The point is that an American playwright like Beth Henley now has theaters to work in, as opposed to what our great American critic Harold Clurman used to call the “show-shop” of Broadway.

But if our theater map superficially resembles that of Europe, with each city boasting its own not-for-profit municipal theater, the great difference is that our theaters get next-to-no government funding.

If our President had his way they would get none. He thinks of them as “Little Theaters,” the phrase used in America in the 1920s to describe well-meaning amateur theaters run by ladies with lorgnettes.

Happily, Congress has kept Mr. Reagan from cutting the budget of our National Endowment for the Arts as drastically as he originally wanted to do. But NEA funding is modest, with no theater receiving more than $300,000 a year (compare the National Theatre of Great Britain, which receives $7 million a year from the British Arts Council) and with many smaller theaters receiving as little as $5,000. I do not have to remind you how much Mr. Reagan spends for missiles every year.

Therefore, resident theater has to look to the box office and, especially, to local patrons for the bulk of its support. There’s also a temptation to develop work with an eye toward having a Broadway hit, as Joseph Papp did with “A Chorus Line.” An artistic director has to be wily, has to balance what will bring in the customers against what he thinks the community should be seeing. Inevitably compromises will be made.

Yet good work is done. Take “In the Belly of the Beast,” at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. No compromise here. It is an exceptionally severe and demanding work, the very opposite of the voluptuous “Tamara.”

The piece originated at another important resident theater, Trinity Square Repertory in Providence, R.I. as the dramatization of the prison letters of Jack Henry Abbott. Then came Abbott’s murder of a New York waiter while on parole, followed by his trial and re-imprisonment. The play in Los Angeles includes all of this, and provides a very complicated experience.

One feels compassion for Abbott as a child of the prison system. But how far does compassion stretch? What about the waiter? We see--in a scene that suggests Pirandello--how Abbott’s prison instincts could have deceived him into thinking that the waiter was about to attack him. Deceived or not, he took the man’s life.

Remarkably, actor Andrew Robinson shows Abbott judging himself even as he’s defending himself. It’s like watching a scientist testing himself for a dangerous bacillus and finding that he does indeed harbor it.

I wish this kind of a play were more of a trend in the American theater. In the main, and with a bow to Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” our playwrights are dealing mostly with private issues these days. The urge to link personal problems with public causes is dim. We even have plays that mourn the death of American idealism of the 1960s as if this were a phase of national adolescence that we have now, sadly but inevitably, outgrown.

On the other hand we do have at least one company, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, that talks to public issues as directly as Dario Fo. (Paradoxically, the Mime Troupe has just received one of the NEA’s largest grants this year--$90,000.)

L.A.’s Odyssey Theatre is also having a success with “Rap Master Ronnie,” a satirical revue that portrays the President as one of those animated robots manufactured for Disneyland.

The show’s most telling number, however, concerns some young upscale professionals who realize that they should be upset by the arms race and all that, but who can’t keep their mind on it--they’ve got their own problems to deal with. If the American theater would address itself more specifically to that attention gap, this would be the most helpful trend of all. . . .

The audience applauded, moderately, and the Soviet delegate introduced his paper on the history of theater in the U.S.S.R. with the hope that Mr. Reagan would indeed cut his defense budget. (No mention of the Soviet Union’s defense budget.) People asked me later about “Tamara,” but not about “In the Belly of the Beast.” That night we saw a Bellini opera, he being a native son, and the next night an entertainment called “Catania Night and Day.” At the final banquet, I out-toasted the Russian, I think. The food was fantastic.