PLAYWRIGHT BUSTING THE ‘80S GHOSTS

In their heart of hearts, most artists would like to be thought of as addressing all time rather than being encapsulated in their own time. But actor-playwright John O’Keefe, whose “Ghosts” opens tonight at the Burbage Theatre Ensemble, has at the age of 44 taken aim on the ‘80s. “The terrifying ‘80s,” he calls them. “They’re so ambiguous and ambivalent, so dominated by the yuppie generation.”

Unquestionably, in O’Keefe’s opinion, the theater has to rethink itself.

“Why is every actor in the country coming to Los Angeles?” he asks rhetorically. “Because it’s (the job market) drying up in New York, which exists in another century, a smokestack century. The unions are destroying the theater there. San Francisco is turning into a giant fern bar--though it still has the freedom to express and I enjoy working there. But the Berkeley Stage is defunct, ACT’s in trouble and the Julian is mostly renting out its space.”

Not that Los Angeles doesn’t have its hazards. “Actors are considered chattel here,” O’Keefe said. “I always pay actors, even if it’s just $50 a week. If you don’t, you’re not giving them responsibility. You’re not crediting them with being human beings. If the audience and the critics hate a show, who carries on? Who’s going to interpret the work? But if actors come just for the movies, they’re shot.”

Though forthright, O’Keefe’s opinions are not belligerently expressed; his mind is too agile and inquisitive, it appears, for the heavy slogging that dogma requires to sustain itself.

O’Keefe has dark, swept-back hair, pale, faintly Mephistophelean eyebrows and intense blue eyes. Locally, his reputation as a writer-performer has grown with his work over the last four years at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, and was further solidified with a 1983 performance of his “Aztec” at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center--a performance that was reprised to acclaim earlier this year at the Factory Place Theatre.

Of “Aztec,” he says: “That was a piece about a man who may or may not have committed a rape and a murder. It was done in a very masculine style, to point out how our overemphasis on masculinity has been at the expense of the female side of our planet, the intuitive, the womanly, the things pertaining to the earth. It was 35 minutes long.”

Duration is one of O’Keefe’s aesthetic responses to the requirements of the speeded-up ‘80s. “I get very neurotic around two-hour plays,” he says. “Theater is a time art as well as a thematic art. Most of my work is an hour long; if I ever get to two, it’ll be a major work, maybe two years in the making. I think that’s an expression of our time.”

“Ghosts” was written in response to what O’Keefe calls “the theory of genetic fascism put forth by guys like Carl Sagan, who say that we’re basically pre-ambulatory repositories of nucleic acids, manifestations of genetic stew. I don’t agree with that.” O’Keefe’s ghosts, therefore, are not scary.

“Not only are they not scary, they’re not even very interesting. Ghosts are alone, caught between worlds. They can only achieve union when they let go of this world. The piece was written three years ago as a series of monologues interwoven with dramatic and choral voicings, spoken and sung. It’s the stories of different people who for one reason or another can’t let go, like the girl who can’t admit that she was in love with her brother, but still holds on through the denial. A ghost is the indefinable essence in us that asks, ‘Who did I think I was anyway?’ ”

The idea is quite in keeping with O’Keefe’s notion of the artist. “An artist lives by the spirit,” he said. “He has nothing else to live for.”