VOICES OF DEAD SPEAK TO LIVING IN ‘IMAGINING’

The Mark Taper Forum will host a theatrical commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Monday at 8 p.m. It’s called “Imagining a Future” and is sponsored by the Hollywood Women’s Coalition and Hollywood for SANE.

Ned Beatty, Ed Begley Jr., Blythe Danner, Howard Hesseman, Pat Morita, France Nuyen, Charlotte Rae, the cast of “Rap Master Ronnie” and 20 kids from Jacques D’Amboise’s “Sir Vival Sweepstakes: A Winner’s Tale” will be on hand to perform and/or read from the works of John Hersey, E. Y. Harburg, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan and Susan Merson. The performance art group “Beyond War” will also be there. Tony Abatemarco will direct.

In this, as in like ceremonies around the country and abroad, the voices of the dead will inform the memory and, one would hope, the actions of the living.

No one questions that William Shakespeare, in his depiction of kings and queens, victors and their vanquished, murderers and lovers, conspirators, true believers, impassioned romantics, fops, fools, light-spirited men and women who came to good ends and o’erweening men and women who came to bad, was--or is--our most universal playwright. How much his view of the world was shaped by individual psychology is, ordinarily, less a matter of discussion than the meaning of his plays, since so little is known about him.

But Donald Freed, an investigative reporter as well as playwright (his most traveled work to date is “Secret Honor,” which he co-authored with Arnold M. Stone), has applied some of those tools to Shakespeare’s life and, with actor-teacher Geoffrey Forward, will present “Shakespeare, 1614--Alive!” starting Friday at the Grove Shakespeare Festival.

The setting of the play is a farewell party at the Globe. Shakespeare is already in the grips of Bright’s disease--the aftereffect of a zealous love of the glass--and Freed/Forward catch him looking back.

“Make no mistake,” Freed says. “Shakespeare was political down to his boots. Those King James men make our own politicians look like they’re in nursery school. He had the adroitness of a Brecht. The Essex rebellion used ‘Richard II’ as a revolutionary manifesto, yet Shakespeare and his company never fell out of favor with the Queen. The Marlowes, the Wolfinghams, the spies--what a time it was.

“But for his knowledge of kings and fatal insight into power, you have only to look to his father. John Shakespeare had been a mayor, well off. He was very famous in Stratford as an alderman and high official. Suddenly he stopped appearing at council meetings. Suddenly he couldn’t leave home because of his debts. Suddenly this boss of Stratford, this capo who gives loans to everyone and is known for his buoyancy, is under house arrest until much later, when his son gets him a coat of arms.

“Today we know what depression and breakdown are like. William Shakespeare was 12 when it all happened. He was at his most impressionable age. What it must have been like to see his father fall from the magistrate’s chair to the chair in the cottage--there you have the paradigm.”

LATE CUES: Final auditions for actors interested in enrolling in Los Angeles City College’s fall-semester professional theater training program will be held at 2 p.m. Aug. 23 at the Camino Theatre. LACC is at 855 N. Vermont Ave. For further information, call or write Cliff O’Connell, LACC theater management assistant, (213) 669-4336.