THE YEAR THAT THE TOUGH GOT GOING

A good play has a spine: an organizing idea that makes its scenes all run in the same direction. A theater year tends to be less coherent, but 1985 might be defined as the year Los Angeles theater realized that if it was going to make it, it would have to make on its own.

In 1985, the local theater community was still nursing a hangover from the previous summer’s Olympic Arts Festival. The festival was at once praised for having brought so many exciting foreign companies to town, and resented for having raised audience expectations that couldn’t possibly be met on a daily basis. Surely that was why the gate for local shows had been off ever since the Olympics.

Or was it the onset of the home VCR? Whatever the reason, by springtime our theaters had grown tired of hearing themselves complain and had come to realize that a Higher Power wasn’t listening. Certainly not in Washington, where President Reagan lauded the National Endowment for the Arts on its 20th anniversary and once again tried to cut its budget.

So some theaters threw in the towel. For the first time in memory, the number of Equity Waiver productions actually fell off in 1985 (from 549 to 495, according to Drama-Logue, which monitors Waiver even more carefully than The Times does). Other theaters continued to bumble along on pure narcissism--a common synthetic fuel in Los Angeles. And some theaters rose to the challenge. If L.A. wanted world-class theater, by God, they’d give it world-class theater.

The theater that went out on the biggest limb was Bill Bushnell’s Los Angeles Theatre Center. In September it opened a $17-million four-stage complex on Spring Street, a glorious hive patterned after Joe Papp’s Public Theatre in New York--and as little likely to be able to support itself on box-office returns alone.

LATC’s first shows were feisty and well produced, whether you agreed with them or not. They also proved that audiences weren’t afraid to come downtown at night. In fact, the theater had an unexpected hit in Charles Marowitz’s mildly ironic revival of “The Petrified Forest.” Actors and writers seemed to like the smell of the place as well. But will Bushnell be able to attract the institutional support that a world-class theater organization needs? He has about a year to find out.

The new LATC gave the city a needed alternative to the Music Center’s theater complex. We’ve also long needed a couple of smaller Broadway-style proscenium houses for spoken drama, and we got them as well. The Henry Fonda Theatre was the old Pix Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, the James A. Doolittle Theatre the old Huntington Hartford Theatre. The first was taken over by the Nederlander Organization, the second was rescued by a triumvirate--UCLA, the Taper and the Ahmanson.

You didn’t have to admire the decor of either house to enjoy the intimacy of each. How pleasant to sit in a theater where the actors didn’t look like miniature action-figures from the balcony, and didn’t have to shout! And each house had a world-class hit at the end of ‘85--David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” at the Fonda and Lee Breuer’s and Bob Telson’s “The Gospel at Colonus” at the Doolittle (which did involve some shouting).

“Glengarry Glen Ross” came to us after winning every theater prize going--Tonys, a Pulitzer, etc. It’s certainly one hell of a play, and Joe Mantegna gives a hell of a performance as a guy who could sell the air rights to the Grand Canyon.

But my pick for the play of the year was Craig Lucas’ “Blue Window,” a quiet divertimento built around a Sunday-evening dinner party in New York.

Not much happened in this play, but what did happen was choice, and Norman Rene’s actors understated their characters beautifully. “Blue Window” topped a consistently interesting season for Costa Mesa’s South Coast Repertory, a company Los Angeles tends to underestimate. And its transfer to the New Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica seems to be catching on, as opposed to the ignorant way we spurned South Coast’s production of “Top Girls” at the Westwood. We are learning.

The Taper--still our flagship theater, after all--kept making voyages in 1985, not all of them successful. Its fifth try at a repertory miniseason (“Measure for Measure” and Schnitzler’s “Undiscovered Country”) didn’t advance the cause very far--there’s need for rethinking here. But its monthlong New Theatre for Now festival generated some real in-house excitement, as well as at least two promising plays--John Steppling’s dark “The Dream Coast” and Doris Baizley’s deceptively light “Mrs. California.”

The most enterprising theater of the year was the La Jolla Playhouse, chaired by Des McAnuff. It convinced Stephen Sondheim to try “Merrily We Roll Along” again (to some improvement) and got Michael Weller to contribute a literate, funny new play of “Big Chill” weight, “Ghost on Fire.”

McAnuff also put that great clown Bill Irwin into Brecht’s “A Man’s a Man” and staged Chekhov’s “The Sea Gull” as if it were a comedy of manners set in a Freudian Wonderland. McAnuff operates on the sound premise of first finding the artist and then finding the project. It’s hoped that he won’t be scooped away by one of the big resident theaters.

Back in Los Angeles, we had a luminous performance from Jessica Tandy in “Foxfire,” which is much closer to being a real play now than when it made its debut years ago at Stratford, Ont., and an equally revealing performance from Harold Pinter in his own play, “Old Times,” which can no longer be played with long, lugubrious pauses, seeing that Pinter doesn’t do so. Liv Ullmann wasn’t so happily cast.

On the small-theater front, the Back Alley Theatre came up with a fine new small-town play in Donald Driver’s “In the Sweet Bye and Bye,” starring Rue McLanahan as a lady who has been in mourning for her life ever since the telephone company told her she couldn’t be the town’s telephone operator anymore and replaced her with an automated switchboard. It sounds cutesy. It wasn’t. We’ll be hearing more about this play.

Another on-the-mark small-theater production was Actors for Themselves’ revival of John Osborne’s “Inadmissible Evidence” at the Matrix. Ian McShane played Osborne’s hero, a swine who somehow engenders compassion--at least as McShane saw him.

The longest play of the year was Murray Mednick’s “The Coyote Cycle,” a dusk-to-dawn marathon at the old Paramount Ranch, put on by Susan Loewenberg’s L.A. Theaterworks, a good friend to out-of-the-way playwrights. Shortest play of the year was the Doolittle’s opener, Martha Clark’s fantasia on themes by Hieronymus Bosch, “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” It lasted less than an hour, but it said what it had to say, and we didn’t feel short-changed.

For the first time in years, Civic Light Opera gave us a summer to remember with “Sweet Charity.” The best musical performer of the year was undoubtedly Debbie Allen as Charity, who should knock Broadway dead when she returns to the show in the spring. Tommy Tune and Sandy Duncan also did elegant work across the Music Center plaza in “My One and Only.”

And in the fall “Tracers” came marching home, after finding success in New York and London. John DiFusco’s Vietnam drama seemed almost complacent at the Coronet, next to what it had been four years ago at the Odyssey--precisely in the way of a veteran who is starting to forget the horrors of war in his nostalgia for its camaraderie.

Nevertheless, the piece had made a proud journey. There will be more as Los Angeles theater comes to feel its strength.

GOODBY ‘85A year of shuttered theaters, challenge and enterprise, but a quiet divertimento ended up stealing the show.