EXTRA ENCOURAGEMENT FOR L.A. THEATER’S CAUSE

The formal gardens at the Greystone estate in Beverly Hills are an elegant reminder of the good old 1920s, when a million dollars went a long way.

The terraces, the balustraded steps and walkways, the fountains and the greeneries are a corner of a foreign soil that seems forever England, despite the eucalyptus.

The great house itself, which was a setting for “The Loved One” and later echoed to the cries of the young movie-makers of the American Film Institute when it was headquartered there, is now quiet. In its next incarnation, it may house an important art collection, although the neighbors have protested that this would bring an undesirable element to the area--young rowdies come to sneer at Abstract Expressionism, possibly.

Last Sunday afternoon, the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild borrowed the grounds for its annual awards ceremonies. Chief among the guild’s good works, and its prizes, are three cash awards for new plays. The young organization has in only six years judged something like 3,000 scripts from throughout the country.

The awards are named in honor of actress Julie Harris, who presented them Sunday. They are quite generous, with prizes of $5,000, $1,000 and $500. This year’s winners, confirming the geographical outreach of the competition, were Katherine Jones Rao of Austin, Tex., for “The Women of Cedar Creek,” Jan Paetow of Bogota, N.J., for “Your Basic Solitary Dancers” and Gram Slaton of Minneapolis for “Carol and Charlie.”

The guild makes grants to community and children’s theaters, gives tickets to senior citizens and holds an annual theater workshop for children, all to encourage the cause of theater. This year the guild also gave a special award to Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Center Theatre Group of the Mark Taper Forum, for the influence his work and the group have had on the whole theatrical community.

As I listened, it struck me, not for the first time, how considerably the theatrical situation of Southern California has changed over the last quarter-century.

No longer ago than that, there were the hypermammarial productions of “Pajama Tops” and “Under the Yum-Yum Tree,” the occasional bus and truck national companies giving their last exhausted hurrahs in Los Angeles, the Civic Light Opera with its opulent productions well back from the leading edge of the avant garde.

(The Civic Light Opera, which has been battling the actuarial tables for years, trying to recruit a new, young audience as its old regulars fade away, appears to be losing its longtime home at the Music Center, as Sylvie Drake reports in an adjoining story.)

The premier house in town, the Biltmore, was on the verge of becoming a parking lot. The Huntington Hartford (still--renamed the James A. Doolittle Theatre--the best relatively small theater in Los Angeles) was an intermittent oasis of interest, and a handful of still smaller companies like the Players Ring did challenging work.

But the best and most exciting drama was then at UCLA, done by the Theatre Group, founded by Robert Ryan, John Houseman and other Hollywood folk. Davidson had come West in 1957 to join the organization as a producer and director. Houseman subsequently moved on and when, 20 seasons ago, the Theatre Group became a permanent company at the Music Center, Davidson was the inevitable choice to be its artistic director.

The most significant change in American theater in our day, Davidson said Sunday afternoon, has been its decentralization: the growth of production centers and the encouragement of good work, including new work, all over the country, from Louisville to Minneapolis, New Haven to Costa Mesa, Denver to Dallas. And nothing, he said, was more important than encouraging new writers.

The Center Theatre Group, born amid controversy with its first production of John Whiting’s steamy “The Devils,” has seldom been placid for long since then. It has made Los Angeles an exporter as well as an importer of theater, with “Children of a Lesser God” as a recent instance.

But beyond its own work, it is evident that the group, together with the other two theaters of the Music Center, the Pavilion and the Ahmanson, have been catalysts for the whole theater scene in the region, helping to build audiences that have supported the Shubert, the Pantages, the enlarged number of Equity Waiver theaters; the excellent South Coast Rep is a prime example of the stable companies of such theaters.

At that, there remain problems and unfulfilled dreams. Audiences need constant wooing, and Davidson has detected some signs of (temporary) burnout after the heady excitement of the Olympic Arts Festival.

Davidson cherishes the idea of a secure and permanent repertory company of cast, crew and writers, on the order of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, where work could emerge in concert, as, say, “Nicholas Nickleby” emerged.

On a limited scale, the repertory idea was demonstrated as part of the ambitious joint venture between UCLA and the Center Theatre Group at the Doolittle Theatre.

The alternating productions of “Hedda Gabler” and Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” using essentially the same cast, headed by the excellent Michael Gross, sketched the possibilities. I missed the Ibsen, but “The Real Thing” seemed the real thing, ensemble acting at its most elegant.

But the joint venture at the Doolittle, and the L.A. Theatre Center on Spring Street in the heart of the central city, are confronting harsh economic realities, and their prospects are suspenseful to say the least.

The up-change in the richness and variety of the theater diet in Los Angeles over the last quarter-century is remarkable and pleasing. But, to paraphrase an old line, good theater, like sex and housework, never stays done, and complacency is not on the menu.