EX-CRITIC RATES HIS WORK AT THE TAPER

“There’s an entire genre of American songs, the title of which involves a person, place and a musical instrument,” explained Jack Viertel of his original concept for “Rogues’ Gallery” (opening Sunday at the Music Center’s Itchey Foot Ristorante). “Songs like ‘Veronica Played Her Harmonica Down at the Pier in Santa Monica’ and ‘Lena Was the Queen of Palestrina Because She Played the Concertina.’ ”

The Taper’s new dramaturg, (formerly theater critic of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner), smiled broadly. “But you couldn’t make a whole evening of those songs. It would be a goof for a while, but it’d wear off quickly.”

So Viertel starting looking for a more substantial tie-in between the musical pieces.

“I found that most had to do with some eccentricity--and all moved quite naturally through the stages of life. I have one called ‘The Yama-Yama Man,’ which is about a little girl who’s worried about a bogey man hiding under the bed. And there’s a Randy Newman song called ‘Old Man,’ which is about a man saying goodby to his father. It made an interesting book-end.”

Yet, within the mixed tone and young-to-old theme, “There’s no connecting text, no linkages. The songs either speak for themselves or they don’t. If they don’t, people are going to wonder why this nice evening gets off to such a cheerful little start and comes to such an appalling conclusion.”

Consciously or not, Viertel’s one year at the Taper has often found him aligned with somber material.

In June, he presented the poems of Delmore Schwartz, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” at the Itchey Foot--”about as bleak as 37 1/2 minutes in the theater can get. What we do there is not mass entertainment. The idea is not to compete with ‘Stand By Me.’ ”

Nor, most likely, will his other current projects: John Steppling’s “Dream Coast” (opening Nov. 12 at Taper, Too) and Joshua Sobol’s “Ghetto,” on Lithuania’s doomed Vilna ghetto, circa 1942 (opening tonight at the Taper).

“The deeper I got into that material,” he said with a sigh, “the more profoundly affected I became. When I was growing up (in Stamford, Conn.), World War II seemed as much ancient history as the Civil War. Now I feel the Holocaust breathing down my neck.”

He’s also felt the presence of Israeli playwright Sobol, whose work he adapted from a literal English translation by Kathleen Komar. (In spite of the input, he stressed, “it’s always been a matter of articulating an idea that someone else had. So it’s not my play. Though I did feel free to make a fair number of stylistic changes.”)

Although it’s been a rigorous year (he quips that this job is “10 times harder than being a critic”), the Harvard-educated Viertel, 37, has found the demands energizing.

“I’ve never worked so hard in my life. And it’s great, because you can see the results in front of you fairly fast. Reviews appear more quickly--but they also seem to disappear more quickly. And of course, I wrote for the Herald instead of The Times, which might have had something to do with it. But that old cliche is true: you wrap your fish in yesterday’s newspaper. I’d come out of the theater and literally step on my review from the morning before. So this is a little more visible, more permanent .”

There were other reasons he left reviewing: “Not that the level of theater was awful; I’d gotten used to it. But there weren’t many times when I felt I had to write something--for myself, to put my feelings in order. Instead, I was doing a surfacy kind of work--competent, I imagine but . . . What really burned me out was the Olympic Arts Festival. Every night I needed to have some religious experience, get in touch with what was often very difficult material. At the end, I just didn’t have it anymore.”

Nowadays, he says with a smile, “There are sometimes shows I’d want to write about. Like, I would’ve loved to get my hands on ‘The Knee Plays,’ but no one asked me. My wife said, ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘Well . . . ‘ and she had to go to the bathroom. But I do love going to most plays and not having to think through everything.”

And, he claims, the change of vantage point has been gratifying.

“On one hand, theater usually fails, and one always thinks that one’s reviews are brilliant. When you’re a critic, you can be right or wrong, but who’s to say nay? In the theater, you have 25 people out there telling you where you screwed up, and they’re often right. So the success becomes the day-to-day work, the process of doing it. It’s not always having a hit.”