WEST COAST PREMIERE OF ‘EVERY GOOD BOY’ : TWO VIEWS OF STOPPARD-PREVIN’S PIECE FOR ACTORS AND ORCHESTRA

Given the assignment to produce a scenario for actors and onstage symphony orchestra, the average playwright would devise a story about an orchestra. Perhaps the players decide to kill their conductor in mid-rehearsal. . . .

Tom Stoppard is not the average playwright. Stoppard’s and Andre Previn’s “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (through Sunday) concerns a lunatic who conducts an invisible orchestra (Rene Auberjonois) and a political dissident who won’t march in step with the State (David Dukes.)

The two share a room in a mental hospital--a little white island fronting a sea of orchestral players at the Pavilion. The lunatic belongs in a mental ward, but the dissident does not. His neurosis is that he sees his country has become a prison. Still, the State is even ready to discharge him, for political reasons, if he will acknowledge having been “ill.”

He will not, but a Colonel who happens to be a semanticist (Joseph Maher) finds a devious way out. “Every Good Boy” has the witty dialogue and clever plot that we associate with Stoppard’s plays, and a sense of social concern that we didn’t associate with him when the work was new (1977).

Commissioned by Previn for the London Symphony--here Previn conducts his new orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic--the piece can also be thought of as a strictly drawn theater experiment. Can an orchestra be given a speaking role (so to speak) in a drama? On the evidence here, it’s tough. Sooner or later it will find itself playing background music.

Colleague Albert Goldberg gives his reaction to the piece in an adjoining column. I was less interested in what the orchestra was playing as in who it was playing. For the loony (Auberjonois was born to play Stoppard), the orchestra functioned as a sort of invisible lackey: someone he could boss around. Not now, you dunce!

For the dissident (Dukes’ performance is graver, as suits the material), the orchestra embodies his oppressed countrymen: a band of anonymous Comrades sawing away at their assigned parts. His psychiatrist (Dakin Matthews) even steps out of the orchestra when it’s time for one of their office chats. (“You are here because you have delusions that sane people are put in hospitals.”)

This second use isn’t as powerful as it might have been: The orchestra doesn’t rise, visually, to the metaphor. Still, we can feel it as a kind of social force field (including the way the characters have to walk through it to get to the three small separate stages). We can see why it’s on stage instead of in the pit.

Elsewhere, though, it does what orchestras usually do in the theater: It either underscores the action or comments on it. That’s a much less vivid function, although it was fun, Thursday night, to see Previn sneak into his conductor’s spot, as though about to commence some kind of subversive activity. One didn’t know whether this was natural modesty or a touch invented by director Gordon Davidson.

As a musico-dramatic journey, “Every Good Boy” doesn’t quite come off. (It does have a boy, the dissident’s son, nicely played by Remy Auberjonois.) But it comes closer to being an honest-to-God play than one might have expected, given its parameters, and one can see why Previn and Stoppard may try another collaboration.

As a stunt, the piece is novel, amusing and not too protracted: it last about an hour and a quarter. And just as the Philharmonic is a world-class orchestra, so are Davidson’s actors world-class soloists. Auberjonois, Dukes, Maher and Matthews (all Taper veterans) share Stoppard’s relish for words. The microphones were on at the Pavilion, but the illusion was that the actors were hand-delivering the text to the balcony, with a particular flourish from Auberjonois.

Katherine McGrath was appropriately severe as young Auberjonois’ teacher, and there was real magic when the Philharmonic’s concert shell was superseded by a huge hospital curtain, putting us into the world of the play. (Ralph Funicello designed the set, Paulie Jenkins the lighting, Robert Blackman the costumes.) “Every Good Boy” does fine--as far as it goes.

‘EVERY GOOD BOY DESERVES FAVOUR’ A piece for actors and orchestra, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Script by Tom Stoppard. Music by Andre Previn. Presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. Director Gordon Davidson. Conductor Previn. Associate director Robert Egan. Set Ralph Funicello. Lighting Paulie Jenkins. Stage managers Don Winton, Frank Bayer. With Rene Auberjonois, David Dukes, Katherine McGrath, Remy Auberjonois, Dakin Matthews and Joseph Maher. Plays at 8 p.m. today and 2:30 p.m. Sunday. 135 N. Grand Ave.