HOW ABSTRACT CAN A THEATER PIECE AFFORD TO GET?

Working my way through “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985” exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the other Sunday, I was struck by this 1914 statement by Piet Mondrian:

“As matter becomes redundant, the representation of matter becomes redundant. We arrive at the representation of other things, such as the laws which hold matter together. These are the great generalities. . . .”

Whether this is a platform statement for all 20th-Century abstract painting, I leave to colleague William Wilson. It got me thinking about 20th-Century theater. It, too, can claim that “the representation of matter” has become “redundant,” with so many films and sitcoms being turned out. It, too, may want to portray “other things.” But how abstract can a theater piece be?

Not so abstract as a painting. The latter can hold the eye through the interplay of its lines and colors alone. Theater can never be that pure. It works with actors. Put two human beings on the stage and a situation seems to be in the making, no matter how abstract the image is meant to be.

That’s what the traditional playwright wants to do: to invent situations that expose the kind of “laws” and “great generalities” that rule human behavior. Here it’s the viewer who makes the abstraction, from the particulars selected by the artist. Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” presented on PBS the other week, shows how powerful this kind of drama can still be.

But non-linear plays also have their power. Audiences today can get along with a lot less story, as long as something else is happening up there.

In a Robert Wilson piece, it’s the visuals. Wilson comes closest of any contemporary theater maker to the condition of the abstract painter. His surfaces are so faultlessly composed (the placement of the figures in the frame, the strong verticals and horizontals, the laser-sharp lighting, the deliberate pace) that they are almost their own reward. Think of “The Knee Plays” last season at the Doolittle.

Even with Wilson, though, it helps to have a primitive sense of where the piece is going. (“The Knee Plays” program included a story board.) An evening of purely random images would put an audience in a condition of psychic overload.

How about an evening of random words? Picasso wrote such a play--”Desire Caught by the Tail.” Gertrude Stein wrote a sheaf of them, one of which became an Off Broadway hit: “In Circles.” This had no characters, no plot and no lines that made any particular sense. “Teeth are sincerely regretted”?

But by setting Stein’s lines to a charming score by Al Carmines, and by devising a scenario about a young man trying not to feel shy at a garden party, the creators of the production gave the audience a place to put down its feet. Soon the listener was chasing Stein’s words like butterflies--in his imagination.

Stein’s plays are playful. But some Russian poets of her day truly believed that freeing words from their customary linguistic obligations would lead to the discovery of a language behind language, a place of magical sounds (analogous to Mondrian’s all-explaining grid).

Appropriately, the stage piece that inaugurated MOCA’s Ahmanson Gallery in December was such a work, Khlebnikov’s “Zangezi” (1922). The language here wasn’t blithe, but full of stress and prophetic urgency, and David Warrilow gave it a brilliant reading.

Director Peter Sellars had also invented a ground plan for the piece, with Warrilow and Ruth Maleczech as street people. And Jon Hassell contributed a fine sound-score. But “Zangezi” didn’t mesmerize. We weren’t getting the colors and the stresses of the original Russian--this was an English translation by Paul Schmidt--and the flow of images didn’t seem all that liberating.

We did get a sense of what an evening of free-form rant would be like: Difficult. Playwrights need to experiment with words, but it’s unproved that there’s any expressive gain in divorcing them from signification. Words don’t become less sensual because they carry meanings. Jon Robin Baitz’s “The Film Society” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center and Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” at the Taper both have passages that succeed as a pure verbal riffs, plus spelling out what’s up with their characters.

That’s not to say that the contemporary playwright has to spell everything out. Chekhov’s discovery was that plays can be made up mostly of little moments, acted out by characters who can’t quite say what they mean. Tennessee Williams carried on that tradition in “The Glass Menagerie,” now being revived, not too abstractly, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. What a world of undisclosure in Laura’s farewell line: “Souvenir.”

How to express what’s going on in that inner world? The soliloquy is still available. Craig Lucas and Craig Carnelia make good use of it in their “Three Postcards” at South Coast Repertory. Three women friends are having dinner in an upscale Manhattan restaurant. Not only do we hear what they’re thinking, we hear what the waiter’s thinking.

But sometimes he’s not the waiter. Sometimes he’s one of their husbands. And sometimes the women are back in high school. And sometimes they sing what they’re thinking. And then the waiter brings coffee.

As when Picasso presents several aspects of the same figure simultaneously, we see the situation and what’s under the situation. We may even think we see below that, to a kind of universal ground plan not unlike Mondrian’s grid.

As in another abstract play called “Our Town,” an ordinary (even trivial) occasion is fleetingly seen as a sanctified one, with no indication as to who is doing the sanctifying. This is not an effect you’d expect to find in a play about a restaurant with a drop-dead menu, but it’s clearly part of the play’s strategy, as it was in Lucas’ previous script, “Blue Window,” where a Sunday night dinner party was likewise seen sub specie eternitatis .

“Three Postcards” is a play with an aura. Which brings us back to the LACMA show and its insistence on a link between abstract art and the spiritual. It’s interesting to learn that one of its painters, Hilma Af Klint, gave up abstraction after her mentor, Rudolf Steiner, admonished her not to try to paint the spiritual realm directly. That’s probably a sound rule for playwrights too. The human figure will always be in the frame. But there are a million ways to present it.