HOUSEMAN TRIBUTE WON THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

Tributes, to anyone, are the hardest things to stage. How do you get 24 busy people together to rehearse a tribute, even if it is for as towering a figure as John Houseman, and make it all run smoothly?

There were, in fact, only about 16 people on the Taper stage Tuesday for the Houseman tribute (they just looked like 24, sitting on crowded risers), and it didn’t all run quite as smoothly as they might have liked. But nobody cared. In the first place, they were all pros who know their way around a stage and can negotiate a misplaced cue. All were reveling in the accolade at hand: mostly reading from John Houseman’s autobiographies (“Run-Through,” Front and Center,” “Final Dress”) and retelling humorous or pivotal or personal anecdotes culled from Houseman’s 60 crowded years in show business.

As Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson pointed out in his introduction, this was hardly the first tribute to the man who made the Mercury Theatre, “The Paper Chase” and Smith Barney equally famous. There was a tribute in Houston, one in Dallas and that recent big one in New York, when they named a theater after him. What do you do for an encore? You read from the best. After all, he acquired these tributes the old-fashioned way: he earned them.

Two Houseman alums, Madolyn Smith and David Ogden Stiers, served as semi-official emcees, inviting people (those on stage as well as some off stage) to step up to the mikes as their names came up and add color of their own to the multitude of tales told.

We heard about the WPA and the impressive Hallie Flanagan who headed its theater program; the voodoo “Macbeth,” followed all too swiftly by the death of Percy Hammond presumably “of pneumonia.” (Houseman suggests that, having questioned the production’s merit, Hammond may have succumbed to voodoo incantations.)

There were numerous references to Virgil Thomson, a lifelong friend and the first artist to take a chance on Houseman. Longtime associate Norman Lloyd, who goes back to Houseman’s Mercury Theatre days, read Houseman’s astounding description of his first encounter with Orson Welles (as a pasty, rotund and indelible Tybalt in “Romeo and Juliet”) and the “War of the Worlds” incident, when a nation panicked at a radio play that sounded like an all-too-real invasion by Martians.

Ellen Geer, daughter of Will, another Houseman cohort, recounted how her father put her to bed as a child with real-life fables--such as the rollicking tale of the WPA’s “The Cradle Will Rock,” a notorious bit of hyper-eventful political theater, reflecting a time when careers and the country were buoyant and young and thrived on controversy.

From there the reminiscence focused on film (such varied outings as “Lust for Life,” “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Executive Suite” and the black-and-white “Julius Caesar” that took a chance on a young Antony named Marlon Brando)--and the salad days of “Playhouse 90.” Lloyd, Robert L. Joseph, John Frankenheimer, Martin Manulis and Ethel Winant shared stories about the man who came to the medium “unburdened by the reality of how to make television” and therefore did well at it, as he did at almost everything else.

Finally, the discussion came to rest on the UCLA Theatre Group, ancestor to the Mark Taper Forum (the group was invited to take over the Taper when it was ready to open in 1967) and the undisguised reason for this tribute. It was, indeed, Houseman who started this company on the Westwood campus in the early ‘60s, with a group of top professionals, including (among many others) Nina Foch, Inga Swenson, Doris Dowling, Philip Abbott, Betty Harford and Pippa Scott.

(A 1947 world premiere of Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo” with Charles Laughton at the Coronet had been Houseman’s first attempt at serious theater in this town, but it didn’t take. The city was not ready. Two decades later, it was.)

Scott recalled that the theatrical climate in Los Angeles was so green that a production of “The Three Sisters” could be billed as a West Coast premiere. When Houseman did “King Lear” with black-listed Morris Carnovsky, the production was so successful they decided to move it to the Pilgrimage Bowl. Houseman called on a stage manager from his Stratford (Conn.) days to come help with the transfer. When shortly thereafter Houseman decided to go live in Paris, he recommended this stage manager to replace him. The fellow’s name was Gordon Davidson.

“He taught me what loyalty was,” said Davidson from the podium. “He taught me something about the value of courage.”

When Houseman, a vigorous 84, finally stepped up on stage, he stood through the applause looking at once humbled and larger than life. Everything paled by comparison to his tall, massive and distinctive presence. “The only important thing when you’ve lived as long as I have,” he said after a collection of acknowledgements, “is what you’ve accomplished--a body of work. . . . We all tend to talk about our successes,” he said. “At least as important are our failures.”

Looking back on his lifetime of relationships, he singled out Welles (“my only direct contact with genius”), lighting designer Jean Rosenthal (“my most beloved (professional) partner and friend”), the absent Thomson (“we did 18 shows together; I learned a lot from him, including cultural politics”) and another former stage manager of his, James Bridges, producer of “Paper Chase,” “the reckless young man who had the unspeakable gall to select an aging schoolteacher to play a part in his movie.”