MARK TAPER TWENTY : SPALDING GRAY TRIPS THROUGH TAPER HISTORY

In the beginning was the word and the word was hope .

“Welcome to what I hope will be a personal history of the Mark Taper Forum,” said monologuist Spalding Gray, as he greeted Wednesday’s packed house from the Taper stage. (It was furnished with two mikes and two brown leather arm-chairs, emblematic of Gray’s one-on-one impromptu monologue/interviews.)

Indeed, things got off to a promising start, but they didn’t stay that way. Either because the theater is less intimate than the much smaller Taper, Too (where Gray very successfully gave us “Interviewing the Audience” in 1983 and “Swimming to Cambodia” in ‘85), or because the skimpy planning may have left him uncertain about what to do and whom to do it with, the exchanges became too frequently derailed.

The evening tumbled from an early high point to a sequence of overextended segments in which Gray seemed somewhat at a loss and the proverbial tables were too frequently turned--with the interviewee becoming interviewer and, on occasion, Gray himself inquiring of his guests, “Is there anything you’d like to ask me?”

Unfortunately, there wasn’t.

After settling in, the 45-year-old Gray, looking his usual paradoxically jaunty and phlegmatic self, began by volunteering some personal background--always a plus. But his own association with the Taper, it turned out, is limited, which left him at a disadvantage.

It did make for a darkly comic introduction, however, as he told of coming to Los Angeles in 1983 at Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson’s request, and being greeted at the hotel with “Welcome to the motel where Janis Joplin died.”

The absurdist trip continued as Gray, in need of a throat specialist, was sent to Rod Stewart’s doctor, where the waiting room walls were covered with gold records (Stewart’s) and the physician asked Gray if he had an understudy.

There were other hyper-real incidents: A two-week hitchhike to San Francisco on Highway 1 (in three-piece suit, with no luggage--as the basis for a monologue) ended before it began when the rain-soaked highway fell into the sea. Gray is always at his best re-creating the faint madness as well as the mood of a moment.

And his first guest of the evening fell right into the hyper-realistic mode. Vivian Elliff has been at the Taper for 13 years, starting out in audience development, eventually becoming Davidson’s personal secretary. Her unorthodox mix of unflappable candor and telescopic thinking made for a host of comic answers. Some samplers:

“What did you do in audience development?”

“I was comic relief.”

“Did you move up from audience development?”

“I moved across. “

What did she do when she took a few months off? “I stared.”

Other topics of discussion:

“The Davidson car wrecks, I suppose.” They have car wrecks ?

“Oh, yes. Regularly. In 1967 they ran into each other. Opening night.

These exchanges were among the liveliest, closely matched by Bob Routolo’s. Routolo, the Taper’s technical director since 1970, insisted he “gave up work 10 years ago” and gets paid “exceptionally well.” Why? “I learned to do nothing efficiently.” Does he see Davidson? “On the sidewalk. We stand and say, ‘What happened?’ ”

But things went downhill from there. The next guest was actress Karen Black, who sang and went unchecked on several long rambles--none having to do with the Taper. After intermission came box-office treasurer Joel Brykman (“I came in to help for three days 20 years ago . . . “); Davidson’s wife, Judy, who credited the duration of their 27-year marriage to the fact that they see each other 30 minutes every morning, and subscriber Cynthia Rollis, who got Gray to admit he doesn’t much like plays, finds them contrived, and walked out on “The Traveler.” Final guest of the evening was John Glover, star of “The Traveler,” who playfully rebuked Gray for walking out--and brought the sagging evening briefly back to life with a humorous dissection of his fear of owning a car.

By then, however, it was too little too late. The evening had gone slightly awry with Black’s winding and impenetrable detours into religion (Scientology) and philosophy and never fully recovered. Gray’s momentum had wavered under the assault and, at evening’s end, seemed all but gone. There was little left to say except good night.