‘TAPER <i> 2</i> 0’--A BIG FINISH

This was going to be a column in response to the flood of letters inspired by my recent assessment of the first 20 years of the Mark Taper Forum. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a flood of letters. In fact, there were only two. One was from a man who thought it was mean to spoil the Taper’s nice birthday party by writing a critical piece about it, and one was from a man who wondered why I had to mention that “The Immigrant” was about Jews. What did I have against Jews?

Either the original column was a bore, or people are tired of talking about the Mark Taper Forum. After a whole week of celebrating its existence, that’s a possibility. Seven days of “Taper 20” may have been overkill.

I only caught the end of the celebration. It was rather impressive, with one exception: “Aunt Dan and Lemon” at Taper, Too. Director Robert Egan obviously didn’t want to produce a carbon copy of the New York production, and he succeeded in not doing that. But the play went up the chimney. We’ll have to wait until somebody else produces it to see what author Wallace Shawn is getting at.

Otherwise, last weekend saw the Taper at top strength. It’s interesting to see how this theater always rises to the challenge of the special event--a memorial service, a festival of new plays, an Olympics.

Partly that’s because it’s a change from the resident-theater grind, and partly it’s because commemorative events are right up Gordon Davidson’s street. The chance to celebrate 20 years at the Taper spoke both to the showman in Davidson and to the chronicler in him--the one who believes in marking off birthdays and anniversaries, so as to keep track of how far one has come on the road.

Events like “Taper 20” also give Davidson a chance to play host. He is a born one. Joe Papp always seems slightly disgruntled when welcoming people to his theater, as if audiences were a necessary evil but not what theater is about. Davidson not only seems glad to see people at his theater, he approves of them for being there. It shows how smart they are.

A good host can adapt to the occasion without turning into a chameleon. Saturday night’s gala saw Davidson in black tie. Sunday morning’s performance of “1,000 Cranes” for kids saw him in Levi’s. Same smile, same ease. Sit down, we’ve got something extraordinary for you.

The gala summed up 20 years of Taper history without being too pompous about it. Scenes from “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” and “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” and “Children of a Lesser God” showed those of us who get exasperated with the Taper why we keep coming back to it.

The emphasis was on the Taper as a theater of the word. Lou Gossett Jr. did a tough monologue from “Murderous Angels,” Michael Gross did a thoughtful one from “The Real Thing,” Phil Proctor did a goofy one from “Muzeeka.” One actor on a bare stage--if he’s really saying something, we’ll listen for a long time.

Sometimes it was two actors, as when Nobu NcCarthy and Sab Shimono did a funny, bashful love scene from Philip Kan Gotanda’s “The Wash.” Sometimes it was a bunch of actors fiddling around, as in the scenes from “The Robber Bridegroom,” a show I could stand to see again.

And just when it looked as if we were in for some kind of commencement address, Davidson came out on the stage riding a circus elephant. “There’s no level to which I won’t sink,” he said--and began a commencement address.

That’s showmanship. We saw it again Sunday morning. After the Improvisational Theater Project’s “1,000 Cranes,” the kids in the audience signed their names to balloons in the Music Center Plaza and let them go at the count of 10--500 balloons rising until they were confetti in the sky.

“1,000 Cranes” had been a bright, hip show, perfect for kids at the age when to be cool is to be everything. (The show has been touring the schools all year.) But its subject was heavy duty: nuclear war. How does a youngster think about it? Should he think about it?

The kids laughed at the right places, but they fell silent at the right places, too. They had no trouble identifying with the youngsters in the story: the scrappy Japanese girl dying of leukemia in the 1950s (Miho), the jumpy American boy realizing in the 1980s that nuclear war isn’t video games (John Allee).

From the notes on the balloons, you could see that “1,000 Cranes” had left them not depressed but thoughtful. “LET’S TRY TO HAVE PIECE”--the spelling needed work, but the mind was engaged.

Yet “1,000 Cranes” wasn’t agitprop drama. Colin Thomas’ script and Peter C. Brosius’ staging were equally concerned with the way children are reluctant to share their fears with their parents and may not even tell their friends about them. (The parent, in each case, was Rosie Lee Hooks; the friend, Karen Maruyama.)

It wasn’t a message play. It was a play, complex and satisfying--one of the best-written scripts and best-realized productions to have come out of the Taper in some time. As Davidson noted in his introductory talk, the ITP hardly ever gets to play on its home stage; the budget isn’t there. If there’s any wing of the Taper that deserves a corporate sponsor, this is it.

“Taper 20’s” final event came on Sunday afternoon: “The Good War,” presented by the Taper’s literary cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante. (It continues through May 3.)

Adapted from Studs Terkel’s book by Robert Egan and Brian Kulick, this started as a sing-along of World War II songs--”I Left My Heart at the Stage Door Canteen,” “The White Cliffs of Dover,” and the like. Billy Barnes played the piano, and if you didn’t remember the words, there was a song sheet.

If you did remember the words, there had to be other memories, and that was the meat of Terkel’s book. The cast (Helen Hunt, Michael Lembeck, Haunani Minn, Brian Mitchell, B. J. Ward) could only represent a few of the hundreds of people interviewed by Terkel. But it was a fair representation. We heard about the war from those who had fought it, and from those on the home front, and it wasn’t all heroism and Mom’s apple pie.

We heard stories that didn’t make Life magazine--atrocities committed by nice American boys. We heard how quickly the thrill of war runs off when one’s buddy has his face half blown away. We heard about pressures on women back home to do their bit for the troops, even to marrying someone they hardly knew, so that the boys would have someone to come back to.

The point was made. If World War II was a legitimate war, if it had opened American women’s eyes to their power, if it had taught black soldiers to stand tall--still, it wasn’t a “good” war. No war is.

Still, the show can’t help feeling wistful about a time when America really thought she had all the answers--that she was the smartest and the most virtuous nation in history. The doubts set in at Hiroshima, and here “The Good War” links with “1,000 Cranes.” It made sense to see them on the same day.

Yet the weekend’s guiding image was that silly elephant. Her name was Flora and Davidson clearly threw her in just as a sight gag. But she brought to mind T. S. Eliot’s poem about the hippopotamus--Eliot’s image of the church in its clumsy, muddy, real-world state, as opposed to The One True Church of theological abstraction.

Lumbering onto the Taper stage, Flora suggested a resident-theater operation, not as a critic thinks it should be, but as it really is--slow-moving, encumbered by bureaucracy, enslaved to doing the same old tricks for the same old crowd. Just for a moment, one rather admired the man on Flora’s back for keeping her moving in more or less the right direction, and even making it look like fun.