TAPER NAMES 5 OF 6 SHOWS FOR ITS NEW SEASON

“The Piano Lesson,” a new play by August Wilson (who won this year’s drama Pulitzer for “Fences”); Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind”; Ron Hutchinson’s adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel “Babbitt: A Marriage”; British playwright Anthony Minghella’s “Made in Bangkok,” and “The Lost Highway--The Music and Legend of Hank Williams,” co-written by Randal Myler and Mark Harelik (who also created “The Immigrant”) are the five new plays announced for the Mark Taper’s 1987-88 season by artistic director Gordon Davidson.

A sixth show (scheduled for Nov.12-Dec. 13) remains undecided. Davidson is considering either Janusz Glowacki’s “Hunting Cockroaches,” about a Polish actress and writer in New York and their variations on the American Dream--or Los Angeles playwright George C. Wolfe’s sendup of black stereotypes, “The Colored Museum,” a major hit at New York’s Public Theater last winter.

“Whichever one I can’t get,” Davidson said, “we’ll reschedule.

“It’s always tricky to talk about a new season when you’re still doing the current one, and we’ve had a good one,” he said Saturday, before leaving for Japan, where he’s touring a revival of “Terra Nova” by Ted Tally (Taper, 1979) under the auspices of the Institute of Dramatic Art and the Japan-United States Friendship Commission.

“It’s important to reach out to new artists like George (Wolfe) and to foster old relationships with others. It’s good to have Sam (Shepard)’s work back on our stage. I didn’t feel our production of ‘Angel City’ (1977) did him justice. And it’s good to have Mark (Harelik) and Randy (Myler) back.”

“Lost Highway,” which originated at the Denver Center Theatre Company, as did “The Immigrant,” continues the Taper’s relationship with that company.

“It’ll be redone, rewritten a bit,” Davidson said. “The idea is to further the work.”

“Lost Highway” will conclude the season July 7-Aug. 21, 1988.

“Even though the Asian play is written by an Englishman, it’s appropriate to Los Angeles,” Davidson said. “ ‘Made in Bangkok’ deals with Western attitudes towards Asians. The title is ironic--made as in manufactured and as in sex. It asks a lot of questions about exploitation. It’s funny and dark and a little scary.

“I’ve also been wanting to connect with August (Wilson). And the ‘Babbitt’ sounds a bit like the Iran- contra affair,” he said, covering pretty much all bases.

The “Babbitt,” a commissioned piece by Hutchinson (who wrote last season’s “Rat in the Skull” at Taper, Too), will launch the season (Sept. 10-Oct. 25) as part of the Los Angeles Festival. It will be directed by Steve Robman and feature barbershop and Sweet Adeline quartets singing a cappella as inner voices and voices of the Middle-American townspeople.

Longtime Shepard associate Robert Woodruff will stage “Lie of the Mind” (Jan. 21-March 6), while Taper resident director Robert Egan directs “Made in Bangkok” as part of the UK-LA Festival (March 24-April 17).

Wilson’s “Piano Lesson,” a cooperative venture with Yale, will be staged by Yale Repertory Theatre artistic director and Wilson supporter Lloyd Richards. It will play the Yale Rep, then Boston’s Huntington, then the Taper, May 5-June 19.

“It’s part of Wilson’s black history cycle,” Davidson said. “The piano is a family heirloom dating back to this 1930s Pittsburgh family’s enslavement in the South. Whether to sell it becomes an exploration of much more.

“Wilson writes beautiful poetic language, but he’s still learning to be a dramatist. This is his most accomplished dramatic writing.”

On other fronts, the Taper, Too season is still being assembled; the repertory may or may not happen (“I don’t honestly know; I have to find the money; I have an idea I can’t talk about yet”), and there will be no New Theatre for Now.

“We’ll be doing a whole series of workshops,” he said, “but no festival. Enough festivals.”

Among works to be examined are “Dutch Landscape” by Jon Robin Baitz, an untitled piece by John Steppling and a play by Kres Mersky. And Spalding Gray and Joseph Chaikin are cooking up separate projects.

THE RUMOR MILL: While the Taper has set its next season, the Ahmanson is still working at it, but the only show that’s a go for the 2,000-seat house’s 1987-88 season is Neil Simon’s “Broadway Bound.”

Count the rumored rewrite of Simon’s “The Gingerbread Lady” as pure gingerbread. It’s out.

Negotiations are on to bring in Tina Howe’s “Coastal Disturbances” and to mount revivals of Gore Vidal’s “The Best Man” and William Inge’s “Bus Stop,” but there are no commitments yet and no names on the dotted line.

AVANTI, COMMEDIA! Ferruccio Soleri, the exceptional Harlequin so admired in the Piccolo Teatro’s presentation of Goldoni’s “The Servant of Two Masters” at the Olympic Arts Festival, returns to Los Angeles to participate in “Festival Commedia dell’Arte,” a weeklong series of cultural and theatrical events beginning Friday on the UCLA campus and at the Italian Cultural Institute.

The remarkable Soleri, who’s been called the last of the great Harlequins, will perform Monday only (8 p.m. at UCLA’s Ralph Freud Playhouse) in a one-man series of monologues and demonstrations tracing Commedia through the ages, as he relates and illustrates the nature and properties of its various masks.

A series of free lectures, set for 4 p.m. in Room 1340 in UCLA’s MacGowan Hall, include: Monday, Maurizio Scaparro, artistic director of Italy’s Teatro di Roma, who’ll discuss “The Modernity of Commedia”; Tuesday, Soleri, who will talk about “The Masks of Commedia” and, Wednesday, Scaparro focusing on “The Mask of Pulcinella.”

Things open up next Thursday with a round-table discussion of something called “The Theatre of the Old World and the New World of Theatre” with Scaparro, Italian critic Renzo Tian and professors Franco Tonelli, Carl Mueller and Michael McLain.

The closing event (June 5, 6 p.m., at the Italian Cultural Institute, 12400 Wilshire Blvd.) will be a free screening of “Tools of Our Craft,” a series of videos of playwright/actor/director and clown prince Dario Fo interpreting Commedia’s traditions.

UCLA will prime its audience Friday at 8 p.m. with “Bottoms Up! The MusiCommedia,” an original student production in the Freud Playhouse.

Tickets for the Soleri performance are $20 (seniors $3). Information: (213) 206-6465.