SOVIETS BELIEVE U.S. THEATER IS LOSING ITS PUNCH

American theater is too concerned with the whims of its audience. It doesn’t challenge them enough. It too often succumbs to the need to entertain, even titillate and amuse. It needs to be more aggressive, more intellectual, more daring and bold.

Was this playwright Edward Albee speaking at a recent arts conference? Was this a troubled American director, tired of playing to this year’s trends, tired of conforming, tired of tailoring art to fashion?

In this case, the outspoken critic was Lev Dodin, artistic director of the Maly Theatre in Leningrad. Dodin was sitting on the terrace of the Mandell Weiss Theatre in La Jolla on Wednesday night, one of a dozen visiting artists from the Soviet Union. The La Jolla Playhouse was the most recent stop in a tour of American cities--and theaters--that began May 17.

Dodin is a bright, articulate man with dark, brooding eyes and a penchant for getting to the heart of a subject. In the time he’s been here--his first trip to the United States--he has seen theaters in New Haven, Conn.; Providence, R.I., and, of course, on Broadway. He watched “A Chorus Line” and found it curiously out of date, matching his assessment that American theater aims too hard to please.

Is it competition from television, he asked a group of American listeners nearby. Do funding problems, which generally don’t exist in a state-sponsored system, compromise the integrity of art?

“The theater I’ve seen here so far,” Dodin said, moments before watching a La Jolla Playhouse preview of “The Matchmaker,” “is overly concerned with audience--with the interests of the audience, rather than with conflicts that might exist. Rather than searching for human issues--sacrifice and suffering--they seem too willing to appease and please.”

American theater appears technologically marvelous, Dodin said, but theater in the Soviet Union might be more inclined to challenge the mind.

Dodin’s comments were echoed by others who mixed and mingled with the Soviet artists on a cool night, over an elegant dinner served outside. Dodin said he and his colleagues had been treated lavishly by their American hosts, which included La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff. This was the exchange portion of a trip that began in December when McAnuff and other American artists toured the Soviet Union.

Dodin and several of his colleagues said they had “gotten an earful” about the problems of American theater--and American culture in general--from scores of American artists seen along the way, from New York to Los Angeles to San Diego. Funding problems, the encroachment of television, the decline of Broadway, the scourge of shallowness--these are the themes, he said, the Soviets keep hearing over and over.

Actor Michael Constantine of TV’s “Room 222” and countless other TV shows and films was on hand to meet with the Soviets and maybe to do research--he’s playing a Soviet arms agent in the upcoming Playhouse production, “A Walk in the Woods.”

“Absolutely,” he said, in reference to the charge that American theater--and culture--is losing its punch in terms of art. Entertainment , he said, is now the disturbing trend.

“That’s why I’m doing a play here,” Constantine said. “I haven’t done a play in seven years. This is the first piece of work I’ve seen in ages I could truly be proud of. ‘Woods’ is challenging, memorable. I’m afraid that with all its restrictions the Soviet system may offer a more serious environment. Look at American television. It’s hours and hours of trash.”

Dodin and his colleagues fielded hours--by this time, days--of political questions. Curiosity about glasnost , the Mikhail S. Gorbachev policy of renewed openness and freeing of restriction, is as much on American minds, he said, as it is on those of the Soviets.

Anastasia Vertinskaya is a movie star and veteran of the stage--one of the Soviet Union’s leading actresses and a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. She said she appreciates the political questions, which give her greater insight into American concerns while sharpening her own views. She said artists in the Soviet Union welcome Gorbachev and glasnost in the way that children in American welcome Christmas.

“Gorbachev is trying to accelerate a gigantic reconstruction,” she said. “Put simply, he’s trying to deal with everything that interfered in the past--with art, economics . . . He’s dealing with it by changing it, in some ways boldly. But it’s change for the better.”

Vertinskaya said censorship has been a “serious problem” in Soviet theater.

“ Glasnost is having a great deal of impact on Soviet playwrights,” she said. “It is challenging and changing them. They now have more freedom to select their own repertoire, as does the theater itself.”

Dodin said glasnost is changing the economic makeup of Soviet theater. Some are actually experimenting with an American model, in which they support themselves financially, without the benefit of a Kremlin bankroll. The motivation for this is based in part, he said, on a response to complacency. And again, he was critical, but this time of his own country’s system.

“Theoretically, with support of the state, survival is guaranteed,” he said. “But with such a guarantee can come laziness, a lack of restlessness. Even with its desire to entertain and please, and not offend, I feel the American theater may be more inclined, in some quarters, to take risks.”

McAnuff believes such risks are necessary and counts getting to know Soviet artists as among the many worth taking.

“We have to face the fact that our two countries are not going to surrender their nuclear weapons,” he said. “I mean, they’re just not. It’s naive to think otherwise. But what we can do is build trust--interact peacefully.

“One way of doing that is by doing what we’re doing here. Yes, I would love to go to the Soviet Union and direct a play, and there’s a chance I may. I’ve already learned a lot about these people, as they have about me. Even so, there’s a lot more left to learn. The only way we can understand someone different is by first learning to trust them.”