IS THERE A DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE? : The Curious Malady That Afflicts Some Directors

You’d think directors and their actors would be the best of friends, soulmates embarked on the same voyage.

Sometimes. Other times those actors are captives on a slave ship rowing and huffing and puffing against the wind.

But let’s start with the happy occasions.

When actor/director Louis Jouvet staged a production of Moliere’s “School for Wives” in the mid-’40s, with a set by the celebrated Christian Berard, it featured a house with an upstairs balcony in a garden whose walls rather charmingly opened and closed according to the location of the scene.

When the wife’s prospective young lover finally scaled the balcony and vanished inside to consummate the romance, the house, overtaken by modesty, blushed.

It did not just turn pink. It . . . blushed. No mistake. In one inspired minute, Jouvet, Berard, Moliere and the house united magically to deliver the quintessence of the play, leaving the audience ecstatic.

It was a moment of brilliance. Yet such benevolent manifestations of directorial genius are rare. The pernicious ones are much more common. Recent and not-so-recent attacks of directoritis on our stages show that it can be a tricky affliction, usually unacknowledged by its victims and best described as an inflammation of the ego causing an excessive itch to be different.

Question: Did Emily Mann really mean to direct her recent “Hedda Gabler” at the La Jolla Playhouse as a comedy? Did Tony Richardson want his Cleopatra in “Antony and Cleopatra,” lately at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, to be a petulant princess, instead of a tragic queen?

Perhaps--and perhaps not. The intention at the outset may have been relatively innocent. After all, no production aims to misfire, but once embarked on the wrong road, it’s hard to turn back. To add to the confusion, audiences look up to directors--such as Jouvet--who can deliver a script in a new way. So what is it that makes one fit of auteurisme laughable and another laudable?

Clarity. And common sense. It’s safe to assume that Ibsen and Shakespeare had something in mind when they set out to write “Hedda” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” respectively. If a director has an idea for staging a play that enhances the author’s original thought--and pulls it off--there aren’t enough laurels to heap on the brave new approach. But how new is new? The most breathtaking stagings of old classics are only a form of redefined emphasis--a magnification of the author’s own intent, which was always there. A director’s true genius lies in underlining that vision, making us rediscover the piece as if it were new.

Director Robert Egan (not always immune to directoritis) mounted a “Hedda Gabler” for the Mark Taper Rep in 1986 that did just that. Except for an arguable coup de theatre at the end, he illuminated the play and the title character--a chilling Kate Mulgrew--by inserting needles of emphasis at strategic points with the skill of an acupuncturist.

Who can forget Hedda’s first entrance-- alone--into the darkened parlor of the house she was to occupy for the rest of her life with the lackluster Tesman? Her impassive stare took in the room like a woman reacting to a sentence. Her eyes locked onto a chair deemed out of place. In silence and with great care, she repositioned it--a skeptical prisoner rearranging the cell. The gesture spoke volumes about neurosis, frustration--and fear. Even someone unfamiliar with the play couldn’t miss the reverberation. Not only was the stage set, but in a single stroke the character was intimately revealed.

Egan’s stamp was all over that production, but having remained entirely faithful to Ibsen, he received high marks for the lucidity of his interpretation-- a key word.

We’ve had the outright usurpations-- those dubious rewrites of Ibsen and Shakespeare by Charles Marowitz--and we’ve had the Idi Amin “Macbeths,” the modern-day “Julius Caesars,” “Medeas” and “Phaedras.” They’ve worked with varying degrees of success, in direct proportion to a director’s imagination and talent--and above all the level of his or her respect for the writer.

The trouble is that trouble is not always simple to diagnose. It can be going too far with a bad idea, or not far enough with a good one. Egan ran into problems in 1985 with a “Measure for Measure” that he started to paint in erotically suggestive, punkish tones of decay, but in which he lost his resolve somewhere along the line. His signature remained superficial rather than penetrating. He’d learned better by the time he delivered his “Hedda.”

Things only run amok when a director, instead of interpreting an author’s idea, superimposes his own. Aside from the presumption involved, the price paid for such transgression can be very high. Add enough layers of other meaning to a play and it’ll crack under the burden.

Mann’s “Hedda,” which closed Aug. 1 at La Jolla, was an extreme example. She encouraged actress Natalia Nogulich to play Hedda as a spoiled brat, given to throwing poor Mrs. Elvsted into the couch--or slamming her down into it, hand pressed to the crown of her head. Aside from the farcical image it created (the first sign of the play’s derailment), why would anyone, especially a relative stranger, put up with such treatment and--worse--fail to react to it?

Mrs. Elvsted (Clare Wren) did not react simply because there is no provision for reaction in the play. Mann’s pretext for Hedda’s strange behavior came from the latter’s reference to Mrs. Elvsted, whom she’d known only casually in school, as “the girl with the irritating hair that she was always showing off.” Mrs. Elvsted is also a presumed old flame of Tesman’s; she shows up flustered over the fate of Eilert Lovborg, another man who’d played a pivotal role in Hedda’s fantasies. But no matter how enormous these perceived threats or injuries, a woman of Hedda’s breeding, who has had the restraint to endure six months of an intolerable honeymoon, would simply not haul off and vulgarly plop someone into a sofa.

It was a betrayal of class and consequently of logic in the character. Having once thrown the play off course, the production had no way to right itself. Hedda’s burning of Lovborg’s manuscript, instead of being a horrifying act of calculated destruction, was trivialized as the whim of a pouting child. What was once central to the play Ibsen wrote became a throwaway moment in the one Mann directed.

Other distortions followed. William Russ played Lovborg not as a flawed genius but as a bit of a bumbler and therefore someone we cared much less about. Gerry Bamman delivered an inordinately mild Judge Brack--a bit randy and corrupt, but relatively sunny. Where was the fearsome, menacing figure who knows what Hedda’s been up to and puts the screws on her to the point where she raises a pistol to her head?

Her suicide at La Jolla bordered on the ludicrous, in keeping with the idea of this play as comedy perhaps, but not in keeping with much else. The curious slants on Brack and Lovborg were part of the attempt to satisfy the internal logic of this director’s concoction. But, in fact, they had an opposite effect. The production just grew sillier and sillier.

Something of this kind of domino effect marred aspects of Stein Winge’s “The Three Sisters” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1985. Winge directed the Chekhov as a full-throttle comedy (something Chekhov claimed he wanted), but what with live bodies in trunks and other oddities, even an extravagant sense of the theatrical did not always hold up.

Excess tantamount to abuse (of script and of audience) so severely marred Winge’s monster mounting of Michel De Ghelderode’s “Barabbas” (1986) that it virtually obliterated the play. And yet when this same director brought his Scandinavian sensibility to Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” (1987), he found in it untapped deposits of humor that were perhaps visible only to a cultural outsider. The vision was enriching.

In Tony Richardson’s “Antony and Cleopatra” (which closed last Sunday at LATC), the representation of the Egyptian queen (Rosalind Cash) as a vixen, more dedicated to teasing Antony (Mitch Ryan) than to loving him, shot huge holes in the play. Would any queen so devotedly self-centered kill herself over a man? And what was gained by depicting Octavius Caesar (Kyle Secor) as a phobic psychopath?

Mostly . . . distraction, which was also provided in abundance by Timian Alsaker’s set and props. (Designeritis is often an offshoot of directoritis; together they can lay waste to entire productions.) The idea, surely, was to accentuate the high drama with wall-to-wall gleaming white sand, mechanical bridges and what looked like a fancy trawler’s fishing net for which were found a variety of strange and remarkable uses. Some worked and some didn’t, but in all cases the text did what it shouldn’t: It played second fiddle to the paraphernalia.

After nursing wounds from a few such assaults, it can be very refreshing to walk into a darkened theater where the only thing allowed to shine is the play--and only the play.