Los Angeles Festival : KCET-TV SERIES SETS STAGE FOR LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : Programs Will Help Viewers Sort Out the Theater Events

A live show can’t be caught under glass. But a good TV documentary can help us appreciate what went into the making of the show.

In that regard, KCET-TV Channel 28’s current “Setting the Stage” series helps the home viewer to sort out the theater events at the Los Angeles Festival without being a substitute for them.

Saturday night’s segment goes to Peter Brook, whose nine-hour staging of the Indian epic “The Mahabharata” is likely to be the talk of the Festival.

From 9 to 10 p.m., we watch Brook’s company perform outdoors at the Adelaide Festival in Australia. The playing space suggests the quarry where they developed “The Mahabharata,” but the material is from earlier explorations--into Persian mythology, for example, in “The Conference of the Birds.”

The playing is down to earth, in line with Brook’s belief that theater’s only responsibility--but a huge one--is to the people sitting around the circle. He and his actors speak simply and well about what they are trying to do, and we watch them working out with a company of aboriginal dancers, part of their search for the common roots of world theater.

The documentary is followed by Brook’s 1970 film of “King Lear,” with Paul Scofield and Irene Worth. Shot in Denmark in black-and-white, this is a frighteningly quiet “Lear,” its figures so locked into their hatred that it subsumes all other emotions. The world of “The Mahabharata” should be less impacted.

Sunday’s program (1:30-3 p.m.) is keyed to the Roadside Theatre’s “South of the Mountain.” Again, this shows the company doing an earlier piece, “Red Fox, Second Hangin’,” filmed before an audience in Roadside’s home territory, Kentucky.

The tale--of an outlaw who can’t be caught--is less important than the telling. It is shared by three guys who might have gotten the story straight from their granddad. Where they’re telling the story and where they’re acting it out can’t be separated. It’s all one flow, abetted by a fiddle accompaniment, not always jolly. There’s darkness as well as fun on the mountain.

Tuesday night’s “Setting the Stage” goes to the Earth Players of South Africa. At 9 p.m. we see a show that some of us saw years ago at the Mark Taper Forum, “Woza Albert.” That’s followed at 10 by the show that the company will do at the festival, “Bopha.”

What’s very helpful here is the way each film cuts between real life and the play. We see a little boy brushing the flies off the meat in a mangy open-air market. Then we see an actor brushing away “invisible” flies.

This gives us a demonstration of the company’s mimetic skill and a specific sense of what it’s like to be black in Johnannesburg. (“Bopha” is about what it’s like to be a black cop.) Again the players are friendly and articulate, leaving us with a wish to know their work first hand.

Ingmar Bergman’s film “After the Rehearsal” will be shown at 9 p.m. Sept. 4. This concerns life in the theater and may give a hint of the way Bergman rehearses a show such as Strindberg’s “Miss Julie,” his Festival piece. It wasn’t received in time for review here.

This is followed at 10:15 p.m. by “Chernobyl Autumn,” a half-hour Danish documentary keyed to the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s play about Chernobyl, “Sarcophagus.” It has many shots of reindeer-herding in Lapland and a voice-over by Donald Sutherland to the effect that radiation isn’t good for reindeer. “Sarcophagus” presumably will have more to say.

The Sept. 4 program closes at 11:15 p.m. with a 15-minute video piece by the Wooster Group, which will perform “The Road to Immortality (Part Two)” at the Festival.

The video piece, “Flaubert Dreams of Travel But the Illness of His Mother Prevents It,” is pure imagery, but not entirely abstracted from narrative. Something is going on in this rumpled hotel room, perhaps something of interest to the police.

Then again, the corpse may be alive. Or perhaps it’s just a painting. The images are lucid, the mood hypnotic--and that’s the hope for “The Road to Immortality” as well.