Festival Picks Irrepressible, Irreverent Sellars as Director

Theatrical impresario Peter Sellars, named Saturday as director of the Los Angeles Festival, shared an ambitious agenda for the popular biennial event that he hopes will shape the international cultural celebration into the next decade.

The peripatetic director said he wants to expand the festival to include more participation by local artists and ethnic groups, stage events beyond Hollywood and downtown, lure productions from China and Eastern Bloc nations, bolster the visual arts offerings and involve the motion picture industry.

Sellars praised the fledgling festival, born in 1984 as the Olympic Arts Festival, noting that it has “already made ripples around the world.”

“There is not a festival in this hemisphere that can touch it,” bragged Sellars, one of the country’s most irreverent theater directors.

Sellars, 29, is replacing Robert J. Fitzpatrick, the former president of CalArts who has become president of Euro Disneyland, a $1.5-billion resort and entertainment project to be built outside Paris. Fitzpatrick will remain on the Los Angeles festival’s board of director.

The announcement preceded the festival’s close today after 177 performances of 37 productions by 352 artists from 21 nations. More than 150,000 attended the dance, theater and musical presentations.

Sellars observed that Los Angeles was the perfect laboratory to test the limits of artistic expression because of its rich jumble of ethnic groups, its closeness to technological advancements the arts can borrow and its healthy commercial core, which he said should be nudged to contribute more toward the arts. He compared Los Angeles to 14th-Century Flanders, which attracted the art world because of its wealth.

Attorney Ron Olson, who headed the director’s search committee, said Sellars was always the No.1 choice, although 15 people were interviewed and three finalists were brought to Los Angeles for intensive questioning.

Compared to Orson Welles

Sometimes compared to a young Orson Welles, Sellars has delighted in shocking audiences as the director of more than 100 plays and operas. He staged Handel’s opera “Orlando” in a Cape Canaveral, Fla., trailer park and introduced lasers and an abstract set to a Chekhov play.

Sellars launched his directorial career at Harvard University and later became artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. He then hopped to Washington where he was given carte blanche to develop the new American National Theater at the Kennedy Center. It was a stormy two years. The theater lost millions when audiences stayed away in droves and critics savaged some of the productions. Last year, Sellars left on a sabbatical.

Sellars got hooked on theater while selling popcorn and later pulling the curtains at a puppet company in his hometown of Pittsburgh, Pa. Recognizing his contributions, the MacArthur Foundation in 1983 gave him one of its so-called “genius grants” to do as he pleased.

A diminutive man with flyaway hair that forms a rather ragged halo, he was exuberant on Saturday as Fitzpatrick, Mayor Tom Bradley and Maureen A. Kindel, head of the festival’s board of directors, praised him.

Latino, Asian Artists

He embraced his predecessor’s desire to involve more Latino and Asian artists in the festival, noting that it is in those communities “where the interesting work is now.”

The festival, Sellars said, is “not another 86 episodes of Masterpiece Theater, but something generated by a new generation of Americans. . . . “