Woodruff Tackles Task-Oriented Theater Head-On : Joseph Chaikin, Battling Effects of Stroke, Is Under His Direction in Taper Monologues

Robert Woodruff doesn’t want to talk about himself. It’s not reverse ego, grandstanding or an absence of anything to say.

It’s just that the director responsible for staging much of Sam Shepard’s early work in San Francisco (as well as his recent revival of Shepard’s “Lie of the Mind” at the Taper) and for the award-winning “In the Belly of the Beast” at Taper, Too (1984) and the Mark Taper Forum (1985) would rather talk about actor-director Joseph Chaikin.

Woodruff is directing Chaikin in two monologues at Taper, Too: “The War in Heaven” (inspired by letters between Chaikin and Sam Shepard) and “Struck Dumb” (by Chaikin and Jean-Claude van Itallie). Chaikin, who founded the Open Theatre in the ‘60s, suffered a major stroke in 1984 that left him aphasic, partially unable to use or to understand words.

“Sam and Joe started working on ‘War’ before Joe’s stroke,” Woodruff said. “They completed it when he was recuperating. Since then he’s performed it as a reading with different musical collaborators. Sometimes he does it alone. In Italy, Sam did the instrumental and percussion. In Poland there was a violin player. Here we have a percussionist, Danny Frankel.

“The piece started with the idea of questions and questioning: intimate, metaphysical questions. Secrets. Fears. It’s almost stream-of-consciousness.”

“Struck Dumb” also had a personal genesis. “The spark came from Joe coming to California and living here for a while. It was a very quiet time. I think he left New York because it was a bit too chaotic for how he was feeling at the moment.

“Jean-Claude and Joe would travel around Venice and Joe would talk about what he saw, philosophize about things that worried him now--just responding to the people living there, the ones on the boardwalk. Out of that a character developed: a former Lebanese classical singer who’s moved to Venice. It’s about his perceptions.”

Chaikin, who was also the inspiration for Van Itallie’s “The Traveler” staged last year at the Taper (about a stroke victim’s physical and psychic recovery), is still struggling with his aphasia.

“It’s reinventing the wheel,” Woodruff said bluntly. “I mean, as strong as Joe is--in that he can make emotional connections with the language--he has trouble with sequence and linearity.

“He can’t memorize. So the piece comes at Joe: The text is there (on monitors for “War in Heaven” and other devices for “Struck Dumb”). The language is a little assaulting--and it’s all around him, in that world, which is a parallel to Joe’s own world. Words exist all around him, and he has to pick and choose.

“We’ve tried to provide Joe with a structure he can count on--which frees him up to act and explore. It’s a little like a treasure hunt. There are different signals so he knows what the next section is. But it still surprises him, it’s still fresh for him. When the next scene comes, he recognizes it instantly in terms of perception--and then he connects with it emotionally because it’s familiar --once it’s there . But he doesn’t have any sense of order, no sense of time. You can’t say, ‘Hold this longer.’ Long and short have no meaning. So it’s just counts: ‘Count to five.’ ”

There’s also the matter of putting reins on a fellow artist.

“He’s a director, too,” Woodruff said. “Sometimes he’ll say, ‘Well, I wouldn’t do that if I were directing . . . .’ ” Woodruff shrugged. “We haven’t worked together since 1978 in (Shepard’s) ‘Savage/Love’ and ‘Tongues,’ when he was healthier. Now we have to find new rules.

“And yeah, it’s been very frustrating. The communication’s hard. Sometimes, I’m trying to create this structure, and I lose sight of him. I can’t drift, I can’t just run ahead. I’ve gotta stay here, really attached to what he needs to be doing.”

Although no longer intimidated by Chaikin, Woodruff says that during their first pairing (for the Shepard one-acts), “I was really in awe of the guy. He was like ‘The Man.’

“The Man was working with Sam, two dynamo guys. And at first it was just watching him and Sam working, being a third eye. But he was very persistent in drawing (out) my real responses to what they were doing. It was great for me. Then the peer thing developed quickly after that, which was nice.”

Does anybody scare him anymore? “No,” he said, bemused. “I guess it’s just time. Repetition breeds that.”

As do impressive credits: directing Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” in its New York and San Francisco premieres, the Flying Karamazov Brothers in “Comedy of Errors” (Chicago, Los Angeles, New York) and “A Man’s a Man,” “Figaro Gets a Divorce” and “The Tempest” at the La Jolla Playhouse.

Home is New York, but Woodruff is rarely there: only 10 weeks last year. After he is finished here, he is off with set designer Doug Stein for a cultural exchange in India--or, as he quips, “having glasnost with the Indians.”

Yet ask him about himself in the work and he inevitably turns the subject back to Chaikin.

“I’m trying to create a forum that’s agreeable to Joe--in terms of his character, his work,” Woodruff said. “There’s certainly something of me in there, but,” he said pausing, searching for the right words, “it’s for him--as opposed to being for me or the audience.”

Is he always so magnanimous?

“Nah,” the director said. “Sometimes you show off. If the piece let’s you do it. It’s fun once in a while. The last piece I did like that was (Odon von Horvath’s) ‘Figaro’: I felt we could do anything with this 50-year-old German play.”

Is there a Woodruff stamp?

“I think it’s just people running around and yelling loudly,” he said jokingly. “No, what I do is too closely tied to the material (to be distinctive). In this case, it’s about Joe. And having Joe as the center of the piece makes it uniquely theatrical: how he performs, what he brings to the piece--which is different from what he brought before. It works as he works. It’s special because it’s so tied into him, who he is.

“I’m trying to keep my fingers in it, doing theater that interests me. But it all revolves around a task: getting the material to Joe’s eyes. Not arty? You try it. I think task-oriented theater is great. Brecht’s task was to inform the public of such-and-such a condition; the whole piece was directed to that task. How can you say that’s not art? Art is work--and it’s real on stage. That’s what’s theatrical, that’s what communicates.”