STAGE : Theater in Houston--The Wonders & the Woes

Oil’s not all that lives--and dies--in this city where things are not always what they seem. On the one hand, this boom town, filled with spectacular high-rises and expensive civic sculpture, feels like a ghost town: clean streets, gleaming architecture, few people; on the other, it may be the only place in the United States where a grizzled cabbie would speak passionately about the theater as he drove us to a show that he said he “had to see.”

“Us,” in this case, was a collection of theater critics, meeting in Houston for the American Theatre Critics Assn. annual congress. The show that had so animated our elderly black driver was the world premiere of a telling 17-year-old play, Jules Feiffer’s “Carnal Knowledge.” Mike Nichols made an award-winning film out of this drama of relationships in 1971, but this was the first time it was being done as originally written: as a play.

And not at the Alley, Houston’s oldest, best known and, at the moment, most unsettled theater (more on this later). “Knowledge” was staged at Stages, a more modest, 10-year-old operation that is staking a claim as a smart and adventurous upstart in a town where it’s been hard for smaller artistic enterprises to survive.

Because one thing critics do when they convene is check out the performing arts of a city, here are some highlights of the trip: the discovery that some of Houston’s best theater is not theater but opera, as in the Houston Grand; finding that its 20-year-old purveyor of light opera, Theater Under the Stars (TUTS), could deliver a bracing refashioning of one of Broadway’s mildest offerings, “Baby;” and meeting that winsome dean of Texas playwrights, Horton Foote, who lives in nearby Wharton, where he grew up and whence he draws his inspiration (“I could no more not write about it than stop breathing, and the day I stop breathing is the day I’ll stop writing about it”).

A “Tannhauser” and a “Manon,” on display in the architecturally eloquent (if somewhat pretentious) new Wortham Center, had admirable dramatic as well as musical values. And the Houston-born “Baby” (with Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence and Rex Smith), presented indoors at the Music Hall, turned out to be superior entertainment. This Richard Maltby/David Shire/Sybille Pearson musical of life from conception to birth was only moderately successful in New York. It will never be weighty stuff, but in this deft and breezy staging by Charles Abbott it escapes overt sentimentality, plugging into just about everybody’s experience. Ahmanson, anyone?

Because this writer was coming from the megalopolis of Los Angeles, where 140 Equity Waiver theaters seem to thrive in their struggle for a share of the spotlight (though that too is about to change), Houston’s relative handful of small theaters--about 20, including some part-time and some semi-academic ventures--seemed at once more dedicated and more forlorn. Perhaps because there is not the lure of film and television shadowing their efforts (though there is now a burgeoning Texas film industry), the actors appear, by turns, more devoted to their work and less than skillful at it.

This by no means includes everyone. Every production seen here had at least one accomplished performance. The strongest--”Carnal Knowledge”--had several. Our band of critics was exposed to only four of these smaller operations (Stages, The Ensemble, the Chocolate Bayou Theatre and the Main Street Theatre). Only the largest among them, Stages, with a $900,000 annual budget, has an Equity contract. The rest are fighting the good fight but fearful that they may not win the war.

Most of these companies started in the ‘70s, during the oil boom, when, said Stages founder and artistic director Ted Swindley, “There was a real opportunism in the city--an explosion of life, wealth, excitement,” all of which has been severely set back since 1982. Of the ongoing groups, Main Street is the oldest and smallest, with a self-appointed mission to remain small and serve as a springboard for young area artists.

The Chocolate Bayou, with a modest $200,000 budget and an emphasis on new plays, has had it especially rough. It almost went under last year when it was displaced by the construction of the new George C. Brown Convention Center and simultaneously lost its artistic leadership. It is recovering slowly.

The Ensemble, a black company getting by on a budget of $50,000 a year, is concerned chiefly with cultivating its black constituency. “Educating the audience (70% black) has been tough,” acknowledged the Ensemble’s Eileen Morris.

All these groups suffered when the bottom fell out of the oil market. All claim they perceive no improvement in the economic picture (although the Houston Chamber of Commerce cites unemployment as down from a high of 12.9% to 7.8%), and a lot of energy gets spent these days on the mechanics of survival.

“You can’t do those weird European playwrights who were so much fun,” quipped Main Street artistic director Rebecca Greene Udden, who nevertheless is doing her own unabashed adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” It’s too long and too talky, but the talk is witty and often well spoken, and luminous Penny Walzel in the role of Elizabeth Bennett has an intelligence that’s a constant pleasure to watch.

Houston, however, is not entirely divided into unequal theatrical camps. Between the small operators and the 41-year-old Alley with its $4.9-million budget, there is Stages. It started in a church basement in 1978 and worked its way up, Swindley said, “to fill a gap. There was a chasm between the Alley and the smaller groups. We wanted to fill it.”

Swindley sees another distinction between major and minor theaters, which hinges on “how you treat your colleagues.” He appears to treat his well. In a permanent company of 12, he has four Equity (union) actors under 52-week contracts earning $376 a week and eight non-Equity actors earning $200 a week, with “about 18 associates we use on and off.” This is real company orientation.

It’s also no mean achievement in a town smarting from a slump that has affected theater on every level, from the withdrawal of board members who lost jobs to a drop-off in attendance. Staying alive means keeping the theater lit at all hours, with daytime programming for children (EarlyStages) and late night “special interest” shows (Swindley’s term) such as “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom” and “Psycho Beach Party.”

“There might be a notion we’re a yuppie theater,” Swindley said, “defined by the number of BMWs in the parking lot, but we try to be eclectic.” Stages’ seasons include a Susan Smith Blackburn prize finalist (a home-town award for women playwrights established in memory of a former Houstonian), a Texas playwrights’ festival, a couple of Off-Broadway plays and a classics repertory.

Among the more uncommon shows Stages has done, aside from “Carnal Knowledge,” are “Pacific Overtures,” “The Mystery of Irma Vep,” “The Lady and the Clarinet.” An ongoing relationship with playwright Christopher Durang means that this summer it will do his wriest and driest comedy of the sexes, “Laughing Wild,” in repertory with revivals of earlier Stages productions of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You” and “Beyond Therapy.”

So Stages continues to nudge its way up at a time when the respected Alley, created and then guided by the late Nina Vance, has had a rough time attributable less to Houston’s sagging economy than to internal troubles.

Since Vance’s death from cancer in 1980, the Alley’s sense of direction has been blunted by the difficulty of regrouping in the wake of such a driving force. The 1982 robbery-murder at the theater of managing director (and long-time Vance colleague) Iris Siff was another shock. Minor and major disputes among successive boards and, most recently, with former artistic director Pat Brown (who was summarily dismissed by the board last February after seven years in the post), have left the Alley beleaguered and in debt.

Brown has not taken her firing lying down. She’s filed a $20-million lawsuit against former Alley managing director Michael Tiknis, the Alley Theatre, six members of its board and one employee, alleging slander and conspiracy and accusing the defendants of spreading lies about her artistic competence and financial probity.

The board’s position is that Brown was fired because the theater was seeking new directions. But meeting with members of the critics association, board chairman Meredith J. Long acknowledged that operational deficits (totaling about $1 million over the past three years) had also influenced the board’s decision. He denied, however, that there had been misappropriation of funds by anyone.

So the Alley remains rudderless and embattled, its luster in need of a bit of polish. A brisk staging by Burry Fredrik of Roger Cornish’s mildly absorbing courtroom drama, “A Class ‘C’ Trial in Yokohama,” played its Large Stage, and “A Shayna Maidel” by Barbara Lebow (a 1985 Susan Smith Blackburn prize finalist) was in the smaller Arena. But the most exciting work seen at the Alley was not Houstonian or even American.

It was Lithuanian--the superb creation of the State Theater of Lithuania (ironically, imported by Brown before she was fired) under the direction of Eimuntas Nekrosius. The 22-year-old company presented a world-class “Uncle Vanya” and an award-winning production of “Pirosmani, Pirosmani,” based on the life and work of Georgian artist Nikolai Piroshmanashvili. Both were performed in Lithuanian, a language distinct from Russian, and made accessible by simultaneous translation over earphones. Very effective.

This writer did not see the “Pirosmani” (which closes today, moving on to Chicago’s International Festival) but, in 1985, had seen another award-winning piece staged by Nekrosius at the company’s home theater in Vilnius. It was a stunning adaptation of Soviet writer Chingiz Aitmatov’s mythic and political novel, “A Day as Long as a Century.” The subjective, richly layered “Vanya” seen at the Alley only confirmed the stature of this intensely private and visionary young director.

It’s demoralizing to think that because of the fragile economic base of our American theater and the absence of a theatergoing tradition, such levels of achievement may never be ours. Our plays are rehearsed for six weeks and performed for as long as the traffic will bear. The Lithuanian “Vanya” was rehearsed for six months and has been in the 43-member company’s 22-play repertory for two years. We’re lucky to find repertory theater at all in the United States.

Swindley lamented theatergoers who subscribe out of a sense of duty but don’t show up at the door. The Lithuanians define a good theatergoer as one who sees a show at least five times.

Can we hope to bridge such deep cultural differences? Not any time soon. But increasing visits by top international companies may slowly bring about changes in how we perceive the goals and needs of our own theater. These visits may not yank our own government’s sense of artistic responsibility from its torpor, but no cause remains without some effect. They may at least give our artists the impetus to prod harder.