Christmas Gifts for Theater Fans : Being a catalogue of interesting reading

What should you give a theater fan for Christmas? Theater. There’s no more thoughtful gift than a couple of tickets to a show that you are sure he or she will enjoy, having the same superb taste as yourself.

An excellent choice this year would be Michael Feinstein’s evening of black-tie songs from the 1930s and 1940s at the Wilshire Theatre, “Isn’t It Romantic?” If your friend doesn’t enjoy this show, you may want to re-examine the relationship.

If it’s a very old friend, perhaps he or she would like to accompany you on the 14-day Theatre at Sea cruise on the QE2. The Theatre Guild is sponsoring one in March, from Sydney to Hong Kong.

Every night there will be a solo performance by one of the stars who have signed for the journey: Helen Hayes, Mary Martin, Jason Robards, Colleen Dewhurst, Richard Kiley, Judy Kaye and Patricia Neal. During the day you and your friend can drink margaritas and read theater books.

The cost: $3,005 to $7,670 per person. Plus air fare.

In that case, perhaps your friend could take care of the transportation, while you supply the theater books. A good many worthwhile ones were published in 1988, including the following:

“Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill” (Yale University Press, $35) Edited by Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Byer, this collection comes closer than any biography has done to putting the reader in O’Neill’s line of fire, so to speak--to making it clear why women fell for him and why men found him a force to be reckoned with. O’Neill’s plays could be ponderous, but his letters are as driven as the man himself was. They crackle with ambition, love, guilt, rancor--whatever was going through him at the moment. They are also wonderfully sane, suggesting that this was an artist who had his demons in pretty fair control. The best portrait of O’Neill that we are likely to get.

“Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor” (Grove Press, $18.95) Laughton’s demons included a sense of guilt about being homosexual and a sense of shame about being physically unattractive. Rather than mucking about with the psychological roots of all this, Callow shows how Laughton’s self-hate fed his art and how his art eventually helped him to achieve self-acceptance. As an actor himself, Callow is also able to describe exactly what Laughton was after in a particular film role (he never saw him on the stage) and whether he achieved it. An original, sympathetic and enlightening book.

“Laurence Olivier: A Biography” (Atheneum, $22.50) It would be hard not to write interestingly about a life so glamorous and so packed with achievement as Olivier’s. Author Anthony Holden has done an excellent job researching the facts of that life, discovering, for example, that Olivier’s memory for some of these incidents, in his autobiography, was less than exact. A valuable book, then; but a chilly one. Holden seems to hold some sort of grudge against Olivier for the fact that he has been able to play every sort of person, except himself, “the one role he cannot pin down.” What does this say except that Olivier is a born actor?

“Hallie Flanagan: A Life in the American Theatre” (Knopf, $24.95) Flanagan directed the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s, still this country’s boldest effort at establishing a national theater. The value of this book, written by her stepdaughter, Joanne Bentley, is to remind us that Flanagan didn’t come to the Federal Theatre from nowhere and didn’t vanish when Congress withdrew its funding at the end of the 1930s. She had a long career in university theater, the only serious alternative to the Broadway theater of her day. Flanagan also maintained a big family, more attentively than a man in her position would have done. Bentley celebrates her with admiration, but without gush.

“John Houseman: Unfinished Business” (Applause Theatre Books, $15.95) With Houseman’s recent death, there’s an impulse to review his career. This book makes it easy to do so. It’s a compendium of his first three books of recollections, cut down to some 500 pages. There’s a touching afterword in which Houseman confesses that when a man reaches his late 80s, life--just the routine of it--gets a bit burdensome.

“Being an Actor” (Grove Press, $7.95) Another fine book by Simon Callow, first published in hard-cover in ’84. It is both an informal account of Callow’s life in the theater to date and a series of meditations on an actor’s dealings with agents, audiences, rehearsals, unemployment, critics and directors--who Callow thinks should get off their high horse and realize that they were created to serve the actors, rather than the reverse. Names are named.

“The Director’s Voice” (Theatre Communications Group, $14.95) A series of long, satisfying Q-and-A interviews between TCG’s Arthur Bartow and 21 leading American stage directors, everyone from Peter Sellars to the Mark Taper Forum’s Gordon Davidson. Why do people want to be directors? “I like to be the one who determines the viewpoint,” says the Arena Stage’s Zelda Fichhandler, and so, basically, say all of them.

Many of the directors interviewed also run their own theaters, which is getting to be less and less fun. (Davidson finds a captious note in today’s audience that wasn’t there when he started.) But it’s also part of “determining the viewpoint.” Balanced answers from a group of people who can take the heat and like being in the kitchen.

“In Their Own Words” (Theatre Communications Group, $12.95) A parallel book of interviews with leading American playwrights, conducted by David Savran, head of the drama department at the University of Regina, Saskatchewan. Savran is a Brecht specialist, meaning that the reader learns what each of Savran’s subjects think about Brecht, even when it’s clear that some of them (Stephen Sondheim, for example) think about Brecht as seldom as possible.

Twenty playwrights are interviewed, and two more should have been: Neil Simon and Sam Shepard. Everybody is thoughtful, everybody has a grasp on the kind of theater he or she wants to make, and everybody seems to be making a living, more or less.

Only a few have had Broadway success: Sondheim, David Mamet, Charles Fuller, August Wilson, Lanford Wilson. The rest are basically slogging away in the trenches of resident theater, street theater, black theater--and don’t consider it a bad bargain, as long as the work can get done.

Above all, they are realists. Charles Fuller: “I don’t think that writers can change the world by themselves. But we can change the climate . . . (we can) get people to the point where certain ideas can be perceived.”

“How to Sell Yourself as an Actor” (Sweden Press, $12.95) This tough little book makes it clear that an actor in America is a small businessman selling a product that nobody particularly wants. Sitting around waiting for somebody to place an order won’t do. Author K Callan shows the young actor how to maintain dignity while merchandising the product, but she makes it clear how hard it is to keep the two things in balance. This book is for your young friend who is thinking about going into the theater--or getting out of it.