Director Garrett Treats Early Pop Icon in ‘You’ll Love Me’

Of what use is art?

It’s a question that never seems to go away--or receive a convincing answer. In her first play, the critical/popular hit “The Ladies of the Camellias” (West End Playhouse, 1988) Argentine-born Lillian Garrett grappled with that issue, while romping through a make-believe encounter between Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt.

“I always wonder, ‘Who are we doing it for?,’ ” the vibrant, delicately boned Garrett said with a smile. “Are we really just entertainment? I hope not.”

The effects of art on society are also very much present in Garrett’s newest theatrical undertaking: staging the American premiere of Jose Ignacio Cabrujas’ “The Day You’ll Love Me,” beginning performances tonight at Taper, Too. “It’s about Carlos Gardel, a famous pop figure during the first half of the 20th Century, who really put tango on the map,” she explained.

“He died young--crashed in a plane--and there was an enormous myth created around him. Like all people who die young, he remained forever young in the public memory. I grew up with that in South America. There and in Europe, he’s just as alive today as he was then. Bigger than Elvis. I mean, there were suicides when he died. We’re talking continents. He went across language barriers. He’d done a tremendous amount of films for Paramount in Spanish; he was just about to make Hollywood films.”

Garrett defends Gardel’s position as a historical figure. “The tango is popular music,” she acknowledged. “It doesn’t change the world or alleviate any kind of human suffering. But wonderful musicals--such as ‘Pacific Overtures’ or ‘My Fair Lady’ and legendary popular performers--the Beatles, Sinatra--they leave a history: of human pain, of the time, of the politics, of economics. Gardel did that.”

It is suggested that perhaps she’s assigning cultural importance to her theatrical projects to justify the worthiness of her work. “I tell you,” Garrett said with a laugh, “I may be directing ‘Coriolanus’ tomorrow, and decide when I’m 85 that it was all fluff. Who knows? But at this moment, I think (theater) is tremendously important. And I take it very, very seriously.

“It touches people in a way that nothing else does,” she added emphatically, “and it makes a difference. People are all the better for having been there. I think it improves the quality of life, improves the spirit. It soothes, consoles and comforts. Therefore it makes you a more generous human being--generous in spirit.”

Garrett believes that the tango is a perfect example of life integrated with art. “It started as sort of an Apache dance, sung by the people in the bordellos, the red light districts,” she noted. “In the ‘20s, the tango came uptown; Gardel--in his white tie and tails--brought it up there. But it literally came out of the streets of Buenos Aires.

“I see it as wrestling with pain: the pain of poverty, of defeat. Basically, they are songs of failure. There are no happy tangos I can think of. They’re always sad, black, about failure: the failure of love, of society. Poor people, horse races where the horse always loses. And the fight continues till you die. But there’s a tremendous energy in it. And the fact that it is a noble fight--because eventually it’s a losing one--is attractive to me.”

When did theater first become attractive?

“I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything else,” she said earnestly. The product of an Austrian father (who fled just before the Anschluss ) and an Argentine-based Italian mother, Garrett--who speaks several languages--attended Northwestern University, first as an international relations major (eyeing a career in diplomacy), but received her master’s and Ph.D. in French literature, specifically French theater.

“They were literary courses--not theater courses,” Garrett emphasized. “That was considered much more respectable by my family.” At the same time, though, she was appearing in every college production and studying off-campus with legendary acting teacher Alvina Krause. “She was the most important influence in my life,” Garrett said soberly. “She took all the glamour out of acting and gave it a tremendous amount of respect. Respect for how difficult it is, how much training you need. And how much of an art form it really is.”

Sadly, none of her studies prepared Garrett for the business end of show business. Transplanted to Los Angeles in the early ‘70s, she was a fish out of water. “Although I spoke the language, I was a complete foreigner,” she said glumly. “And no one took me aside, showed me the lay of the land. When I look back on it now, it makes me angry: that people who could’ve helped me didn’t. I feel that I wasted a lot of time. And a lot of agents wasted my time--in an unforgivable way.”

In the last decade, she’s made peace not only with the scope of the business (“I do lots of television, commercials; I’m not a theater snob”) but with its perceived limitations. As a director, her credits include “Cat Among the Pigeons” and “A Lady’s Tailor” (which she also translated); as an actress, she just returned from an Off-Broadway stint in Eduardo Machado’s “A Burning Beach”; as a playwright, she recently finished “The White Rose,” about the Munich University students executed in 1942 for protesting against the Nazis.

“I do it all,” Garrett said proudly, “and I think that’s fine. But we specialize so much in this country. Everyone says, ‘You have to do one thing or the other’ or ‘What do you really do?’ Look at Sam Shepard: he does everything. Why can’t I?”