‘Connections’ Opens Windows Into the Depths

Mikhail Gorbachev is a big fan of Soviet playwright Alexander Gelman. So is Kristoffer Tabori. “He looks at people with enormous compassion, enormous scrutiny--and the knife of a surgeon,” said the director of Gelman’s “A Man With Connections,” opening tonight at West Hollywood’s Matrix Theatre.

“The story is about the relationship between a man and woman who’ve been intimate, had a family and made love with each other for 20 years,” Tabori continued.

As the play opens, the couple (played by Charles Hallahan and Carolyn Seymour) are dealing with a horrible industrial accident involving their son; resentment and recriminations suddenly engulf their marriage. Tabori, 37, believes the characters’ pain reaches beyond the concerns of ordinary kitchen-sink drama.

“The play is highly domestic in its structure, yet--while expecting individuals to take responsibility for their own lives--it reverberates with our recognition that a society is responsible for the kind of people it produces. That’s always a lesson of great drama: Shakespeare, Arthur Miller. ‘Death of a Salesman’ is a psychological investigation of Willy Loman and his family--but never forget that a man like Willy compromises himself because of the culture he lives in.”

To research visual details of a contemporary Soviet home, the director and his set designers saw the Russian film “Little Vera”--thoroughly expecting stiff characters interacting unemotionally in a gray-hued setting. “I saw passionate, wild, interesting, volcanic people,” Tabori marveled. “Immediately I thought of the characters in this play, the fights they have. This play is only interested in the raw experience. What’s so wonderful is, it does it in a rather delightfully middle-European way.”

Playwright Gelman, who’s in his mid-50s, is a concentration camp survivor who lost his entire family in the war. Married to a screenwriter, he spent many years as an engineer, writing his first play at age 38. “Man With Connections,” with a translation by Stephen Mulrine, will be his first play done in the United States. “I think we’re dealing with a master,” Tabori said cautiously. “I can’t be sure. We’re in a town that tends to worship a new guru every week. It used to be that everybody’d be famous for 15 minutes. Now everybody’s a genius for 15 minutes.” He grinned.

Exhaustion aside, at the Matrix, where he starred in “The Common Pursuit” in ’86 and directed “Inadmissible Evidence” in ‘85, Tabori is loving the experience of being part of the new repertory season established by company producer Joe Stern. (“Connections” will play in repertory with Larry Shue’s “Wenceslas Square.”) “I think it was born out of a need in all of us to create community,” he said.

When Tabori directs, he uses the name Siegel as a hyphenate to honor his father, director Don Siegel. His mother is actress Viveca Lindfors, his stepfather--the man who raised him--Hungarian playwright George Tabori.

“In this country, we’re too naked all by ourselves. The most successful actors right now are ones who’ve come out of and have a home they can return to: Kevin Kline from John Houseman’s company, William Hurt from Juilliard.”

Tabori, who was born in Los Angeles and raised in New York, shook his head. “I never had that when I started. I didn’t do well in school. I’m a high school dropout.” (He left at age 16, and immediately started working at Lincoln Center and Circle Rep.) “I never liked the idea of being in a company. I think I envisioned being an artist as an experience in which you were kind of separate. Your identity was created by your work, and your work was created by your identity.

“Well, I was wrong. Our profession is about community.

“You hear some directors talk about how they love working with different actors. Well, I like to work with the same people. It’s a bit like the difference between an affair and a marriage. An affair is heady, exciting, novel, filled with fresh scents and new behavior patterns. But a marriage--if you get to really know somebody--is about getting deep. Not so many highs, not so many lows. But getting deeper into experience.”

Artistically, Tabori hopes to now tap into that at the theater.

“The need for me to find a home is so powerful,” he said earnestly. “It’s what I’ve been looking for. When I was 16 I wanted to have sex all the time. Then I wanted to take drugs and travel and then I wanted to stay up late. Then real late: ‘Hey, I won’t even go to bed!’ Then it was more coffee. . . . Then it gets to be about something else. My journey now--at least in my work; my personal life is mishigas --is to get down. Get serious. Get down .”