Breaking Down Walls : Minorities and Eastern Europeans smashed barriers. ‘Tamara’ and ‘Tony ‘n Tina’ crossed : the line between actor and audience.

Theater in the 1980s continued its usual business of dying and coming to birth. Opportunities were met and missed, change was embraced and avoided, and nothing went according to the subscription brochure. An actor became President of the United States and promptly cut the arts budget. A playwright went from a prison cell in Czechoslovakia to a leading role in that country’s government.

Who could have predicted any of it? The most shocking turn of events was the AIDS epidemic. It cut a path through a whole generation of American theater people--strict classicists like John Hirsch, zanies like Charles Ludlam and more good workaday directors and actors than bears thinking about.

The musical theater was especially hard hit. One of the most painful losses was that of Michael Bennett, creator of “A Chorus Line,” who had 20 more terrific musicals in him. We got only one of them--”Dreamgirls.” Other illnesses claimed Gower Champion and Bob Fosse, and by the end of the decade the Broadway musical had lost its bearings.

Broadway still had blockbuster musicals, but they came from Britain, where producer Cameron Mackintosh and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had discovered that the way to an audience’s heart is through its nerve endings. Give them a simple plot, an eye-popping set and a score that left no doubt about what emotion they were supposed to be feeling, and they would be lined up for blocks.

What was good about Lloyd Webber’s musicals was that they were music-driven--they weren’t plays with music. What was bad about them was the cheapness of that music. But they sold and sold--particularly “The Phantom of the Opera.” Stephen Sondheim had his successes, too, with “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George.” But Sondheim’s meaning takes time to grasp, while Lloyd Webber’s is instantly familiar. Like it or not, he was the theater composer of the decade.

The playwright of the decade? No single voice emerged. The old reliables kept producing (it was the decade of Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach” trilogy) and so did the new reliables (although Sam Shepard and David Mamet were spending more time at the movies).

Many of the newer voices were female--Marsha Norman, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, Los Angeles’ Marlane Meyer, the latter’s a very tough voice indeed. South Coast Repertory helped showcase new writers like Keith Reddin and Craig Lucas, whose “Blue Window” and “Three Postcards” may have been the best yuppie plays of the decade. Los Angeles’ John Steppling kept patrolling his beat, and you hoped it wouldn’t prove to be a blind alley. Howard Korder (we had his “Boys’ Life” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center) explored the age-old question: “What do men really want?”

But the playwright who took the biggest steps was August Wilson. Being black himself, he wrote about black people, but there was a universality here that went beyond race. Earthy as Wilson’s plays were--”Fences,” for instance, set in the plain-dirt front yard of a Pittsburgh garbage collector--they weren’t quite of this Earth. Wilson was the first playwright since O’Neill who really believed in ghosts: in forces out there in the dark that didn’t necessarily wish human beings well. One could call it an African sensibility but it was equally a Greek sensibility, and Wilson’s protagonists had the size of tragic heroes.

This was a surprise. Tragedy was supposed to have dried up around the time the universe went dead, circa “Waiting for Godot.” But in Wilson’s play the universe was a living mystery again.

His voice wasn’t the only one that contradicted Western rationalism. The Los Angeles Theatre Center gave access to Latino playwrights who saw dreams and reality as being different aspects of the same thing--with dreams possibly coming closer to the heart of the matter. (Jose Rivera’s “The Promise” was one such play.)

And a young Chinese-American writer, David Henry Hwang, suggested in “M. Butterfly” that the “realistic” Westerner is the biggest dreamer of them all, confusing the world as it is with the world as he wishes it to be .

The most interesting plays of the 1980s suggested that the world cannot be reduced to a computer print-out, useful to keep in mind as the certainties of the Cold War collapsed at the end of the decade.

Such plays tended to come from “minority” writers. But the phrase was beginning to date. At least in cities like Los Angeles, it was evident that we were all “minorities” now, and that we had to learn to pool our information. The Mark Taper Forum did its part here, but it was at LATC that one felt a real effort to incorporate non-white thinking (not just non-white actors) into the program. What would we have done without this imaginative, gutsy theater in the ‘80s?

As for our leading minority theaters, the East-West Players, the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts, the Inner City Cultural Center--they kept keeping on, but without breakthroughs. Amazingly, the decade saw not one play about Los Angeles’ Korean community. How so?

The Mark Taper Forum did have a good deal to do with the planning of the Olympic Arts Festival in 1984, the most adventurous spread of world theater ever presented in the United States. We can still see those samurai horsemen dashing in, in Le Theatre du Soleil’s “Richard II.”

Only slightly less sumptuous was the 1987 Los Angeles Festival, its highlight being Peter Brook’s all-day staging of “The Mahabharata.” Here, again, a magnificent theatrical legend offered another way of looking at things--things that had to be looked at if the planet wasn’t to become a wheel of fire.

Brook’s staging also offered faces of black, brown, beige and ivory, all seen as kinsmen, albeit warring kinsmen. This wasn’t “color-blind casting,” but a notification that the variety of the human tribe is one of its strengths. Who wants to hear the same old song over and over? “The Mahabharata” was a shaping experience, although hard on the tail-bone, and Peter Sellars’ 1990 “Third World L.A. Festival” will extend that experience, if we look at it through the right eyes.

One of the laments of the decade was: “Whatever Happened to the 1960s?” This was a good way to avoid taking responsibility for the present--as if to say that political protest had to have the sanction of intellectual fashion to be worth one’s time.

The American theater produced exactly one critique of the Reagan years, a mild spoof entitled “Rap Master Ronnie.” After Vietnam, it just wasn’t trendy to do political theater any more. Besides the issues were too complex. Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” was the only play that had the guts to attack a government official by name (New York’s Mayor Koch, for failing to move on the AIDS crisis early enough). “Whatever Happened to the 1960s” in theater was that people got tired of fighting its battles--or joined the other side.

But the experimental theater of the 1960s had a victory. Two of the biggest hits of the 1980s were audience-participation events--”Tamara” and “Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding.” As envisioned by experimental-theater directors like Richard Schechner 20 years before, the wall between performers and viewers had come crashing down, and “theater” was now something that both parties improvised together on the spot. Well, not quite. “Tamara” simply allowed the viewer to wander around a pre-set story, while “Tony ‘n Tina’s Wedding” merely offered him the role of a wedding guest--not that great a challenge. Still, there was a fluidity here that wasn’t found in traditional theater, and people enjoyed playing the game.

The ‘90s would bring more “environmental” pieces, but the fourth wall would not disappear. Audiences never tire of that game too.