Symposium Looks at Future of Classics in Modern Theater : Stage: But scholars and practitioners are unable to agree on a role model for staging such works.

Three things you can count on at any symposium about theater: It will not accomplish what it set out to do; it will serve as a great chance for theater people to network; it will be highly political.

All of the above prevailed at the Price Center on the campus of UC San Diego last weekend, where about 350 theater people gathered from all points of the Southland, across the nation and even across the water (keynote speaker was English director Jonathan Miller) to talk about “The Classics in Contemporary Theatre.”

It should come as no surprise that there were as many points of view as there were bodies present. Roughly speaking, participants fell into three categories: Scholars and academics (most notable among them Jan Kott, author of “Shakespeare Our Contemporary,” and scholar/critic Martin Esslin), theater practitioners (from Anne Bogart of Rhode Island’s Trinity Rep to George Coates of the George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco, to New York’s Classic Stage’s Carey Perloff and the La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff) and the public, consisting mostly of people belonging to the first two groups but not serving on panels.

The gauntlet was tossed early by panelist/director/critic Charles Marowitz who, having frequently reinvented Shakespeare, spoke largely about doing that. He was perhaps abetted in this narrow view by the implicit fact that Miller is a Brit and that, out of about 26, only two panelists were non-Anglos: playwright and scholar Paul Carter Harrison, and director Rene Buch, founder of New York’s 21-year-old Reportorio Espanol. Jan Kott broadened the area of definition to include the Greeks, Romans and absurdists (namely Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht) and Esslin, declaring academic thinking narrow, widened “tradition” further to encompass “cultural material of all types” from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (as he clarified later) to film, and “I Love Lucy.” Culture, he argued, “is never fixed.”

“Restaging is rewriting,” he reponded to Marowitz’s notion that to contemporize a classic is to tack on “an accretion of connotations to a basic text,” and cited the Anouilh and Brecht “Antigones” and “The Planet of the Apes,” which he called “a rewriting of ‘The Tempest,’ ” as examples.

A panel on experimental theater and the classics got no closer to dealing with the subject than to speak of it in paradoxically broad general terms and from highly individual points of view. No one was able to define a classic or single out valid ways of doing classics in the modern theater for the simple reason that, as Esslin said, the classics elude definition and there are any number of valid (and invalid) ways of doing them.

Miller, who staged highly contemporized (and controversial) versions of “The Mikado” and “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” in Los Angeles, dwelt in his keynote address on the inheritance of texts as artifacts, and on the popular misconception that “if something does not bear a patina from the past , it is not authentic.” Fidelity he believes is a form of forgery. A script is “a promissory note with a view to a performance. If there was a finite idea of what behavior should be, psychoanalysis would never have flourished.”

In connection to the title of his address (“Survival of the Fittest?”), Miller questioned what is fit to survive and how we maintain custody of the works, which he said (with a remarkable--and unchallenged--lack of reference to his own part in the assault) have been “hijacked to realize their relevance to modern times,” adding, “but I have some sort of feeling that things have gone too far. . . .” Why . . . yes.

A panel Miller moderated with designers Robert Israel (who designed his “Mahagonny”) and John Arnone enlightened the audience on the relationship of designers with directors, space and texts. There was some extrapolation on forgetting experience in order to retrieve it, but not much on whose past or what classics.

Fortunately, the simpatico Rene Buch was vociferous about widening the scope of the classics to include Hispanic and other cultures as Harrison had earlier single-handedly broadened it to include the Afro-American one.

And a number of vocal members of the listening public joined in, including UCSD professors Jorge Huerta and Floyd Gaffney. They heatedly protested misconceptions in multiracial casting and the absence of more color among panelists. A form of round-table discussion that closed the symposium Sunday saw more of the program’s failures of omission vented: the put-down of Americans, the lack of definition, the frustration at the focus on England and Europe, the absence of actors on panels, the lily-white complexion of things.

In the end, the weekend was as much about sociology as it was about art. And, yes, there was probably something there for everyone--if nothing more than something to rebel against. The moral: Theater people should do theater, not talk about it.