2nd Time Around With Berkoff’s ‘East’

“It’s great fun to be on the outside looking in,” said Barry Philips, who’s directing Steven Berkoff’s “East,” opening Saturday at the Odyssey Theatre.

The first time around--London, circa 1975--he was one of the actors, as was author/director Berkoff. “We’ve kept the skeleton of what we had done, its basic shape--and played around with it. Different people bring different rhythms to it, of course. But so much of it is done for them, in terms of the writing. It’s done in Shakespearean argot, a lovely iambic pentameter, and spoken in a classical way.”

The characters are a trifle less lovely: neighborhood “cocks of the walk” Mike and Les, Everywoman Sylv, and Mike’s working class mum and dad, all living in London’s public housing projects. “Sylv is a sister at one point, then the object of their passions,” Philips explained. “Everyone becomes someone else. During monologues, the other players become the chorus, either by repeating (the speaker’s words), or taking a (nonverbal) stylized stance.”

Confused? A glossary of cockney slang will be provided.

“It’s very simple in terms of structure,” said the director, who also appeared in Berkoff’s “Agamemnon,” “The Trial” and “Greek.” No through-line connects the 19 scenes, “and yet it is a story,” he stressed. “It’s basically slices, essences of what life was then, through Steven’s eyes. But it’s not a piece to intellectualize about.”

THEATER BUZZ: From the any-port-in-a-storm file: Things are bursting at the seams over at the Mark Taper Forum, which is currently prepping Joe Chaikin’s staging of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (starting Tuesday at Taper, Too) and the 13-play “50/60 Vision” repertory program (starting Saturday at the Taper).

After filling the theater’s rehearsal rooms, the casts (including Teri Garr, Charlotte Rae and 15 others) spilled over into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s rehearsal rooms--and then to the gymnasium of the Queen’s Coronado Terrace, a retirement home in Echo Park. The logistics of managing five directors and all those actors--most involved in more than one play--said production administrator Jonathan Lee Barlow, are “like being an air-traffic controller at O’Hare in a snowstorm.”

CRITICAL CROSSFIRE: “Piano,” Anna Deavere Smith’s tumultuous story of a family in Cuba in 1898, is having its premiere at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Bill Bushnell directs.

Said The Times’ Don Shirley: “The storytelling and the mood-making are fairly accomplished; it’s the characterizations that could use some polishing.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Ed Kaufman wrote: “Despite the astute direction of Bushnell and all the glitzy production values and its acting talent, ‘Piano’ is little more than an intriguing, and sometimes absorbing work-in-progress.”

From Bill Raden in the L.A. Weekly: “For a work that aspires to epic historical drama, Smith’s sonata for turn-of-the-century Cuba plays decidedly like domestic costume drama. . . . Pedestrian language and thinly drawn characters fail to support Smith’s larger allegorical purposes.”

The Daily News’ Lawrence Enscoe wrote: “This being a political parable and all, you might well expect the characters to act as stand-ins for ideologies. Well, you’re right. Only Smith has ensconced her proxies so well into the fiber of the tale that the symbols rarely take over the story.”

THEATER MARATHON: LATC’s 11th annual Big Weekend races to the finish line today with free public offerings from its Young Playwrights Lab, Women’s Project and Latino Theater Lab, two festival premieres (“Harry’s Way” and “Butterfly Kiss”) and a creation performance event--plus regular-price performances of “Piano” “Stevie Wants to Play the Blues” and “And Baby Makes Seven.” The events go from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.