STAGE REVIEW : Albee’s OK but Ionesco Roughed Up at Taper

Was it too good to last? Too good to be true? So far, the Mark Taper’s rewarding “50/60 Vision,” a celebration of 13 seminal plays from the ‘50s and ‘60s, has been almost scrupulously dedicated to fidelity to texts.

The acting has been rich. The playwrights’ visions have been heeded. Caringly. Here and there a tiny directorial fillip hit the canvas, but nothing to get excited about. This conscientiousness has been one of the most satisfying aspects of this eminently worthwhile marathon--not just because it shows respect for and understanding of the plays, but mainly because it illuminates an important period in theater history without distortion.

Distortion may not be the word of choice for what happens in round four of this six-round event, but things do change. The plays are arbitrarily connected (why not?) by the use of knives. While Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” second on the bill, comes to us pretty much intact, Eugene Ionesco’s 1951 “The Lesson” is assaulted by directorial will. It’s tricky to write about, too, because it involves an element of surprise that a responsible critic (more responsible at this juncture than the director) should not reveal. Let’s just say that Peter C. Brosius’ directorial imperative shifts the focus of attention from the play to the actors in it.

That’s a sizable shift. And extremely questionable. It has a large effect on the nature of the humor in Ionesco’s black farce about a professor whose uncontrollable passions take their toll on his strange new pupil, despite veiled pleas for restraint from the maid who looks after his household.

This is pure and rich Ionesco cheapened by a broadened humor and a splitting of its levels in a way that reduces some of the darker hilarity to mere slapstick. Funny it is, but not always the right kind of funny or for all the right reasons.

To put it charitably, Ionesco might be stunned by some of the goings-on, including gratuitous references to Brigitte Bardot or Charles De Gaulle. Whose play is it anyway? And why “fix” something that was never “broke”?

Along with the writer, it is, as usual, the actors who suffer. Within Brosius’ imposed parameters, Ron Campbell is notable for very cleverly discharging his director’s wishes and Christopher Allport for being undone by them. Only Alan Oppenheimer’s professor, a bit tentative at Thursday’s performance, heels closely and quite ably to the playwright’s intent.

How curious it is, how bizarre and what a coincidence that Ionesco, already curiously, bizarrely and ironically under-represented in this festival (“The Lesson” is the only entry by this playwright), could not have been honored with his own choice of ironies.

With Daniel O’Connor’s staging of the 1958 “The Zoo Story,” things come closer to the mark. This play is what it always was: potent early Albee, the subtext of which has, if anything, taken on more currency in our crisis of homelessness and in a society where more and more people feel less and less connected.

Phillip R. Allen plays Jerry, the itinerant boarding-house roomer who strikes up a not-so-idle conversation with bookish, married, middle-class Peter (Allport, fully recovered from “The Lesson”) in a remote area of New York’s Central Park. The talk is an illumination of what it is to feel totally alienated, and the ending (we won’t reveal it for that generation of theatergoers for whom the play might still be new) has all of the cumulative power it ever had. Much more anchored in straightforward realism (not always the case with Albee), “The Zoo Story” has suffered only a slight societal scarring.

It is much less likely today that someone like Peter would sit around and listen to someone like Jerry. The quotient of peril in such an encounter has become too great and we are all sadly on the alert. Case in point: Upon leaving the theater we were aggressively detained by a homeless person who, for several minutes, would not let us get by.

Life imitating prescient art? How curious, how bizarre and what a coincidence. But the echo still rings.

At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., April 3, 14, 27, May 3 and 9 at 8 p.m.; May 13 at 7:30 p.m.; matinees April 1 and 21 at 2:30 p.m. Marathon Weekend (all 13 plays): April 7-8, 2-5:30 p.m. and 7-10:30 p.m. Ends May 13. $22-$28; (213) 972-7373, (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300, TDD (213) 680-4017).