‘Widows’ and ‘Discovery’ Dropped From Mark Taper Season : Theater: Chilean author questions the demand for another reworking of his tragedy. ‘You can workshop a play to death,’ he says.

“The 23rd season will take you places!” exclaimed the cover of the Mark Taper Forum’s subscribe-now brochure last year. But the last two places won’t be the ones advertised in the brochure.

Brian Friel’s Irish-set “Aristocrats” will replace Ariel Dorfman’s Chilean-set “Widows” in the Taper’s May 31-July 1 slot.

And “Miss Evers’ Boys,” a play set in Alabama earlier in this century, will take the place of Arthur Kopit’s “Discovery of America,” which is set in a 17th-Century Spanish colony, in the July 19-Sept. 2 slot.

The two postponed plays “are not ready,” said Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson. But Chilean playwright Dorfman disagrees.

The Taper commissioned his “Widows” in 1985 and has staged it twice in workshops. The play also received a full production last year at the Williamstown (Mass.) Theatre Festival. Dartmouth will stage a student production of it next month, and San Diego Repertory Theatre has scheduled a bilingual production for January, 1991.

“We’re excited about it,” said Davidson, “but we realized we were forcing it into a date that it wasn’t ready for. . . . It needs one more pass. Everyone agreed what needed to be done.”

But Dorfman said he “felt very comfortable” with the version that he submitted in January. Dartmouth is using that script, and San Diego Rep “is more than willing to do that (version). I felt the problems were not so serious we couldn’t solve them in rehearsal.”

Yet the Taper asked for another rewrite, “and I went reluctantly along with it. I did a major restructuring of the play which did not satisfy any of us.”

The Taper requested still more rewriting. “They care enormously for the play,” said Dorfman. “I’m extremely grateful and appreciative of their trust and resources.” So he’s trying again.

“But there are limits to what I’m prepared to change,” he added. “There is a point where you can workshop a play to death. I don’t know if we’ve reached that point.”

He plans to return to Chile for six months beginning in July, and “before I leave, we’ll have a (new) version, and they can decide. Either we’ll find a way of reconciling our differences, or perhaps we cannot agree on this. There may be too much of a ‘Latino untranslatable’ in the play--something that’s just not palatable for American theatergoers.”

“Tragedy is somehow still possible in the Third World,” he continued. “It’s almost impossible in the post-modern United States. That may be an abyss we have to jump across.”

Davidson suggested that Dorfman’s time spent in the newly democratic Chile may have limited his time spent on the play. Dorfman was there for a month in December and January, “but I don’t think the basic problem is that of time,” the playwright said. “There may be a sense of weariness on my part. I don’t want to continue telling the story of the dead all my life (the play, based on Dorfman’s novel, is about a group of women who reclaim the bodies of their loved ones from a brutal military regime). I want to get on to writing about other things.”

Meanwhile, the Taper will move on to Friel’s “Aristocrats,” a 1979 play about a family of Irish Catholic gentry in decline, set on the eve of the youngest daughter’s wedding. “It’s wonderfully Chekhovian,” said Davidson, “the kind of play you sometimes put on hold because there are pressing contemporary issues.” The Manhattan Theatre Club staged it a year ago.

John Larroquette is the only actor yet announced for “Aristocrats.” Robert Egan, who would have staged “Widows,” will direct.

The postponement of “Discovery of America” was no surprise; Stage Watch quoted author Kopit in February saying that it probably wouldn’t be ready because of conflicting assignments. Davidson said a Taper workshop “opened up a new door to the second part of the play” and he will “set some deadlines for a second workshop.” But he wouldn’t commit to doing it next season; “it might even be the following season.”

“We’ll do it, no matter what, when it’s ready,” said Davidson.

Its replacement, “Miss Evers’ Boys,” is an examination of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, a 1932-72 research project during which black tenant farmers were not told that their “treatment” would not cure their syphilis.

Author David Feldshuh is a doctor as well as the artistic director of Cornell University’s Center for Theatre Arts (Davidson is a Cornell alumnus and has advised the university on its theater arts center). The play won the 1989 New American Play Award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and was directed at Baltimore’s Center Stage in 1989 by Irene Lewis, who also will direct it here.

Davidson was asked about the progress of the Taper’s work on Adrian Hall’s adaptation of “All the King’s Men.” “Coming soon to your local neighborhood theater,” he responded. “If you want a prediction, you can look for it next season.”

QUOTABLE: Ron Link, accepting his Los Angeles Drama Critics’ Circle award Sunday (for staging “Stand-Up Tragedy” at the Taper), explained the “artistic differences” that prompted Neil Simon to fire him as director of Simon’s ill-fated “Jake’s Women” in San Diego: “I wanted to go to the San Diego Zoo, and he wanted to go to Sea World.”

For any critics who might start interpreting the symbolism of the remark, Link later commented that it was just “a joke.”

“Stand-Up” author Bill Cain thanked “the theaters--and there were many--who rejected” his play--because the Taper might not have done it had it gone elsewhere first.

Davidson, accepting the production award for the play, quipped back: “I didn’t realize it had all those rejections, Bill--I never would have touched it.”

“Stand-Up” choreographer Shabba-Doo also accepted his award in a stand-up comedy spirit. Referring to the troubled street kids at the heart of the play, he joked to the LADCC audience: “You’ll get home safely, ‘cause the Crips are going to be happy tonight.”

Accepting the Margaret Harford Award, Laura Zucker of the nearly defunct Back Alley Theatre noted “many portentous signs” about Los Angeles theater, including “a lot of empty midsized theaters.” But she pledged that after she and her co-producer and husband Allan Miller have “recharged the batteries, we’ll be back.”

OH! HYPERBOLE!: The Sunday ad for the touring production of “Oh! Calcutta,” coming to the Henry Fonda Theatre April 29-May 6, claimed “Direct From New York . . . First Time in Los Angeles.”

Not true. While cast members performed in the show in New York, their journey here has been indirect, including a swing through Anaheim’s Celebrity Theatre in February. And the show first opened in Los Angeles in December, 1969, at the Fairfax Theatre (now a movie theater) on Beverly Boulevard, just a few months after the New York opening.