COMMENTARY : Mark Taper’s Artistic and Cultural ‘Vision’ : Theater: Thirteen seminal works from the ‘50s and ‘60s remain fresh, funny and biting.

We’ve all heard of new play festivals. But an old play festival? That takes imagination.

Which is what the Mark Taper Forum demonstrated it had when it undertook “50/60 Vision,” a festival of 13 seminal plays from the ‘50s and ‘60s that remain as fresh and immediate today as late-breaking news.

Everything about the event is not perfect, but it’s hardly the point. Attendance could be better (though a marathon weekend, featuring all 13 plays, drew a crowd of 583 out of a possible 750), yet the festival has reached out to high school and college students--and to some talented directors from the city’s smaller theaters.

It was a “vision”-ary idea. Credit Edward Parone with dreaming it up. Parone was associate artistic director of the Taper from 1967 to 1979 and the man with vision enough then to create the Taper’s still-memorable New Theatre For Now--back when new-play festivals were really new and the Taper itself was the new kid on the block.

The plays he chose for this look backward are examples of some of the best deconstructivist theater around. Its main men are the writers who were in the forefront 25 to 45 years ago: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, Harold Pinter, Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. LeRoi Jones) and Jean Genet. The choices pretty much dictated themselves. Those who live continue to be heavyweights. They’re still hard to top.

And yet even if “50/60 Vision” were above artistic reproach, it would have been risky business.

Aside from the logistics of assembling 13 plays into a repertory of six programs, how well would these old plays play? How receptive would audiences be? How deep a gash would they make in the budget--particularly if they were not well received?

Audiences have not been flocking to these shows (though at last report they were growing). Are they intimidated or uninterested? Hard to tell, and too bad, too, because “50/60 Vision” is not museum theater. It has simplicity and drive. The plays are cogent, fresh and often blisteringly funny--when they’re not simply blistering. Beckett is a poet. Ionesco a prankster. Pinter a pauser. Albee a slasher. Each, in his own way, is a revelation.

Some plays, like Genet’s “The Maids” or Beckett’s “Happy Days” have surfaced now and then through the years, but most are rarely revived. When did you last see a good professional stage production of Beckett’s television play, “Eh, Joe” or Pinter’s radio play, “A Slight Ache”? Or for that matter Albee’s “The Sandbox” and “The American Dream”?

Nowhere but in the not-for-profit arena would such an uncommercial and economically marginal enterprise be possible. Yet even in that arena, the current by-word tends to be new plays and new-play festivals. Few theaters look back--unless it’s way back to classics that bring with them unquestioned if often overvalued respectability: Shakespeare, the Greeks, Moliere.

Parone’s proposal, and Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson’s decision to adopt it, were much more perilous. True, the period Parone chose to focus on was uncommonly fertile and had a very direct bearing on many of the plays we see today. But it was still too close to them in time to have acquired the filter of real age. These plays have not even made it quite as “modern” classics.

Yet in resurrecting this more immediate, influential past, Parone has placed a value on something that we, as a nation of unmoored, culturally orphaned immigrants, have too little of: cultural continuity. The Taper’s commitment to it shows social as well as artistic responsibility. While “50/60 Vision” is largely rooted in a European tradition that is no longer the singular tradition of the country, it does remain, historically and theatrically, the predominant one.

At least the high schools and colleges (pursued by the Taper) have recognized an opportunity. Of the 2,550 tickets sold through group sales so far, 90% have gone to students. Taper audience development director Robert Schlosser expects to sell another 500 to 1,000--a strong showing, he said, topped only by the popular (if not critical) success of Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company, which sold 4,200 group tickets to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “King Lear” (though only 75% of those to students).

What was it about this theater of the ‘50s and ‘60s that made it so trenchant? Political climate for one. The postnuclear world had left people staring, for the first time, at the real possibility of Apocalypse. Theater, which had stagnated during the war years, was ready for a shake-up. Its re-awakening in a nihilistic mood saw it gravitate to the soul-searchings of Beckett and the savagely comic breakdowns of Ionesco.

The effect was indeed a theater that wanted to break things down--or up. Logic. Language. The fourth wall. “We wanted to reverse the values,” Ionesco told this writer a few weeks ago, “deal with essentials.” Whatever else it would be, this new theater was not going to be warmed-over movies. It was time for the revolution--a revolution that leap-frogged into the ‘60s, influencing those rising young turks in America--Albee, Shepard, Baraka.

Examining this festival, one could argue that Ionesco is woefully under-represented, that Sam Shepard has written better one-acts than “Red Cross,” that one black play (Baraka’s “Dutchman,” paired with “Red Cross”) borders on tokenism--as does a Latinized version of Genet’s “The Maids,” however sassy and striking.

One could also argue--though reluctantly--that Beckett, who has four plays in this retrospective, is over-represented. Ionesco and Beckett constituted the headwaters of the torrent that became the Theatre of the Absurd. They deserved to be more evenly displayed. It is “Vision’s” singular serious misstep that its only Ionesco play--”The Lesson”--is also the only one to surface in an unprofitably altered state thanks to unchecked directorial zeal.

Otherwise, economy and simplicity have earmarked Yael Pardess’ unit design--a sort of neutral, semi-circular coliseum, with minimal embellishments or furnishings supplied as needed. It can’t be said enough that these are not plays about decor but about writers with images dancing in their heads.

Crucial to realizing those images are the directors and actors. The performers have created a versatile company gleaned from just about everywhere--the ranks of TVQ (a splendid Charlotte Rae but tentative Teri Garr), to such hardball dazzlers as Angela Paton and a raft of surprising players, familiar and unfamiliar, younger and older, who glide from role to role with effortlessness and grace.

“The Lesson” excepted, the staging has been vivid and urgent, but not egocentric. The Taper did something else that was long overdue: It reached into the community to hire three directors who had distinguished themselves in small venues around town--Michael Arabian, Daniel O’Connor, Ethan Silverman--and entrusted them with staging more than half the plays. Only Silverman had a slender earlier tie to the Taper. He had been Davidson’s assistant at New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre in 1983, when Davidson restaged “The Lady and the Clarinet.”

If artistic director Gordon Davidson is still mourning the demise of the Taper’s blunted attempts at classical rep (which were never repertories in the true sense anyway), he need look no further. This is the repertory model that should serve for the future. It has size and it has stature. The Taper and Parone have done their job. Those who pass up this “Vision” will have only themselves to blame.