Shaky Start for L.A.’s ‘Stand-Up Tragedy’ in New York

Bill Cain’s “Stand-Up Tragedy” was the toast of Los Angeles last year. Now, on Broadway, it’s burned toast.

But it isn’t quite burned to a crisp.

The Mark Taper Forum-Hartford Stage Company production, which opened last Thursday at Criterion Center Stage Right on Broadway, received a deadly notice from Frank Rich of the New York Times: Cain “merely restates the obvious” and wrote “a denouement that, for all its tragic pretensions, proves laughably melodramatic.”

Rich wrote that “the gimmickry of the script” and “the busyness of the production . . . do succeed in insinuating ‘Stand-Up Tragedy’ into a theatergoer’s mind--if not as an intellectual or emotional stimulant, then as the relentless source of a throbbing headache.”

Most of the reviews were not so negative. Clive Barnes of the New York Post called the play a “stunner” and “very much to be seen, and seen now while its temperature and climate are both white-hot.”

Linda Winer of Newsday found the play too long and better suited for off-Broadway, “and yet. There is so much heart onstage here, so much smart talk and stage savvy--not to mention an authentic urgency that earns its claim to the theater.”

But Rich’s word usually has the most influence at the box office.

A spokesman for producers Charles B. Moss Jr., Brent Peek and Donald Taffner said the show will not close Sunday, despite Rich’s review. “It needs to do better,” he said, “but they’re going on a week-to-week basis.” It’s possible that a more favorable verdict might even emerge from the New York Times: The opinion of the newspaper’s new Sunday critic, David Richards, has not yet appeared.

Despite the mention of the Mark Taper Forum in the credits, the Taper did not invest in the Broadway production and won’t suffer a loss if the show goes belly-up, said Taper managing director Stephen J. Albert. But the Taper is a participant in the show’s royalty pool (taken from the gross) and its profits, if any should develop.

NEW WORKS: The Taper’s New Work Festival, which introduced “Stand-Up Tragedy” to Los Angeles two years ago, has scheduled 16 free workshops, readings and performance-art pieces for Oct. 22-Nov. 16.

A double bill of Luis Alfaro’s “Downtown” and John Steppling’s “A Deep Tropical Tan” will open the festival Oct. 22-23. It’s the first of 10 two-day workshops.

Other workshops include Quincy Long’s “Whole Hearted” (Oct. 24-25), Thomas George Carter’s “Hells Kitchen Ablaze” (Oct. 27-28), Sybille Pearson’s “Untitled Play” (Oct. 31-Nov. 1), William S. Yellow Robe Jr.’s “The Pendleton Blanket” (Nov. 3-4), Han Ong’s “The L.A. Plays: In a Lonely Country & A Short List of Alternate Places” (Nov. 7-8).

Plus Tony Kushner’s “Perestroika” (Nov. 10-11; this is the sequel to his “Millennium Approaches,” which played Taper Too earlier this year), Erin Cressida Wilson’s “Cross-Dressing in the Depression” (Nov. 14-15), Peter Mattei’s “Elixir Vitae” (Nov. 14-15) and Roy Conboy’s “Camino Confusion/Confusion Street” (Nov. 17-18).

Playwrights whose works will receive Monday readings are Sheri Bailey, Donald Freed, Hollye Levin, Adelaide Mackenzie, Bill Corbett and Ruth Franklin.

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson noted that two-thirds of the playwrights are from the Los Angeles area.

Though admission is free, reservations are necessary: (213) 972-7392.

LATC LABS: Los Angeles Theatre Center is opening a new Classic Theatre Lab, not long after it closed its Music Theatre Lab.

The new lab will be directed by Roger Hendricks Simon, who has staged productions at a number of prestigious theaters, including the New York Shakespeare Festival, Lincoln Center, Yale Repertory Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

In a statement, LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell and producing director Diane White said that the “principal aim” of the new lab is “to draw from the immense pool of Los Angeles-based multicultural talent to develop and produce the classics from a particularly American point of view.”

Meanwhile, Bushnell and White said that the defunct Music Theatre Lab was supposed “to develop contemporary musical theater which addresses significant human, social and artistic issues. However, the work the lab has produced did not meet LATC’s standards or fulfill those objectives, so we have chosen to disband it and develop musical theater through other means--i.e., the commissioning of ‘The Joni Mitchell Project’ ” (a commission to writer Henry Edwards and director David Schweizer resulted in a production that opens Nov. 1).

Reached in Kansas City, where he now lives, the Music Theatre Lab’s director, Paul Hough, said that LATC’s ethnic and women’s theater labs “had a sociological concern as their inspiring ground, while the Music Theatre Lab had as its base an aesthetic concern. That was the basis of the problem. The comment being made was of more interest to Bill (Bushnell) than the aesthetics.”