STAGE : A Bumpy Ride Through a Dramatic Year

As we slip into what looms as the dawning Age of Uncertainty, 1990--with its censorship battles and financial struggles--has left us its own kind of chill.

In light of this, it is ironic that 1990 was in so many respects an artistically superior year in Southland theater. It kicked off with a stunning production of Howard Korder’s steely “Search and Destroy” at South Coast Repertory and closed with the complex emotional tracery of Terrence McNally’s “Lisbon Traviata” at the Mark Taper Forum and Reza Abdoh’s fragmented encapsulation of modern times, “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

In between, there was a small windfall of uncommonly fine productions: Sally Nemeth’s eloquent Dust Bowl play, “Holy Days,” and Shaw’s “Man and Superman” at South Coast Repertory; Arthur Miller’s roiling “Crucible” at LATC; and Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland’s vivid “From the Mississippi Delta,” part of the Mark Taper’s Literary Cabaret at the Itchey Foot Ristorante.

There also was a collection of impressive adaptations. Among them were Tony Kushner’s fanciful rewrite of Corneille’s “The Illusion” (LATC), Shelley Berc and Andrei Belgrader’s equally clever one of Diderot’s “Rameau’s Nephew” (Odyssey Theatre Ensemble) and Adrian Hall’s restructuring of two Robert Penn Warren works in “Hope of the Heart” (Taper).

The La Jolla Playhouse came close to a jackpot of sorts this past summer with top-notch stagings of almost every show attempted: “The Cherry Orchard,” Keith Reddin’s “Life During Wartime,” an intelligent “Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” a witty “Twelfth Night” and Athol Fugard’s searing “My Children! My Africa!” (which later moved to Los Angeles, where, despite glowing reviews, it never found its audience).

And the year played host to two festivals: the Taper’s visionary retrospective of the ‘50s and ‘60s, aptly called “50/60 Vision,” which turned out to be a nostalgic reminder of the prolific innovations of that uncommonly fertile period; and the more comprehensive Los Angeles Festival, in which the salient theatrical contributions came from Vermont’s activist Bread and Puppet Theatre and El Gran Circo Teatro de Chile, both leaving large imprints in their first appearances here.

Even the Christmas and holiday shows this year seemed minted in unsentimental forges. Nothing gooey. The productions--including perennials such as the “Christmas Carols” and the Pacific Theatre Ensemble’s “Long Christmas Dinner”--favored rigor and starkness.

Perhaps the starkness was dictated by what was happening throughout the year at the business end of the scale. For all their seemingly heightened artistic astuteness, theaters were scrambling for the fewer and fewer available dollars. The fallout from the Robert Mapplethorpe affair hung like a toxic cloud over the National Endowment for the Arts. It precipitated a rush of attempted restrictions, unease and government intervention unseen since the McCarthy era of the late ‘40s, and entirely too reminiscent of the congressional circus that led to the demise of the Federal Theater Project of the 1930s.

Some theater companies and individual artists, local and otherwise, rejected their NEA grants rather than submit to conditional clauses that might have forced them to alter their work, in the conviction that you can’t have limited censorship any more than you can be a little bit pregnant.

In the ongoing turmoil, four performance artists who had been recommended by a peer panel to receive fellowships--Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, John Fleck and Tim Miller--had their grants denied by endowment chairman John E. Frohnmayer. The Los Angeles Theatre Center jumped into the breach, providing substitute grants and a professional home for those of the so-called NEA Four who are Los Angeles based--Fleck and Miller.

Not without irony. The 5-year-old LATC’s ongoing battle for its own survival, involving the city of Los Angeles and the Community Redevelopment Agency, intensified dramatically this year. A special commission has spent weeks coming up with suggestions to solve the endemic fiscal crisis plaguing the facility, but it’s a cinch future business at LATC won’t be quite as usual.

And there were other signs of a darkening mood. An offshoot of the subliminal hysteria generated by the NEA squabbles was the Costa Mesa City Council’s adoption of new language in its grant agreements. It prohibits the use of city funds in its theaters for “obscene matters” or “religious or political activity,” with no real clarification offered.

Which may be just as well. This was spearheaded by a pair of arts vigilantes, John Feeney and his wife, Ernie, who, even though they had never attended a performance at the very comme il faut South Coast Repertory, became alarmed, they said, that SCR might have used city funds in printing or distributing flyers calling for support of the NEA.

The Feeneys succeeded in persuading the Costa Mesa City Council to adopt the new restrictions. They invoked them soon after in an attempt to have the city reimbursed for funds used in the Costa Mesa Civic Playhouse production of Christopher Durang’s “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You,” a spoof noir of the playwright’s own Catholic upbringing. The good news is that the city attorney--perhaps because of the vagueness of the new language--disagreed with the Feeneys, judging Durang’s satire to be “secular and not sectarian.”

Orange County seemed particularly unamused all year by the alliance of subsidy and freedom of artistic expression. In Garden Grove, the 12-year-old Grove Shakespeare Festival, which has had its share of financial difficulties, was chastised by at least one exasperated city councilman for doing too many plays by that foreigner Shakespeare at the expense of good old American culture.

Things are looking up, but the city’s stance created something of a local backlash. Corporate entities and one anonymous donor came to the rescue, bailing out the Grove’s last show of the season--a musical adaptation of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by another dingdang foreigner, Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

When last heard from, the donor--reportedly a woman of moderate means whose contribution came from a small, unexpected inheritance--was thinking, at her next windfall, of hiring someone with a trumpet to attend city council meetings and deliver blasts each time an expression was used that Shakespeare had introduced into the language.

But that was only a sideshow. In the center ring we had the Actors’ Equity-Cameron Mackintosh flap over the casting of Jonathan Pryce, a Brit, as a lead Eurasian character in the upcoming Broadway edition of “Miss Saigon.”

Round 1: Mackintosh wanted Pryce, who had not only created the role but made it famous, to play it in New York. Round 2: Equity, under pressure from its underemployed Asian-American constituency, refused permission. Round 3: Mackintosh canceled the show. Round 4: Equity’s embattled other members brought enough pressure to bear that Equity reversed itself. Round 5: So did Mackintosh.

So the show, with Pryce (who, as a Caucasian, arguably had as much claim to a Eurasian role as an Asian-American), is on again. But so is another potential battle--or “Miss Saigon” Round 6. After what he said was a thorough search for an Asian-American to sing the title role, Mackintosh has now asked Equity to grant Filipina Lea Salonga (the original Miss Saigon) star status and permission to come to New York. The matter had yet to be resolved by press time.

These events aside, it was a year in which key Southland theater people traded posts. Martin Wiviott and Keith Stava walked away from the Long Beach Civic Light Opera to become the artistic directors of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera--the first ones since the Nederlanders acquired LACLO in 1981. They were replaced at LBCLO by Broadway’s Barry Brown, a producer of two Tony Award-winning “Gypsies” outings--with Tyne Daly (1989) and Angela Lansbury (1974).

Christopher Durang made his first appearance on a Los Angeles stage this year, starring in his own “Laughing Wild” at the Tiffany. And when Michael Crawford was leaving the cast of “Phantom of the Opera” at the Ahmanson in April, he made some kind of history by commanding $56,000 for three pairs of tickets to his final performance. The proceeds of the auction went to charitable causes. But the Michaelmania could resume full-bore when Crawford returns to the show Dec. 31 for three months, before going on to make the movie.

At West Coast Actors’ Equity, longtime staffer George Ives replaced the retiring Edward Weston as Western regional director for the actors’ union. Except for a significant new contract for commercial productions in mid-sized theaters, the transition has yielded little change. But change will certainly be in the cards at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Susan Dietz gave up her artistic directorship to pursue other interests. She had single-handedly restored the playhouse as a credible theater while she was there.

Almost two years after the modification of the Equity Waiver Plan (under which actors mostly worked for free, without protection) into the Actors’ 99-Seat Theatre Plan (under which they work for pennies and some guarantees), the demeanor of the smaller-theater scene in Los Angeles has also changed. Some of our institutional theaters (or companies), such as Actors for Themselves at the Matrix and the Victory, became inactive. L.A. Theatre Works did one show all year, concentrating more on radio work with its L.A. Classic Theatre Works company. At the Cast Theatre, artistic associate Diana Gibson has gamely continued production while contending with the devastating loss of artistic director Ted Schmitt, who died of AIDS in May. All have been plagued by the same central problem as the larger theaters: higher costs and dwindling sources of funding.

The mid-size theaters are still struggling to stay alive. “A Chorus Line”--which closed in New York March 31 after 15 years and 6,014 performances--fared much less well in a revival at the Las Palmas Theatre, closing in less than two months. Aside from A.R. Gurney’s “Love Letters,” which has shown impressive staying power since April at the Canon Theatre, only the Westwood Playhouse has managed bookings on anything resembling a regular basis.

On our wish list: Money and shows to fill the Ivar Theatre, acquired this year by the Inner City Cultural Center, and to fill Marla Gibbs’ Crossroads Art Academy and Theatre, which moved into a new $3.2-million home in Leimert Park in June.

Inner City will hold the finals of its fourth annual short play competition at the Ivar Jan. 12, but the theater is still being renovated.

As for Crossroads, managing director Shay Wafer says they plan to announce a season in the smaller of the two theaters to run from March to July. Stay tuned. . . .

Before closing, we shall remember those who vigorously and often valiantly contributed to the arts and enriched our lives before taking their final curtain in 1990.

In no particular order, they are Tary Ismond, Clarke Taylor, Mordecai Gorelik, Dennis McIntyre, John Dexter, Aldo Fabrizi, Greta Garbo, Alice Sapritch, Henry Luhrman, Margaret Goheen, Martin Shwartz, Antoine Vitez, Mary Lea Johnson Richards, Joseph Leberman, Michael Shawn, Jessica James, Susan Oliver, Sergio Franchi, Hal Bokar, Kim Joseph, Albert Salmi, Jack Bunch, Franklyn Seales, Martin Workman, Sammy Davis Jr., Jim Henson, Ted Schmitt, Steve Foreman, Susan Oliver, Jay Doyle, Ryszard Ciezlak, Barbara Baxley, Marian Walters, Manuel Puig, Ben Frank, Lawrence Kasha, Richard Hummler, Delphine Seyrig, Clyde Ventura, Jay Moran, Herbert Berghof, Leonard Bernstein, Mary Martin, Rick Ingersoll, Lawrence Durrell, Malcolm Muggeridge, Aaron Copland, Robert Chesley, Joan Bennett, Edward Binns, Tadeusz Kantor, Robert Cummings, Arthur Kennedy, Ken Hill, Stanley Green, Friedrich Duerrenmatt and Edwin Lester.