IMPRESARIO of the AVANT-GARDE : For His Brand of Theater, Reza Abdoh Draws on Shakespeare, Hip-Hop, William Burroughs, Brazilian Dance and Greek Mythology. Sometimes Even the Cast Is Confused.

IT IS ALMOST NOON in rehearsal room 5C, and the cast and crew of the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s 26th world premiere will soon start another day’s work. An atmosphere of reverent meditation permeates this spare, windowless space.

Verdi’s Requiem mournfully echoes in the background. Lead actor Tom Fitzpatrick sits on the floor, shirtless, barefoot, twisting and turning his limber body into yogic positions. His co-star, the impossibly lean and graceful Julia Mengers, faces a wall, quietly singing a lullaby to herself. Muscular Brazilian performers Joselito Amen Santo and Borracha Santana prepare for their roles as the play’s chorus, kicking in slow motion the steps of their native dance capoeira .

Only one figure violates the tranquillity. Dark and slight, he is physically the least striking person in the room, yet Reza Abdoh projects a fierce, disturbing self-absorption. Hunched over--in a black turtleneck, military fatigue trousers and combat boots--Abdoh’s body forms a quivering question mark as one foot taps impatiently.

At the moment, Abdoh is focused on the fourth day of eight-hour, six-day-a-week rehearsals for the opening of his latest work, “The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice,” which runs through Jan. 27. He resembles a hunter stalking game, but the beast he’s after is more elusive than any wild animal. Abdoh is tracking his own imagination. His rehearsals are physical re-creations of his dreams. But before the Theatre Center can produce his spectacular visions, Abdoh must hunt them down. Only he knows what today’s work will entail.

The 26-year-old Abdoh might seem an unlikely candidate for Southern California’s most promising theatrical Wunderkind. But since migrating to Los Angeles in 1982, Abdoh has created and directed seven original pieces, often in environmental stagings (“Peep Show” inhabited a seedy Hollywood motel; “ Pasos en la Obscuridad ,” the Park Plaza Hotel). Before he came to Los Angeles, he had done everything from street theater to full-scale stagings--including a London production of Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” he directed at age 14.

During his remarkable rise, Abdoh has attracted an impressive array of mentors, managers and advisers. One of the most influential sits in a folding chair, struggling to put the loose pages Abdoh calls a script into some semblance of order.

Actor Alan Mandell, who has just returned from a guest lecture and performance in Spain, has jet lag. This is the first time that he has seen any words on paper for this production. The quintessential Beckett performer and a friend of the late Nobel laureate, the 62-year-old Mandell is more accustomed to analyzing a playwright’s painfully sculpted language and delivering the words impeccably and precisely than creating text, scene after scene.

But Abdoh doesn’t believe in scripts. For him, the rehearsal process creates the form, and “Hip-Hop” is based mostly on excerpts from numerous sources piled on the stage: a sociology study, “More Man Than You’ll Ever Be: Gay Folklore and Acculturation in Middle America”; Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”; a face-lift manual; academic treatises on semiotics with imposing titles such as “Nomadolo gy: The War Machine”; a stress-test questionnaire; the screenplays for the classic movies “I Was a Male War Bride” and “It Happened One Night”; a text on “aversion therapy for sexual perversion”; a wine-and-cheese guide; books on political torture; a psychiatric paper of obsessive/compulsive disorders, “The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing His Hands,” and a volume about British futurist J. G. Ballard.

“The pages might read ‘Man,’ but your character is ‘Captain,’ ” Abdoh tells Mandell. “He’s a combination of Jack Benny, Huey Long, Adolf Hitler and Orson Welles.”

Mandell does a double take. “Is there such a thing? Which Orson Welles? The ‘Third Man’ Welles?”

“ ‘A Touch of Evil.’ Physically, you’re going to be very, very huge.”

Mandell blinks, absently strokes his trim waist, then quips, “That’s hard for me to imagine.”

The urbane Mandell observes Abdoh with patient skepticism. Despite their eight-year friendship, Mandell, who is the Theatre Center’s consulting director, has never been in an Abdoh play until now. And today, he resembles Beckett’s burned-out poet Krapp agonizing as a tape recorder spools out youth’s deluded ambitions.

“You will be grotesquely oversized.”

Mandell nods sagely, then asks, “Bigger than Sydney Greenstreet?”

“Oh, much bigger!”

“Bigger than Marlon Brando?” The eavesdropping cast and crew stifle their giggles.

Abdoh finally realizes that Mandell is gently deflating his enthusiasm, trying to force him to explain, to define, to be precise. It is typical of their Socratic debates.

He joins in the laughter but quickly turns serious again: “Oh, much bigger than Brando. Much bigger. So it’s a very paradoxical character. In this universe, sex and desire and pleasure--all these aspects of life--are forbidden. Passion, love--forbidden.”

Mandell studies his pages. “Who’s playing Orpheus?”

Abdoh points at Mengers, now done with her lullaby and warm-up exercises.

“And who plays Eurydice?”

Abdoh points at Fitzpatrick. He shrugs. “It’s sort of tearing genders apart.”

Mandell appears stunned by the extremes “Hip-Hop” will be waltzing him through. If in mythology Orpheus entered Hades to bring his beloved Eurydice back to life, Mandell is about to enter hell to bring Abdoh’s vision to reality. Or so his expression suggests.

“I don’t understand any of this,” Mandell sighs, “but go ahead.”

AS REZA ABDOH passionately describes “Hip-Hop,” his charisma is undeniable. Vulnerable yet furious, naive yet wise, Abdoh maintains a delicate balance between innocence and experience. He’s simultaneously poet and priest. No wonder he can talk actors into working naked onstage. No wonder he can persuade them to sacrifice so much time for so little money.

He’s a genuine visionary, a reincarnation of the 1960s confrontational, agitprop experiments of communal ensembles such as the Living and Open theaters. To Abdoh, avant-garde isn’t a dirty word. He’s not out to make a deal. He’s determined to make art in an era when even the word artist is under siege.

Abdoh also personifies those chic buzzwords of contemporary theater--multiethnic and multicultural. After all, Abdoh brings to his work the zealous mysticism of the Mideast and the rigorous classical training of an upper-class British education.

He was born in Tehran to an Italian mother, Homa, and Iranian father, Ali Muhammed Abdoh, who met in Europe. She was 15, and he was 33.

Ali Muhammed, who had graduated from the University of Maryland, was a naturalized American and star boxer and volleyball player. After marrying, he returned to his homeland in 1961, where he built Tehran’s first bowling alley. Bowling revolutionized the city’s night life, quickly becoming the “in” activity among high-society Iranians. Soon Ali Muhammed owned numerous sports businesses and purchased a popular soccer team.

Such prosperity, however, did little to improve family harmony at home. Abdoh remembers “a patriarchal domineering authoritarianism” and says that his parents’ marriage was “a relationship based on fear rather than mutual respect.” Although he denies creating work as therapy, he could just as easily be describing the dysfunctional relationships in his “Rusty Sat on a Hill One Dawn and Watched the Moon Go Down” or the sadomasochistic power games in his “Minimata.”

Abdoh’s family took up residence in London when he was 6. “Living in England was the thing to do for the rich Persians, their claim to fame,” he remembers. “It was decadent because there was a lot of money, and they didn’t know what to do with it.”

But England exposed him to art that spoke to his private fantasies. At age 7, his governess dragged him to see Peter Brook’s legendary circus version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The acrobatic choreography, the sudden bursts of wild spectacle, the direct address to the audience--all characteristic of Abdoh’s work--can be traced to that performance.

During a 1972 visit to Iran, his mother took him to the Festival of Arts in Shiraz-Persepolis. There, a relatively unknown American director named Robert Wilson was conducting auditions for an English-speaking child. (Four years later, Wilson would win international acclaim with “Einstein on the Beach.”) Abdoh, then 9, was cast in Wilson’s 168-hour epic “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: A Story About a Family and Some People Changing.” He walked in circles, reciting a single line: “I went to the supermarket but didn’t get any chocolate.”

“I saw that there is an innate beauty to people just running around and making fools of themselves,” he says of his role. “Intellectually, of course, I had no idea what I was experiencing.”

For three years, he worked with England’s National Youth Theatre, cleaning bathrooms, building sets and acting. Then at 13, Abdoh left home and began living with a 32-year-old English writer. “I was seeking maternal fulfillment,” Abdoh says of her. “But there was affection and a hunger to learn and a need to get out of the morass of military school and my family.”

A year later came the “Peer Gynt” production at the National Youth Theatre. At 15, Abdoh struck out on his own, working primarily with an avant-garde ensemble of street artists. He traveled to India to study Kathakali dance, then organized a touring show of ethnic choreography called “Vazz Pazz.” He was invited to share his dance-theater work at festivals in Scotland and France, where Abdoh saw troupes from all over the world perform. In Paris, Italian opera impresario Georgio Strehler’s work became a major influence.

Then Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini gained control of Iran, and Abdoh’s father was condemned as a friend of the Shah. Forced to flee, Ali Muhammed chose West Covina as his city of exile. Shortly thereafter, he suffered a heart attack, and Abdoh decided to try one last time to connect with his father.

But Ali Muhammed, a businessman whose financial wealth had suddenly been confiscated by the Islamic fundamentalists, turned his bitterness on his son. “He was violently against me being an artist of any sort,” Abdoh says. “He had lost his spirit. There was not a whole lot for him to live for.” His father died following another heart attack in 1980.

With his mother living in Europe, Abdoh remained in Los Angeles, eventually moving to an apartment in Venice he now shares with his lover, liberal arts student Brenden Doyle. Abdoh was fascinated by the mix of Asian, Latin and Western cultures, by what he viewed as the region’s “future possibilities.” Besides, Los Angeles reminded him of Tehran where, he says, “you don’t really see what’s going on until you’re behind closed doors.”

A screenplay earned him a scholarship to the University of Southern California’s film department. But Hollywood networking was not for him. “They hated what I was doing there, which was nothing,” he says. “When I saw the students’ monomaniacal focus on getting it, making it, consuming it, I went back into theater.”

At the now-defunct Fifth Estate Coffee House in Hollywood, Abdoh directed three one-acts by British political playwright Howard Brenton. In 1984, he chose to take on Shakespeare.

Alan Mandell heard that a 19-year-old Italian-Iranian was mounting a full-length “King Lear” in a 36-seat Hollywood loft. So he went to watch and was treated to a wildly gymnastic cast of students laboring more than four hours in Shakespeare’s most difficult tragedy. “The fact that someone this young truly understood ‘Lear’ was astonishing,” Mandell says.

One night, when Diane White, the Theatre Center’s resident producer, stopped in, the actor playing Edgar failed to show up. No problem. Since he had memorized the entire play, Abdoh calmly assumed the Tom of Bedlam role. “Even though it had a lot of flaws,” White remembers, “Reza had directed it, designed it, rewritten it, done everything.” She was clearly impressed: “The ingenuity of the kid, the sheer audacity of it!”

In 1986, White and Mandell helped secure Abdoh’s professional Los Angeles stage-directing debut, a pair of one-acts by David Hwang at the Theatre Center. Soon Marta Holen, a longtime board member of the Los Angeles Ballet, became another mentor and, more important, a producer of his work.

“I loved his use of movement and his visual look and how cultures mesh in his pieces,” Holen says. Her backing freed Abdoh from fund-raising responsibilities. It also allowed him to pursue his visions without compromise. After the Hwang one-acts, Holen produced Abdoh’s radical version of “Medea” in a basketball gym at the Hollywood Recreation Center.

With Mandell, White and Holen solidly behind him, Treat East Management contracted with Abdoh to guide his career, and the kid from Iran was poised to make a major artistic move.

ALL THIS ATTENTION is ironic in light of how Abdoh works. He has never believed in traditional cause-and-effect storytelling theater. Abdoh’s plays are constructed of fragments and styles from diverse sources. He works through a montage of painting, dance, opera and film. Old ways of seeing and experiencing no longer suffice, he says. His composition technique is borrowed from his major literary influence, novelist William Burroughs, who titled it the Cut-Up Method.

Abdoh is frequently compared with another controversial theatrical wizard living in Los Angeles, Peter Sellars, but Abdoh’s quest for artistic purity is more politically confrontational. Audiences are deliberately shocked by Abdoh, whereas Sellars offers more mischievous and much lighter fare.

Abdoh’s kindred contemporary is East German playwright Heiner Muller, whom many Europeans consider the most important playwright since Samuel Beckett. Like Abdoh, Muller believes that “art must awaken the yearning for another world, and this yearning is revolutionary. Theater must not duplicate reality.”

“You can’t pander to people,” explains Fitzpatrick, Abdoh’s favorite actor and a veteran of eight Abdoh productions. “I think Reza believes our culture has made us all so numb with constant media bombardment that ordinary theater has a soporific quality. I think you have to get right up in people’s faces, and, if not vocally scream, you have to scream at them with images. His technique is to assault.”

Abdoh’s manifesto is less fierce in his words, more philosophical in tone. He bases his world outlook on the ancient mystic poet Molanah, who “truly celebrates the mysteries of life, who writes about the struggle between light and dark forces.”

“My plays are dreams,” Abdoh explains. “My dreams are dreams of a better future where we can truly live in peace rather than simulated peace. But to get there, there’s a whole process of purging. And that’s why often my work is so dark. In my work, there are moments of complete mayhem, unforgiving and relentless violence, passions that are like excrement. It’s not because I’m cynical. It’s a form of purge that needs to occur.”

Abdoh’s first critical success using this method occurred last year with “Minimata,” a ruthless indictment of industrial pollution. After influential critics such as Time magazine’s William Henry III flew in to see the Theatre Center production, Abdoh’s underground reputation spread to the East Coast. En Garde Artes, Manhattan’s most successful venue for progressive theater, invited him to direct an environmental piece. He selected a warehouse and a four-block area in the city’s meat-packing district as the setting for his Off-off- off Broadway interpretation of Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov.”

The resulting “Father Was a Peculiar Man” included a shower scene in a meat tub with two naked men kissing, another nude male dangling upside down from a meat hook and yet another painted green and hanging on a cross as Christ. Despite the graphic nudity and simulated sex, the play was a hit. The New York Times raved that it was “exhilarating” and “exuberant.”

More praise followed. “I think Reza is the only true theatrical visionary in Los Angeles,” says Adam Leipzig of Touchstone Pictures. A vice president of motion-picture productions, Leipzig has seen every local piece by Abdoh during the past seven years. “You can’t watch one of Reza’s plays the way you watch any other theater because it is not about traditional things like the development of character or linear progression of plot. You have to open yourself to the experience, which consists of a mixture of events, themes, images and sounds.”

Leipzig also finds Abdoh intriguing, he says, “because, in his heart, Reza is a romantic. He offers us a world where love is possible, and I think that makes Reza very different from the cold, austere, avant-garde theater directors.”

Soon after “Father,” Abdoh attempted another original work in time for the 1990 Los Angeles Festival. But “Pasos en la Obscuridad” (Footsteps in the Darkness) turned into a nightmare. Abdoh’s mistake was to mount a three-hour-plus telenovella in Spanish, using Latino transvestite entertainers--but with a small budget and only 2 1/2 weeks of rehearsal. It was panned by Los Angeles Times critic Sylvie Drake, who wrote that the play was “much ado about nada. . . . This is a free event, but it costs to sit through it.”

Although Abdoh wants to stage a version of “Hamlet” set in Andy Warhol’s Factory studio and is writing an original screenplay based on Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot,” he returned to the Theatre Center with plans of mounting an epic about AIDS, titled “Bogeyman.” But he was told that the theater didn’t have funds for such a large cast. “Hip-Hop” became the alternative. Despite its relative brevity (80 minutes without an intermission), it is his most technically ambitious work yet, with hundreds of sound and light cues.

Abdoh has set the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in a 21st-Century science-fiction society where sex is taboo. Mandell’s fascist Captain polices the erotic behavior of ordinary married citizens such as Orpheus and Eurydice. When their libido triumphs, Captain condemns Eurydice to hell. Desire is the ultimate sin for those not in power. But Captain gets to play around.

“Hip-Hop” represents Abdoh’s furious reaction to the re-emerging Puritan ethic of sexual repression. The nudity, graphic sexuality, scatalogical dialogue--all of it is designed to celebrate desire and challenge the Jesse Helms ethic. Pornography, Abdoh says, is in the eye of the beholder and the mind of the censor.

THE “HIP-HOP”rehearsal is now entering its eighth and final hour. It has been an exhausting day.

Fitzpatrick, as Eurydice, wears false breasts. Mengers, as Orpheus, wears false male genitals. Santo and Santana wrestle to the floor again and again. A dance instructor leads them repeatedly through an intense fox-trot to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek.”

“I would like to taste every girl and every man,” Mandell, as Captain, declares sinisterly. “Is my body now obsolete?” Then to Fitzpatrick’s Eurydice, he roars: “My body’s now obsolete!”

“Perfect!” cries Abdoh.

“No,” Mandell moans, “it’s not perfect at all.”

“It will be perfect,” Abdoh assures him.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” Mandell moans again.

Abdoh huddles privately with Mandell, just as they did before the rehearsal began.

“It’s a lot to absorb,” Mandell tells Abdoh. “At this point, I have very little idea of what’s going on, although there seems to be a beginning and an end, which is like the beginning. I’m still not sure why you’re using the Orpheus and Eurydice myth.”

Abdoh tries to answer. “What inspired it was a line from (William) Blake: ‘He who desires but acts not breeds pestilence.’ It’s basically a celebration of Dionysian forces in our culture which need to be celebrated and emphasized because right now we live in a time where we are frugal with our care, with our love for each other. In this culture, our personal freedoms are being taken away from us in the name of law and order and decency and morality. The moral fabric of a culture should not depend on the mindset of a few individuals.”

Mandell ponders Abdoh’s comments. His jet lag is obvious now, so Abdoh decides to stop the rehearsal a few minutes earlier than usual. Besides, Santo and Santana must go to traffic school tonight.