STAGE : Morgan Jenness : The Los Angeles Theatre Center wanted a dramaturge but got ‘a free-lance facilitator’ with a radical vision

If the cultural scene in Los Angeles is a great, multicultural experiment-in-the-making, then theater is the central laboratory. The experiment requires regular infusions of new blood. That is particularly true in the theater, where high costs and subscription audiences tend to force companies into safe, conservative choices. Yet those same companies know that without young artists with fresh perspectives, they will petrify and the new blood will flow to more lucrative veins.

Not surprisingly, the Mark Taper Forum and the Los Angeles Theatre Center--theaters forever torn between feeding the art form and pleasing their subscribers--have recruited people with often startling notions of what theater can do. Plays which have more in common with musical structure than the usual rise and fall of dramatic action. Subjects which reflect Los Angeles’ increasingly complex web of multiple cultures, languages and traditions.

Besides knowing each other (having collaborated on an LATC Latino Theatre Lab workshop of Cherie Moraga’s “Heroes and Saints” last fall), the Taper’s newest associate artist, Jose Guadalupe Saucedo, and LATC’s new literary manager and dramaturge, Morgan Jenness, share a view of the city as a vast stage upon which the new multicultural drama is being played out. Robert Koehler interviewed both L.A. native Saucedo and New York expatriate Jenness.

Morgan Jenness, with her shock of blinding white-blond hair, her darting eyes and her wiry frame, looks like someone struck by lightning.

Then, when she speaks, the listener is sure that she has been hit by a bolt from the blue.

It is cultural lightning that Jenness is talking about, and as she has recently moved from New York to assume the post of associate director of new-play development at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, Jenness feels that she has landed in the heart of a theatrical thunderstorm.

“I look at what I’m doing,” she says, intently sitting at a table in an LATC conference room, “and it’s as if I’m a cog in a huge machine, linking up with artists and linking them up with each other. All these people bumping up against each other is what makes a culture, and I feel more connected with that now than I’ve ever been. And in L.A., it’s multiple cultures, each vitally changing the other.”

What Jenness actually does at LATC isn’t as easily pegged as the work of a director, writer or designer. She roams in that foggy land known as dramaturgy , populated by people who help their well-endowed theater employers find new scripts, or research the background of old ones the theater is reviving, or collaborate with the playwright and director during the production process.

This makes Jenness a key conduit at LATC where new work is a central guiding force, an artistic reason for being. But her work is complicated by the fact that she doesn’t view herself as a dramaturge.

“Not at all. Call me . . . a ‘free-lance facilitator.’ Dramaturgy is really a distinct, academic profession. I don’t come out of a scholastic background--not like (Mark Taper Forum dramaturge) Leon Katz. My experience is in hands-on production situations.”

Indeed, it is as a production dramaturge that Jenness has gained her reputation as one of the country’s best. So desired was Jenness that LATC artistic director Bill Bushnell and producing director Diane White spent two years wooing her West, and only succeeded when the New York Theatre Workshop Jenness was associated with suffered major budget cutbacks.

Peter Sagal, a Jenness colleague at LATC until his recent departure to work on his own plays, says: “The great dramaturges like Morgan check their egos at the door. She really considers it a privilege to work with artists. For example, at a dramaturgy conference in 1989, a panelist told everyone that their jobs were basically pointless, so they should quit their posts. Morgan was on the next panel, and trashed that idea: ‘Don’t quit,’ she said. ‘Theater saved my life.’ ”

It started in the Midwest. “I performed in this group called Magic Theatre for Madmen,” she recalls with a laugh. “By the late ‘70s, I was in New York, working with Lynn Holtz on a poetry series she happened to be doing at the Public Theatre. One day, I was in the Public’s literary office, thumbing through scripts. I gave them some comments, which I guess they liked so much that they asked if I would like to do it full-time.”

Jenness had a home at the Public from 1979 to 1988, working as its director of new projects as well as a production literary manager--the more easily digestible synonym for dramaturge . When she left the Public, she explains, Public Theatre artistic director Joe Papp gave his blessing: “He felt that he had been clipping my wings, that I needed a place where I could put more of my ideas to work.”

From her vantage point at LATC, she is struck by both theaters’ commonalities: “Yeah, even their brochures and lobbies are kind of alike. They’re both deeply committed to multiculturalism. They’re both willing to cause an uproar. Each invites ‘outside’ artists--David Greenspan and Joanne Akalaitis at the Public, Reza Abdoh at LATC. But while Joe (Papp) is an artist, Bill has vision and tenacity.”

It is vision, she insists--with a strong multicultural accent--that underlies Jenness’ LATC projects, which extend beyond production work to community outreach (such as performances geared to the inner-city organization Para Los Ninos) and overseeing the theater’s various labs, including the Latino Theatre Lab, Playwrights’ Workshop, Asian-American Theatre Project, Black Theatre Artists Workshop and the Women’s Project. “All these groups used to be off in their own corners, like foster children,” Jenness notes. “It wasn’t intentional, but now real, solid works are coming out of the labs. And the lab leaders are now directly involved in the theater’s decision-making process.

“This may address multiculturalism’s challenge: How do you hold onto what you have as a culture, and not get swallowed up? What’s exciting about this country are all the elements and groups that can come together and influence each other.”

The Jenness vision is also a radical one: “The old Aristotelian notions of drama are dying out, or at least being taken over by television, where a lot of very good writers who happen to be writing for the stage should really be working. I think in terms of musical notation--that’s exactly the conception of (Abdoh’s just-ended) ‘Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice.’ Tony Kushner and Mac Wellman are two among many writers who understand this.”

Besides being constantly on the search for new scripts and talent, Jenness devotes large chunks of time to shows that have fallen outside of conventional drama, such as Abdoh’s “Minamata” and Eduardo Machado’s “Stevie Wants to Play the Blues.”

“A lot of my theater friends get mad when I say this, but the most exciting stuff isn’t happening in the theater, but in underground performance galleries, or places like LACE. That’s the theater of the future.”

As an example of that future, Jenness half-jokes about the spoken language to come. “We won’t be speaking English as we now know it, but maybe a blend of English, Spanish and Japanese. Won’t that be exciting?”