Director Turns to Comedy After a Year of Difficulties

1990 was not the best year for director Ron Link.

What had started as a magical 1989, with the popular and critical success of Bill Cain’s “Stand-Up Tragedy” at the Taper and then a plum assignment to direct Neil Simon’s new play “Jake’s Women” turned sour when Link was publicly fired from “Jake’s” five days before its opening at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. The bad vibes intensified last fall on Broadway, where a sharply negative review of “Stand-Up” by New York Times critic Frank Rich prompted the show’s skittish first-time producers to shut down four weeks into the run.

“There’s no significance in being wounded, staying wounded,” Link said coolly, surveying the set of his new project, Richard Greenberg’s “The Maderati,” which opens tonight at the Tiffany Theatre in West Hollywood. Nevertheless, he resolutely offers a packet containing clips from the many glowing reviews that “Stand-Up” received during its New York run--including raves from the New York Post’s Clive Barnes and John Simon of New York magazine. “New Yorkers loved it,” Link said. “They were on their feet every night.”

The director’s string of local successes began in 1982 with “Women Behind Bars” and continued through the decade with “Delirious,” “Bouncers,” “Shakers,” “Happy Jack” and “Stand-Up,” which won several L.A. Drama Critics Circle awards, including one for direction.

In spite of that track record, Link’s confidence was shaken by the New York experience. “Even though I read all those brilliant reviews, the one by that psycho-vagrant Rich . . . ,” he said, trailing off mid-sentence. “It’s sad, hurtful. It makes you feel like maybe you don’t want to work anymore.”

The detour for “Maderati” has obviously been a healthy one.

“I’ve never seen actors respond so well to a director,” said the show’s co-executive producer, Jordan March. March, who had seen “Stand-Up” but never met Link before this, praises the director’s “comedic charm, the intelligence and warmth he brings to the stage. He also has more energy than 10 people--even more than me, and I have a lot of energy.”

“I just wanted to do something now ,” Link said firmly, “something light, something fun. After 2 1/2 years directing a piece as serious as ‘Stand-Up,’ this is like a little vacation to me.” Link describes the play, a contemporary story of 20-something upscale New Yorkers, as “a yuppified comedy. These people are art poseurs-- people who are more concerned about being known as talented as opposed to being talented. It’s self-styled bourgeois, plastic Bohemia.”

If these don’t sound like the most lovable types ever to cross an L.A. stage, Link, 48, isn’t worried. After all, “Women Behind Bars” gave us a bevy of hard, raunchy female inmates. “Delirious” featured drug-addled Hollywood rich kids. “Stand-Up’s” protagonist was an angry, self-destructive Latino youth. “Happy Jack” was, in fact, dour and remote. “For some reason, I’m always attracted to unredeemable characters--and then I make them lovable,” Link said, grinning. “Does that make sense?”

Another character (and project) he had hoped to redeem was “Jake’s Women,” the not-too-thinly veiled examination of playwright Simon’s relationships with four important women in his life. Link admits being both flattered and curious when he was approached to direct the work. “The first time I had lunch with Neil, I asked him why Mike Nichols or Gene Saks weren’t directing it,” he recalled. “He said Gene had indeed taken a shot at it, as had Mike, and couldn’t work it out--that is, the device of having dead and live people on stage.”

Link’s first choice for the lead was John Larroquette (whom he had directed in 1989’s “Happy Jack”), but the actor couldn’t make it work with his “Night Court” schedule.

“All the guys who are 50 and good in this town are working,” Link said matter-of-factly. “So we went with Peter Coyote, which was a mistake, because he’s not innately funny--and he’d been off the boards for 10 years, which I didn’t know at the time.” Although there was obviously plenty of bad feeling to go around (the producers cited “bad chemistry” for his firing), Link shies away from directly indicting Simon: “He panicked. You’d think after 24 plays, he’d relax. But he doesn’t. If he doesn’t hear people laugh, he panics.”

Link, who is a 1990-91 associate artist at the Mark Taper Forum, got another disappointment earlier this year, when an English tour of “Stand-Up” was canceled.

“When we were busy playing cowboys and Arabs,” he said dryly, “there was talk about possible terrorist threats, so the tour went down.” Even if it is revived, he said, he has found himself at odds with Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, who had expressed interest in remounting “Stand-Up” at the Taper before the European tour. Link resisted, fearing that the piece might be relegated to curiosity appeal, with audiences who’d once liked it returning to see if perhaps Frank Rich was right.

More important for Link was the necessity of moving on.

“When you have an enormous hit, you spend a couple of years making it into a mega-hit, and I think you get artistically tired,” he said. “Some of your muscles are slovenly because you haven’t had to recast, learned how to talk to other actors. And I love that work process.” In the same breath, however, the director’s ambivalence is apparent. “If tomorrow I was offered another movie or a TV job, I might totally leave the theater,” he said candidly. “I really love what I do, and I’m lucky to have a good support system. But theater can be a very bad mistress.”

“The Maderati” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and at 7 p.m. Sundays at the Tiffany Theatre, 8532 Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood, through June 2. $18 to $22. (213) 289-2999.