Here’s One Scene We Know Shakespeare Didn’t Write

The Duke of Gloucester bites the dust onstage in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” at the Mark Taper Forum. But Shakespeare wrote no such scene. His text refers to the Duke’s death but doesn’t depict it. So who wrote that scene?

It’s taken from “Woodstock, a Moral History,” a pre-Shakespearean play by an anonymous writer, replied director Robert Egan. He included it “to make the storytelling as clear as possible” to a modern audience and because “I’m interested in the brutal political world of power and violence.”

Shakespeare didn’t have to write that scene, he said, because the original audiences needed no explanation about the history. But Egan likes the way the scene “catapults us in with an event.”

Meanwhile, Egan is taking a leave of absence from his job as the Taper’s associate artistic director. He’ll be gone through Nov. 1. The New Work Festival he has directed in recent years will be postponed from the fall until January, with Taper staffers Oskar Eustis and Corey Beth Madden running preparations for the festival in Egan’s absence.

TONY TALK: Taper officials are delighted with the 11 Tony nominations that went to “Jelly’s Last Jam.” The Taper helped develop it and presented its premiere.

The Taper is a royalty participant in the Broadway production, entitling it to percentages of the weekly operating profit and the post-recoupment profit. But it won’t get the extra profits that an investor might get, nor a co-producer title--unlike its role on two other Tony nominees, “The Most Happy Fella” and “Two Trains Running.”

“If the production had gone directly” from the Taper to Broadway, “we would have been a co-producer,” said Taper boss Gordon Davidson. But elements of the show were changed in between the two productions. Davidson tried to raise enough money for the CTG to invest in the Broadway production, but his efforts “hit this community at the wrong time,” he said.

“Dancing at Lughnasa,” which won the most Tony nominations in the play categories, was mentioned as a possible entry in the next Ahmanson-at-the-Doolittle season in mailings to subscribers. But then it didn’t make the list recently announced by Davidson.

“They haven’t quite got their act together yet,” said Davidson, referring to the “Lughnasa” producers. “They don’t know what the future of the play in New York is or how to handle its tour. I even offered to do our own production”--but in the absence of a firm decision from New York, “I had to move on with the season.”

The show’s general manager, Joseph Harris, confirmed that decisions about a tour hadn’t been reached yet. But he added that he’s not talking to anyone except Davidson regarding a Los Angeles production.

AND WHAT IF SOME STRIPPER GIVES $3 MILLION?: The Ivar Theatre in Hollywood is now the New Ivar. C. Bernard Jackson, whose Inner City Cultural Center owns the Ivar, said he wants “to brush aside the old image” of the place as a burlesque hall. He reported that men still arrive or call, looking for the girls, girls, girls. Maybe a new name will help.

Still, he would prefer a different new name. His offer of naming the theater after a big-bucks donor still holds, only he has raised the ante--it will now take $3 million to attach your name to the Ivar.

An adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story, “Next in Line,” opened Friday at the New Ivar.

“MISS DAISY” IN SIMI: Another production of “Driving Miss Daisy”? What else is new?

The fact that this one, from the Santa Susana Repertory Company, is held at a former courthouse in Simi Valley.

A program note by director Lane Davies notes the irony: “I had already been struck by the perverse coincidence of rehearsing a play which deals so deftly and gently with racial issues . . . while the Rodney King trial was in session in the new courthouse a few blocks away. I was caught totally off guard by the madness that ensued.”