Putting L.A. on the Theatrical Map

Quick: What happened in Los Angeles in 1965? The Watts riots, right?

Right, but what a mistake it would be to forget that 25 years ago something else happened in the City of the Angels: The Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre opened their doors downtown at the sparkling, just-constructed Music Center.

A black-tie celebration of that anniversary was originally scheduled for May 1. Canceled when last spring’s riots broke out, the ball has now been rescheduled for Thursday at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. It will commemorate not just an institutional beginning but also the man who, more than any other, has seen to it that well begun would be well done: Gordon Davidson.

Davidson, founding artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, has been more important to theater in Los Angeles than anyone else ever has been or, perhaps, ever will be.

Critics who said in 1965 that Los Angeles theater had come of age were exaggerating, but the same claim now would be no exaggeration at all. This year, for the first time in the long history of the Pulitzer Prizes, the drama Pulitzer went to a play that had not been mounted in New York. The winner was Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle,” a Davidson production that may stand as a proof that American theater is different because of the director’s long run in Los Angeles.

There are many stars in the local sky, but Davidson, over the years, has been the one to sail by, the North Star of the imagination in Los Angeles, the center of the Center.