Different Is Good : In theaters large and small, director David Schweizer likes to tailor each production into a unique event

David Schweizer kicks back on the funky couch in the living room of his longtime Venice Beach pad, surrounded by the clutter of a life in art. Posters of Eastern European stage productions, exotic dolls and trinkets and a dogeared pair of antique books on French court life bespeak a wide-ranging but playful sensibility.

Schweizer is in fact famous for this eclecticism. Anointed as a boy wonder in the early ‘70s by Robert Brustein and Joe Papp, he has become, in more recent years, one of Los Angeles’ busiest directors--if also one who seems to work here very little.

From “Peer Gynt” in Prague to last month’s sold-out run of Ann Magnuson’s “You Could Be Home Now” at New York’s Public Theater, to Beth Lapides’ recent “First Lady” show at the Coast Theater here, Schweizer’s recent projects have run the gamut from small to large, from neoclassical theater to avant-garde performance art. He’s equally at home with grand old man Ibsen, performance artist John Fleck or contemporary playwright John Steppling.

It’s an unusual way for a director to work, careening from coveted prosceniums to hole-in-the-wall joints, from Oslo and Sarajevo to Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions or the dinky Cast Theatre off Melrose. Yet Schweizer will pop up at yet another new venue Dec. 1-6, with a staging of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” at UCLA’s Little Theater in Macgowan Hall.

What ties all these projects together, however, is the standard by which Schweizer chooses them. Rather than opting for another career-building notch on the belt, he simply follows his nose.

“It’s not that someone with the experience that I’ve had can’t get jobs at various regional theaters, but my life has always been based on intense interest in what I’m doing and some reason that I can give myself for doing it,” he says.

“I don’t think of the theater--even after making theater for 20 years--as a job, or myself as a director for hire. Although I’m perfectly capable, there’s a level on which I don’t place myself in that competition.”

He has, he acknowledges, been lucky. “In this way I’m spoiled. I will do something because I get intrigued about doing it. And I’ve never starved. I’ve stayed afloat with that kind of modus operandi for many years.”

Talk to both artists and administrators alike and you also find that Schweizer commands a respect as consistent as his projects are diverse.

“He’s an absolutely unique talent,” says Mark Taper Forum resident director Oskar Eustis. “He’s technically impeccable. He’s terrific with text. He combines an avant-garde sensibility with an equally populist sensibility. He’s a showman in the best sense of the word: the P. T. Barnum of the avant-garde.”

“He brings a rare love of performers and material to his work, where contempt toward artists is much more usual,” says a longtime colleague, performer-writer Philip Littell. “He’s extremely instinctive and he’s also one of the few with an unerring comedy sense. The scale and the venues change, but the quality of play is always there.”

Two black-clad figures (Schweizer and Littell) are seated on a cross-stage black catwalk, above the playing area in the steep Theater Two of the late Los Angeles Theatre Center, reading aloud select stage directions as the actors perform below. Onstage, actor Buck Henry walks his invisible watchdog--which is actually a black box with stick legs--while the pooch’s barks are provided by Littell above.

Marlane Meyer’s “Kingfish” is the story of an aging and lonely gay man, his snarly pet and the sundry cads who try to take advantage of him. As staged by Schweizer at LATC in 1988, it was also an exercise in style, blending humanism with formalism.

Former Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote: “Director Schweizer has imposed a certain flatness on the show. It’s as if all the lines were being read with quotation marks around them, so lightly observed that they are only just felt. . . . All of this cools the temperature of the story by several degrees, adding wit, subtracting emotional involvement--a 1980s equivalent of Brecht’s famed and often misused ‘alienation’ effect. It’s precisely right for this play.”

Such bold directorial style--especially for new drama--may be one of Schweizer’s calling cards, but it’s not his only one. He’s also known to mix idioms within works, which is one of the qualities that endears him to the avant-garde.

“I’ve always combined elements of club, cabaret and theater, melting different forms,” says Fleck. “David encompasses all these and is open to everything. The offbeat psycho-sexual realm has always attracted me and we work together well in that genre.”

Yet Schweizer, 42, wasn’t always the Pied Piper of the cutting edge. The product of an old-line Baltimore WASP upbringing, he was a sickly baby with a lot of time on his hands for making up play worlds.

Obsessed with theater at an early age, the young Schweizer became expert at devising ways to get out of Baltimore, including summer jobs in Europe, New York jaunts and train trips to Philadelphia to catch Broadway tryouts.

Already set on his vocation, Schweizer thought he should go straight into graduate work at the Yale School of Drama, but was persuaded instead to enroll as an undergraduate at Yale University, where he spent the turbulent years 1968-72.

“It was a complete gas,” Schweizer recalls. “Literally the first night I arrived in New Haven, I met up with some people who were going to see the Living Theater.” Like so many back then, he soon became caught up in the frenzy of that experimental company’s heyday, when productions sometimes degenerated into street riots and pseudo-orgies.

Schweizer was one of a small group of undergraduates that came to the attention of then-drama school dean Robert Brustein. Overnight, the young director found himself elevated to a rank of privilege few have ever obtained. “Brustein glommed onto my work,” Schweizer recalls, a bit of retroactive bemusement in his voice. “All of a sudden, I was this 19-20-year-old kid with a show in the (Yale) Rep.”

He soon segued into simultaneously finishing his undergraduate degree and beginning graduate course work at the drama school. That kind of attention can turn a young head, though. So when Brustein split for a two-year sabbatical, Schweizer couldn’t quite bring himself to go back to the regular curricular grind.

He headed instead to the Williamstown Theater Festival, where he started a second company and would spend many subsequent summers running that group. Many of Joe Papp’s favorite stage artists passed through Williamstown, and they suggested to Schweizer that he present himself to the New York impresario.

“That was the summer that Joe Papp was on the cover of Newsweek,” says Schweizer. “I was doing a new play for him by the end of the year.” Schweizer continued to direct for Papp throughout the ‘70s, working at regional theaters as well.

“I had a straight profile, but with a weird tinge. I was the young director who would be in the regional theater’s slot to do the ‘odd’ thing.”

Indeed, it’s more the odd things than the “straight” gigs that Schweizer is known for here in L.A. Although he originally landed in Los Angeles in the late ‘70s for yet another regional stint--Len Jenkin’s play “Kid Twist” at the Taper--Schweizer soon decided to make the place his adopted home.

“Subliminally, there was the feeling of the end of a chapter in New York, like I’d done a certain kind of work and what I’d be doing would be just repeating those jobs in different forms,” he says. The Taper put him on staff for a year and a half in 1979-80, running a festival of new work in what was then called the Lab.

By the time the Taper gig ended, when financing for the new works projects dried up, Schweizer was hooked on L.A. “My life changed then,” he says. “I’d come here as a young director with a certain valediction, but my little theater reputation didn’t matter much and nobody really cared about it.”

Schweizer diversified, doing a bit of everything for a while. He went to the American Film Institute, directed some shorts, cable TV and music videos and became interested in the performance scene. Since then, he’s been much in demand among solo artists, including Magnuson, Fleck and Lapides.

“David respects individual performance artists,” says Fleck, one of the so-called NEA Four, who has worked with Schweizer both as a solo performance artist and as an actor in such plays as Tony Kushner’s adaptation of “The Illusion” at LATC in 1990. “In a sense, we’re directors as well and he doesn’t ever say, ‘It has to be done this way.’ It takes a special kind of director to do that, to blend with (a performance artist’s) creative concept.”

“The Weba Show,” a popular collaboration between Schweizer, Littell, the late Jerry Frankel and Weba Garretson that ran in 1983-84 at the Lhasa Club, “became an event that symbolized the possibilities for crossing over between communities,” according to Schweizer.

Another project, a 1986 Schweizer-Littell-Frankel stage adaptation of “Plato’s Symposium,” started as a one-night AmFar fund-raiser and ended up running for a year at the Powerhouse and Court theaters. “Coming out of the ‘Weba Show’ period, I developed a nonprofit structure called Modern Artists Company,” Schweizer recalls.

Even the nonprofit producing company, though, couldn’t alleviate the difficulties of making small theater in L.A. “ ‘Plato’ would be running still if there was a business mechanism behind these kind of events,” says Schweizer. “The hard thing about that kind of community-level producing is that it’s hard to figure out how to make it work on any financial basis beyond subsidizing it yourself.”

That lack of financing, however, doesn’t preclude these projects from having impact. “The events can resonate with the same impact as something at the Pantages,” says Schweizer of his commitment to interdisciplinary works in smaller venues. “When we were doing ‘Plato,’ the feeling of attention to the event was enormous, despite the fact that everybody was essentially doing it for free. But it gets harder to figure a way to keep these things going.”

Partly because of this difficulty, Schweizer simultaneously nurtured a relationship with the then-fledgling LATC. First as a guest director on a Mabou Mines production in 1985, Schweizer went on to direct a number of notable works, including “The Illusion,” “Kingfish,” “Demon Wine” and “The Joni Mitchell Project.”

He also continued his regional work, most significantly with “A History of Sexuality,” based on Michel Foucault’s multi-volume work, with Milwaukee’s Theater X, in collaboration with Seattle’s New City Theater.

In the final few months of LATC’s existence, Schweizer joined the staff as a resident director-developer. The attraction was the comforts only a large theater can provide. “It became important for me to have a venue that was substantial, where the work was shown to numbers of people, where everybody got paid and where a certain boldness of choice about the material was in evidence.”

As it turned out, the only show Schweizer was able to mount at LATC prior to its demise was “True Lies,” an evening of three solo works by Luis Alfaro, Rocco Sisto and Chloe Webb. It’s the potential to produce even bolder shows at LATC that Schweizer sees as the greatest loss.

“We were able to prove in many instances that you could put something together in an exciting way and people would come,” he says. LATC also afforded Schweizer the opportunity to bring some of his favorite collaborators along for the ride. “He’s one of the few who does take time to nurture talent and to create a family-like situation in a cold business,” says Littell. “I’ve worked at the Taper and LATC and the only reason was because of David. He smuggles a lot of interesting people into stodgy places.”

Still, with LATC down the tubes and no equivalent replacement in sight, Schweizer is feeling relatively unmoored these days. What’s more, for the former Papp hotshot of ‘70s New York, the intermittent low profile is a new experience. For all his credits, he’s spent most of the last couple of years working outside of Los Angeles.

That hasn’t gone unnoticed. “One thing that makes me absolutely convinced that L.A. theater is in trouble is that David is not continually employed in major projects,” says Eustis. “I hope he is employed here a lot more in the future. David should be directing on the mainstage here (at the Taper). We’ve just got to find the right project.”

To compensate for L.A.’s fickle propensities, Schweizer has been making frequent trips to direct in Eastern Europe. He spent last winter in Prague and has also had productions in Oslo, Sarajevo, Warsaw and elsewhere. (A “Peer Gynt” adaptation that was produced in Europe and picked up--but not produced--by LATC has fallen into the Taper’s hands. It has been given a workshop there, although there’s no production commitment attached to it at the moment.)

The door to Eastern Europe opened in the mid-’80s, thanks to a program of the U.S. Information Agency that ships over directors to introduce American material into the repertories of various national theaters.

“One thing that draws me to making different theater in different situations is that, at base, it needs to be an event,” says Schweizer. “I try and zero in on feelings I’m getting from the particular community about what people might want to see and why or what else is going on.”

One thing he found going on, for example, was an absolute dearth of AIDS awareness. “I didn’t fly the hugest flag about being gay personally so as to terrify them, but nor did I keep it a secret,” says Schweizer. “And I certainly made no secret about my concern for the worldwide AIDS crisis.”

That is typical of the way Schweizer goes about making theater a part of community life. “He knows how to situate a theater event within a city and cultural climate, but that’s a talent that is only fully appreciated here in L.A. and in Europe,” says Eustis.

Back home, there are similar challenges but too few opportunities. “I come back here and it’s harder,” Schweizer admits. “The election was great, but the past year or two have been hard. When I am here, I’m semi-stumped. My commitment to the community is still very alive: I care enormously about a lot of colleagues here and I do a lot of advising. There’s nothing I’ll turn my nose up at.”

The upcoming UCLA presentation, for instance, isn’t a job you’d necessarily expect Schweizer to pursue, yet he relishes the project. At the behest of UCLA’s Mel Shapiro, the director turned his attention to the currently popular Count.

“I immersed myself in all the different Draculas, but I decided that it would be most interesting to do the script from 1927,” said Schweizer, referring to the stage adaptation of Stoker’s novel written by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston. “It’s a strange blend of horror-suspense and high-camp satire that mixes the two . . . as if there’s no reason not to mix the two.”

The real significance of the UCLA project, however, is that he is, at least for now, working in the adopted hometown that’s given him less than his due of late. “I was looking for tangible homing spots to keep me here,” says Schweizer. “I have a very strong feeling about at least being based here.”