STAGE : Fighting Fire With ‘Fire’ : The failure of ‘Dutch Landscape’ fueled Jon Robin Baitz’s writing; he returns to L.A. with a hit play, determined to follow his own star

If President-elect Bill Clinton can call himself “the comeback kid,” so might Jon Robin Baitz.

After all, Baitz is back in the city of his birth, working on “The Substance of Fire,” his acclaimed New York play about a tempestuous editor’s battles to retain control of a publishing house. This Thursday he’ll witness its opening at the Mark Taper Forum on the same stage that four years ago premiered “Dutch Landscape,” the notorious career-threatening debacle that propelled Baitz on a self-imposed exile to Manhattan.

And, at 31, Baitz could still be called a kid.

But forget “kid.” To hear Baitz talk is to realize that only “comeback” rings true. Meeting Baitz today might shock many of his former Los Angeles colleagues and mentors who remember him as “boyish.” Gone is the lanky adolescent kid with the sometimes shy and sometimes sly gaze.

The man positioning his six-foot-plus frame in front of a tape recorder is obviously a mature, self-confident, sophisticated professional. Even a slightly world-weary, ambiguous sadness burdens his voice, a condition he dismisses as “just a natural melancholy endemic to being alive.”

Clearly nothing ages a writer like success. But Baitz must carry an additional weight: being ordained the great hope of the American theater.

Seriously.

Consider the following:

* New York Daily News critic Howard Kissel declared after reviewing “The Substance of Fire”: “Nothing makes me more hopeful for the American theater than the writing of Jon Robin Baitz.”

* New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote about Baitz’s 1992 Off Broadway hit “The End of the Day”: “At the age of 30 this playwright is a mature artist with a complete vision . . . (who) offers so much hope for the American theater.”

Failure is dangerous to a writer. But so is this level of praise. Fortunately for Baitz, success breeds discontent.

“It’s all very intangible,” the playwright says of his good fortune. “The list of things I would like to do and cannot do as a writer are legion and they grow with the rapidity of trees falling in the Amazon rain forest. It’s not good enough. The work should be better. But it gets harder as you get older. And one becomes harder to please.”

Baitz’s defense against phenomenal acclaim is to keep a low profile. For example, he’s been in L.A. since September, staying with his lover, actor Joe Mantello, while Mantello performed in “Angels in America” at the Taper.

“During the ‘Angels’ run, I kept myself sequestered away,” Baitz says. “I was very chary, very wary of this town, so I stayed in the hotel and worked on my next play as much as I could. One problem with this town is innate: There is nothing new to be said about Hollywood. And that state itself is enervating for a writer because you’re actively in a cliche.”

Still, it must be pleasing to return home in triumph.

“I don’t feel that it’s home anymore,” Baitz responds. Although born in Beverly Hills, where he lived until age 8, Baitz is now a confirmed New Yorker. “A lot of what I loved about L.A. seems to be gone.”

Particularly saddening to Baitz was the loss of the Padua Hills Playwrights’ Workshops in Northridge, where he began his playwriting career in 1982, and the closing of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, which staged “The Film Society,” his first nationally successful play.

“The context for theater here is vastly diminished,” Baitz says. “When I was starting there were so many different groups and places to go. I don’t know what young playwrights are supposed to do here anymore, or where they’re supposed to work.”

Baitz was indeed luckier than today’s neophytes. He discovered writing for the stage at the start of Southern California’s theater boom in the early 1980s.

Because his father was an executive for a multinational corporation, Baitz spent his childhood years in South Africa, Brazil, Amsterdam and London. A voracious reader, Baitz soothed his loneliness and alienation with literature. His longtime companions were always books. He returned at age 17 to Los Angeles and found himself in “a gulag of style over content”--Beverly Hills High School.

After graduation, and before wandering into a Padua workshop, Baitz toyed with vague fantasies of becoming a ceramist. Baitz resembled an accidental tourist, not an ambitious visionary, shuffling into the theater to be born.

“I came to the theater out of literature, not out of the theater,” Baitz explains. “I came out of being a reader. The writing is more meaningful to me.”

At Padua, Baitz fell under the tutelage of playwright John Steppling, whose encouragement led Baitz, at age 21, to write and produce his first professional production, “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” a satire about small-scale film producers. That debut led to Baitz’s signing with William Morris agent Michael Peretzian, who became another primary mentor.

After “The Film Society,” based on his adolescence in South Africa, premiered at LATC in 1987, it was staged in London in 1988, where it received mixed reviews. It later got raves in New York, establishing Baitz at age 26 as a playwright of exceptional promise.

Baitz seemed blessed, a golden boy who could do no wrong, a whiz kid with the Midas touch.

In 1986, Mark Taper Forum Artistic Director Gordon Davidson had responded eagerly to Baitz’s audacious proposal: an autobiographical three-act epic about an estranged American family, set in South Africa, Amsterdam and Malibu.

Davidson, captivated by Baitz’s youthful enthusiasm and eloquence, not only commissioned the play, but decided to direct “Dutch Landscape” himself.

For the next three years, Baitz and the Taper staff labored through numerous readings, workshops, rewrites and cast changes, until the ambitious epic dwindled to two acts set in a South Africa living room.

“I am very much responsible for what happened,” Baitz says now of the destructive “Dutch Landscape” workshop process. “I could have stopped it. Every time Gordon offered to pull the plug, I insisted on going back to it. I was being honored, I was being given my own way. How do you know when to say, ‘I can’t do it?’ ”

Davidson agrees, admitting that he shares some of the responsibility for the failure. “It was very hard for Robbie to say what he had to say about his parents,” Davidson said in a 1991 interview about the development of “Dutch Landscape.”

“We had a very close relationship, and there probably was a transference. Whether it was father, son, lover, I don’t know.”

Baitz remembers that during that period “out of fear” he would “shuck and jive and hustle” to please others. Ultimately, he lost control of his work.

The world premiere of “Dutch Landscape” gained national attention. But critics responded to the play with what Davidson later said were “the worst reviews of my career.” Baitz thought his reviews were even worse.

“Why couldn’t it be seen as a rite of passage?” Davidson wondered aloud two years later. “Why did the local critics turn on ‘Dutch Landscape’ as if a mortal sin had been committed?”

Despite his own pain, Davidson comforted Baitz with seasoned advice: “You have to start writing right away, no matter what it is.”

“That echoed with great urgency,” Baitz remembers, “because I was afraid when ‘Dutch Landscape’ imploded under its own weight I wouldn’t be able to write anymore. I was paralyzed, raw . . . disoriented and distressed and not myself . . . filled with acrimony, fury, confusion. What confused me the most was this strange combination of trying to write a play where there really was none, and couldn’t be one, and how little my own experience as a reader, as a thinker, as a writer, came to bear in protecting myself. How little books meant.”

Baitz retreated to a small upstairs office at Book Soup bookstore in West Hollywood, where he had once worked as a clerk. The day after the initial barrage of scathing reviews descended, Baitz stared at boxes and shelves and piles and suddenly exclaimed, “Look at all these books!” He compulsively wrote the sentence down.

Without realizing it, he had begun his next play, “The Substance of Fire.”

“How come these books didn’t teach me how to fight?” he remembers asking himself. “Not with anyone in particular, but with myself. How do you defend yourself? The first act came very, very quickly out of this fever of trying to capture the passion of what it means to fight.”

Baitz explored these questions by creating the character of Isaac Geldhart, a Manhattan publisher of scholarly works. Geldhart, the hero of “Substance,” possessed everything Baitz felt he himself lacked: a fighter’s courage, idealism, ethics, passionate convictions, emotional honesty and an unrelenting conscience.

Baitz finished the first act quickly, but then collapsed. No doubts existed in Baitz’s mind about who would portray Geldhart--New York-based actor and friend Ron Rifkin was Geldhart--but numerous other doubts remained, especially about the missing second act. He left Los Angeles for New York.

But a few months later he returned, as if to be near the burned-out site of “Dutch Landscape.” Again he hid out, this time in Rifkin’s second home in the Hollywood Hills.

“After the initial rush of writing the first act of ‘Substance,’ ” Baitz says, “it was very hard for me to write because I was still kind of raw and I knew that the play was unfinished. The second act came out of the depression that followed the warlike first act. It came very quickly again, but after many months of silence. The second act concerned the debilitating and disfiguring nature of terrible depression . . . not a bad theme for me.”

When Baitz returned to New York, among the very first to read “The Substance of Fire” was Rifkin, who had emotionally guided Baitz through the “Dutch Landscape” aftermath.

“People who suffer tragedies early in life, if they survive, survive with great stuff,” said Rifkin after a recent rehearsal at the Taper. “Nobody escapes, and to have a play fail is not a great tragedy. So Robbie took something that was deeply and profoundly painful, put it in its proper perspective and said, ‘I’m healthy, I have great friends, I have this great talent, so I’ll pick up the pieces and write another play.’

“That was a pretty grown-up thing to do at that age.”

Baitz now believes that “Dutch Landscape” provided “the most seminal experience in my life as a writer. Right after it I wrote ‘Substance,’ ‘Three Hotels’ (his PBS American Playhouse teleplay) and ‘End of the Day’ in rapid succession. And I attribute all of that to ‘Dutch Landscape,’ to learning from the extraordinary battle of that play. It fueled a great growth for me.”

Baitz is now celebrated as a writer with an uncommon social conscience who refuses to compromise.

For instance, last year when the National Endowment for the Arts rejected financing for two museums because of “pornographic” exhibitions, Baitz wrote $7,500 checks to each of the museums, giving away an amount equal to the sum of an NEA award he had received. He also publicly denounced the Bush Administration for what he saw as interfering in artistic freedom.

Another example occurred when “Substance” made its West Coast premiere last year at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. After learning from his friend and “Substance” director Dan Sullivan that the theater was in financial trouble, Baitz returned his royalties.

He also stopped the play’s originally scheduled West Coast premiere at the Old Globe in winter, 1991, when the San Diego theater rejected a contract with the Dramatists Guild. “The issue was who controls the future life of (a) play,” Baitz explains. “I would still owe all my plays to LATC if I had signed the contract that was suggested back then after they produced ‘Film Society.’ So with the Old Globe I wasn’t going to step over other playwrights. Life is really too long to do that sort of thing.”

Recently, after working on the screenplay adaptation of the Sinclair Lewis novel “Dodsworth,” he received contradictory notes about the script from anonymous readers. As a result, Baitz withdrew from the Warner Bros. project.

“I had never before received a note about something I was working on without someone’s name on it,” Baitz explains. “Maybe it’s immature of me, or maybe it’s prickly or oversensitive, but I think (in the studios) there’s something depersonalizing and geared, very deliberately and cynically, toward unsettling the writer’s relationship to his material. And so I finally had a sense of this project and of a system itself that is in many respects bankrupt. The studio system is not a system I have any interest in working within.”

There’s also the 1991 incident in which Columbia Pictures was on the verge of purchasing the screen rights to “Substance of Fire.” After six months of negotiations, William Morris agent Peretzian earned Baitz a six-figure deal. However, the studio wanted Dustin Hoffman, Richard Dreyfuss or Anthony Hopkins as the embattled publisher--not Baitz’s friend Ron Rifkin.

Baitz decided to kill the deal.

“The play came out of an examination of the nature of passion and fighting and strength, and the idea of what’s worth fighting for,” Baitz says. “There are very few fringe benefits to being a writer. One of the only ones is that maybe you learn something about yourself and about the world from your writing. And relationship is more important to me than a movie.”

“I never worked so hard to undo a deal,” Peretzian recalled of his final negotiations with Columbia over ‘Substance.’ Peretzian had to enlist the aid of John Burnham, co-head of the William Morris motion picture department, to plead Baitz’s case with Columbia executives.

“Robbie had been OK until he realized he wouldn’t have control over it,” Peretzian explained, “especially in terms of the lead. He decided to do the film version small-scale, independently, with Ron Rifkin.”

William Morris is currently looking for financing to make the film, with Baitz writing the screenplay, Rifkin starring and Agnieszka Holland (“Europa Europa”) directing.

“The neophyte playwright of ‘Dutch Landscape,’ wanting to please everybody, is now the guy who says, ‘This is what I want,’ ” Peretzian says. “The Robbie of ‘Substance’ takes creative control.”

Baitz concludes: “As I get older, Hollywood success means less to me. It never meant that much, but it means less and less. You have to live with yourself, and it’s hard enough to do that on your best behavior.”