The Out of Towner : The Head of L.A.’s Powerful Center Theater Group, Gordon Davidson, Is Reinvigorating a Tired Broadway With Great American Drama

If he weren’t such an impresario, says his friend, this would be the most pointless of stories.

His friend is John Lahr, drama critic of the New Yorker, son of actor Bert Lahr and the author of something like 15 books on the theater, who once, in testament to their decades-long friendship, spent three months living in Gordon Davidson’s house while trying to write a screenplay.

“If you’re writing about Gordon,” says Lahr, letting a wicked smile creep across his wheat-colored, pug-nosed mien, “then you have to have some fishing stories.”

This is a few weeks ago in the lobby of New York’s fabled Algonquin Hotel, where Davidson and Lahr are meeting, midway between their respective homes in Los Angeles and London, to talk about theater--specifically the Broadway opening of “Perestroika,” the second part of Tony Kushner’s epic drama “Angels in America.” Davidson is one of the play’s chief producers and cheerleaders. After an acclaimed run last year at Davidson’s theater, the Mark Taper Forum, “Millennium Approaches,” the first part of “Angels,” earned Kushner a Pulitzer and launched the playwright toward Broadway, where it won four Tonys.

This afternoon, in the Algonquin’s paneled confines on West 44th Street, there is the palpable sense of another hit in the making. And not just “Perestroika.” By the end of this season, Davidson will have piloted five productions to New York, of which Kushner’s drama and “The Kentucky Cycle,” Robert Schenkkan’s massive Pulitzer Prize-winning historical saga, were among the most anticipated plays of the year. It is a track record that no other artistic director in the country can currently match, one that has propelled Davidson into the front ranks of Broadway’s players.

After some talk about opening nights and last-minute rewrites, the conversation veers, over loosened ties and Bloody Marys, toward the retelling of old tales. “I took Gordon on his first fishing trip,” says Lahr, who, unlike the Brooklyn-born Davidson, is prone to Norman Maclean-style exploits on Montana’s Big Blackfoot River. “So we’re in the boat and Gordon lands his first fish.”

Lahr pauses, glances at Davidson, who is smiling into his glass, and plunges on. “So Gordon turns to me and asks, ‘How do you kill it?’ and before I can say anything, he stabs it with a knife.”

Like any producer worth his percentage of the gross, there are two Gordon Davidsons. One comes blazing at you with that shock of white hair, the chipped-tooth grin: a loyal, hard-working, paternalistic producer in the Old Broadway way, with a too-ready handshake, a suite at the Algonquin and a yellow silk pocket handkerchief. The other man is darker, more difficult to see, but no less present: proud, competitive, easily wounded, a suspicious realist who keeps everyone waiting and has more frequent flier miles than all of you combined. A bona fide doppelganger . Ask anyone.

Among those who have worked closely with Davidson in the three decades he has lived in Los Angeles, piloting the Taper from an unknown university-sponsored troupe into a mini-theatrical empire of national renown, metaphors abound. He is Ibsen’s “The Master Builder”!--”happiest when he is building something his way.” He is Shakespeare’s Prospero!--”easily commanding lots of spirits.” He is, variously, “a brilliant salesman,” “the consummate politician,” “a true visionary,” “a social humanist in Los Angeles who reads!” and “my hero!” (That last one from a state arts official, no less.)

But Davidson’s faults have always been at least as captivating as his virtues, and there are other, less flattering comparisons that suggest that his preeminence as the city’s de facto culture czar has been hard won.

Complaints have been voiced that in “sniffing the air for those ideas that excite him,” as one Taper staffer puts it, Davidson has neglected local playwrights--particularly Latino, Asian and women writers--while pursuing a high national profile with productions exhibiting a potential commercial afterlife. This perception has gone hand-in-hand with criticisms that Davidson is controlling, self-serving, too eager for the limelight, unweaned from Broadway.

“Gordon is the reigning godfather of the American regional theater movement,” says William A. Henry III, theater critic of Time magazine, summing up the verbal hyperventilation that has become testimony to Davidson’s influence.

“Gordon is like director Hal Prince was in the ‘80s,” observes Wiley Hausam, a former playwright’s agent and current director of public affairs at the New York Shakespeare Festival, “a man so successful that people started wanting to destroy him.”

As cool as the eye of the storm: “I am,” says Davidson obliquely, “just trying to mediate between artists and the commercial world.”

Poking through the Sturm und Drang , fortunately, are some uncontested facts. In the 27 years that he has headed the not-for-profit Mark Taper Forum--first as its artistic director, hand-picked by founder Dorothy M. Chandler, and now as the producing director of the nonprofit Center Theatre Group, which includes the Ahmanson Theatre--Davidson has overseen its growth from rogue member of the Music Center into a $22.9-million institution, the wealthiest not-for-profit theater in the country.

But more significantly, Davidson is one of the few artistic directors moving confidently into the 21st Century, updating the formulas practiced by Flo Ziegfeld and Sol Hurok and reaching audiences by forging new links between a fading Broadway and the struggling nonprofit theater organizations. Not only is he one of the most influential producers of new American drama--one of the few people able to take a play from the slush pile to Broadway--but commercial theatrical producers increasingly look to Davidson, and a handful of other regional artistic directors, as their research and development arm. “The Taper is probably the most important theater outside of New York right now,” says Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg.

In transforming the Taper from an ad hoc theater group co-founded by John Houseman at UCLA in 1958 into a consistent source of contemporary drama, Davidson has positioned himself at a crucial nexus. Many of the country’s most acclaimed contemporary playwrights--including Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, George C. Wolfe, Jon Robin Baitz and Michael Cristofer, among others--have had their work premiered at the Taper. In most instances, those productions have gone on to play Broadway. Collectively, Taper productions have earned 18 Tony awards and three Pulitzers, including back-to-back awards in 1992 and 1993 for “The Kentucky Cycle” and “Millennium Approaches,” the first prizes ever awarded to plays produced outside New York.

And he has accomplished this at a time when major shifts are dealing setbacks to most of the nation’s nonprofit arts community--changes in funding priorities, declines in subscribers and the gradual passing of the regional-theater movement’s leaders: Zelda Fichandler at Washington’s Arena Stage, Lloyd Richards at the Yale Repertory Theatre and Joe Papp, the late founder of the influential New York Shakespeare Festival, have retired, died or simply moved to the sidelines.

Davidson’s success is attributable not only to his artistic instincts but to his reputation as a master administrator able to communicate equally well with artists and businessmen. To the consternation of several rival artistic directors, he is now the West Coast producer of choice for dozens of playwrights. He is also regarded as one of the most astute money-men in nonprofit circles, one who knows whose purse strings to pluck and when--a considerable skill given the Byzantine financial structures of the Music Center, which was unable to support even the West Coast season of the Joffrey Ballet. While Davidson, like many arts leaders, has had to battle a recession and cutbacks in arts subsidies, which contributed to the elimination of one Taper production per season as well as the experimental Taper Too program, he has compensated somewhat by wooing and winning production funds from commercial producers as well as some of the heftiest arts grants available. (And like any nonprofit theater, the Taper gets a share of the net income generated when plays transfer to Broadway, a percentage--1% on “Angels in America”--that can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

Certainly other nonprofit theaters regularly send their wares to Broadway. San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre is the source of the upcoming Broadway revival of “Damn Yankees.” The South Coast Repertory has sent “Brothers,” “Prelude to a Kiss” and “Search and Destroy” to Broadway. The Seattle Repertory Theatre regularly premieres the comedies of Herb Gardner and Wendy Wasserstein, and last season, the Tony award-winning musical “Tommy” originated at the La Jolla Playhouse. And Davidson has not always demonstrated a Midas touch as a producer, as any Taper subscriber during the 1980s can attest. Yet, he remains perhaps the regional producer most interested in Broadway.

“I come from New York,” says Davidson. “I believe in Los Angeles and its future, but you can’t ignore New York, and (maintaining a link) is what I have tried to do here.”

This season’s five Taper productions opening in New York are an impressive follow-up to the successful transfer in 1992 of “Jelly’s Last Jam,” the hit jazz musical written and directed by George Wolfe. In addition to “The Kentucky Cycle” and “Perestroika,” they include “Fire in the Rain,” written and performed by singer-songwriter Holly Near, which closed shortly after its off-Broadway opening last month; “Twilight: Los Angeles 1992,” Anna Deavere Smith’s one-woman play based on last year’s riots, which will be restaged at the Public Theater next spring; and “Unfinished Stories,” a drama by Sybille Pearson about three generations of an American Jewish family that Davidson will direct off-Broadway in February--his first directing job in New York since “The Lady and the Clarinet” a decade ago.

“The Taper is a factory, a play-producing bureaucracy,” says Helen Merrill, a New York-based agent. “Of course Gordon has his eyes on Broadway; it’s great visibility for his theater.”

Davidson is plainly energized by that high profile this season--a marked contrast to the Taper’s 25th anniversary celebration last year, when a string of critical and box office failures found him snappishly defending his tenure in an interview: “I’ll tell you what it isn’t, it isn’t a loss of nerve.” As he says now, “I’ve recently turned 60, and while I’ve gone through certain periods of feeling burnt out, I don’t feel that now,” he says. “The visibility of ‘The Kentucky Cycle’ and ‘Angels in America’ has contributed to a greater awareness of this theater than at any time in its history.”

Although he has been dogged throughout most of his career by rumors that he intended to abandon Los Angeles for the East Coast, there is now some suggestion among the theater world’s cognoscenti that Davidson is positioning himself to fill the gap left by the death two years ago of producer Papp, who influenced a generation of artists on Broadway and in nonprofit circles and was to some extent Davidson’s chief rival.

“No question about it, Gordon is ambitious,” says Gerald Schoenfeld, chairman of the Shubert Organization, the nation’s largest theater owner and Broadway’s most powerful producer. “He is entrepreneurial, ubiquitous and he has more than one theater under his control. But he is still based in California, and while Los Angeles is a major center, it limits his reach.”

Davidson is seeking to extend that reach--maintaining the Taper as a prime source for new American drama while transforming the 2,000-seat Ahmanson, which will reopen in early 1995 after a $17-million reconfiguration, from what was largely a roadhouse into a producing theater for original musicals. The Ahmanson will continue to function as a major Broadway satellite and might also serve as the home base for a hoped-for national classical repertory company and as the West Coast partner of the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music’s avant - garde Next Wave Festival. There are also plans to construct an experimental second stage that could serve as a workshop for the Taper as well as for film producers.

Despite his growing stature on a national level, Davidson still faces challenges on his home turf, namely the lack of real support from Hollywood as well as the fragmented local theater population. For the foreseeable future, however, Davidson is as close to cultural arbiter as Los Angeles is likely to get, one who is, depending upon your view, a self-interested power-broker using his theaters for personal aggrandizement or a true visionary seeking to move the country’s performing arts community into the next century.

Spend any time with the peripatetic producer, which is likely to include several frenetic days in Manhattan as well as his typically meeting-packed days at his office on Temple Street downtown, and it becomes obvious that Davidson embodies both of those perceptions.

On the one hand, he is acutely aware of the power and the perks of his position: the hundreds of phone calls, the monthly cross-country flights, the three assistants, 10 Rolodexes, the salary he draws as head of two theaters (his income is said to be at least $200,000, which places him in the league of the highest-paid arts administrators in the country), the luxury car (a donated 1993 Lexus GS 300), a highly visible spouse (Judi Davidson, the mother of their two grown children, runs her own public relations agency, Davidson Choy McWorter) and an endless round of deal-making. Perhaps mostly the deal-making. Among colleagues and friends, Davidson is known as relentlessly adept at “wheeling and dealing,” as one Taper employee describes it. “We all like to savor our moments of leverage over the other guy,” says Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn Theaters, a major Broadway production group. “But perhaps not as much as Gordon.”

Yet Davidson also has another, more sentimental view of his craft: “To participate in the gift of performance, a great piece of acting, a few moments of a rehearsal,” he says with apparently unfeigned wonder. “I truly love it.”

And when he chooses, he plays the enthusiastic--some would say overbearing--paterfamilias. During the opening night of “The Persians” at the Taper in September, Davidson took to the stage like some cross between Monty Hall and a Las Vegas emcee to bestow his annual “Skipper Awards” (named after his late father) on four female staff members. Not only was the ceremony an ill-timed public display of internal housekeeping, he also arranged for the women’s children to be brought onstage, affirmation, apparently, of the extended family Davidson heads at the Taper.

Exactly how this plays among colleagues is perhaps open to question. Most of those who know him, from Taper employees to Broadway producers, seem well-versed in his contradictory nature. Or at least they accept it as the price of doing business in a community where Davidson is one of the few “remaining Mandarins,” says Kushner.

“Some people think Gordon is just funny, and you sometimes wonder if he’s for real,” says Merrill, the New York agent. “But the theater is a small world and there is always room for his kind of enthusiasm.”

Davidson affects obliviousness to all the opinions churning in his wake. Ensconced in a taxi, racing down Broadway to his next appointment, he is the picture of ingenuousness in motion. “Right now I am in a very busy mode, but these things come in waves and I can’t or do not want to stay like this for long,” he says. “Really, I’m just amazed that my enthusiasm for theater has not diminished, and I see a lot of bad theater. But I’m still a naif. That is my central nature.”

A little past noon on a recent autumn day, in the darkened confines of Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre, George Wolfe is staving off equal parts boredom and terror as he struggles through technical rehearsals for “Perestroika,” the concluding half of Kushner’s epic, which has been plagued by delays and production problems.

“I want this to be dingier without being darker. Can we get that?” asks the director, who is seated in semi-darkness in the theater’s orchestra section. While his request is met with immediate, and nearly imperceptible, adjustments to the light flooding the actors onstage, it is equally clear, as Wolfe later puts it, “This is potentially a masterpiece, but right now it’s a mess.”

But as one of the bright young stars on the nation’s theater scene--a Tony award-winning director and Papp’s successor at the Shakespeare Festival--Wolfe is not easily rattled. “Want to hear my imitation of Lauren Bacall laughing at a Mike Nichols story?” he asks, sending a throaty laugh whopping throughout the theater.

“George, add a hacking cough,” suggests one assistant, who has, apparently, witnessed this performance before.

“Now, my Jim Jones,” Wolfe says, pursuing his tension-cutting tactics. “ ‘Drink the Kool-Aid. Drink the Kool-Aid. Suicide is a revolutionary act.’ ”

Even to a casual observer, Wolfe heads a close-knit circle of artists who communicate in their own argot and have little use for outsiders. If Davidson, slipping in through the stage door, feels any sense of exclusion, he does not show it. Armed with his Tiffany leather portfolio and dressed in his customary Nathan Detroit-ish ensemble of dark sport jacket, dark shirt and light tie, he breezes into the theater greeting Wolfe and various crew members with hugs, kisses and general bonhomie.

Although everyone is cordial, it is obvious they are paying closer attention to the arrival of lunch--”If you have any food bring it over here,” calls someone in the dark--and their looming deadline, than to a producer in the midst. And like a school principal checking on his star class, Davidson is savvy enough to keep his visit brief. Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t have three other shows needing his attention. After a stop at the pay phone backstage (he is a relentless phone user), he heads out of the theater, explaining that he sees his job “as protecting the artists”--smoothing the way between the commercial producers’ demands for speed and thrift and “getting the artists more time, more money so they can do their job correctly.”

This is Davidson’s preferred role, the indispensable middleman, and one that he plays repeatedly during the week--coffee with a playwright at the Algonquin, a reading of “Unfinished Stories” at the New York Theater Workshop, a dress rehearsal of Holly Near’s “Fire in the Rain,” where he is advised by an anxious co-producer “that Holly needs to have daddy calm her down.” As Jack Viertel, creative director of the Jujamcyn Theaters and a former manager at the Taper, puts it, “Gordon plays a wonderful father figure to the American theater.”

That has less to do with his being a mere producer than in his own galvanic personality as a Daddy Warbucks to the country’s theater community. Certainly, after nearly three decades at the Taper, he is in an enviable position to offer, and deny, his theater’s considerable resources to artists of his choosing. As the Shubert’s Schoenfeld says, “there are many prestigious places a playwright might want to have his work done, but Gordon offers several unique advantages.”

Davidson’s war chest includes an extensive new-play development program, a large local pool of professional actors, an ability to woo influential critics and commercial producers as well as the Taper’s 700-plus-seat house, which can, with a successful run, influence investors while providing the play’s author with royalties far greater than those offered by rival regional theaters.

“When something like ‘Kentucky Cycle’ sells out at the Taper, my investors consider that,” says David Richenthal, the play’s New York producer.

Supporters say that once Davidson is committed to a production, he is a tenacious and generous producer as well as an insightful dramaturge who “knows what to say and when to say it,” says Kushner, adding that Davidson assiduously avoids “the kind of hideous damage that can be done when, in a moment of great panic, an artistic director comes at you with 500 pages of notes.”

Yet Davidson has also earned a reputation as a fickle broker of hits, which some observers, including members of the Taper’s staff, trace to the strictures surrounding the theater’s much-vaunted play-development program--namely the lack of a small, experimental second stage. While the Taper has consistently developed numerous plays in readings and workshops, it has a much narrower window for main-stage productions, which creates a theater that Viertel calls “friendlier to audiences than to artists.” This has also led to criticisms that Davidson is unwilling to commit to a play until other producers sign on and mitigate the Taper’s own risk.

For instance, “The Kentucky Cycle,” which was originally workshopped at the Taper and before that at L.A.’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, arrived in Los Angeles only after a sellout run at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre. Anna Deavere Smith was invited to develop “Twilight” at the Taper after her first hit play, “Fires in the Mirror,” succeeded off-Broadway. Even “Angels in America,” which was developed at the Taper after an original commission from San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, did not make its way to the Taper main stage until a full production at London’s National Theatre had been favorably reviewed by Frank Rich, the powerful critic of the New York Times.

Such production decisions, however, can also be seen as the result of Davidson’s personality, reflected in his Darwinian management style--survival of the fittest. Like any tough-minded businessman, he plays for keeps. He runs his theater less like the high-flown altruists populating the nonprofit arts world and more like a canny commercial producer who battles for every advantage, manipulates his opponents and knows when to ultimately cut his losses.

After critics--most notably Rich--took exception to the Taper production of “Angels in America,” Davidson, at the behest of Kushner, did not hesitate to replace the director--Oskar Eustis, the Taper’s associate artistic director--when the play went to Broadway. When Davidson was unable to find Broadway backers for “The Kentucky Cycle” and was forced to relinquish control of the play to Richenthal, a deep-pocketed arriviste, he did so with some measure of bad feeling, privately telling colleagues he considers the play an unlikely commercial venture.

Davidson will direct “Unfinished Stories” at the New York Theater Workshop later this season because, as the head of the Taper, which holds the play’s rights, he attached himself as its director. He is trying to pilot Deavere Smith’s “Twilight” toward the Great White Way amid a fractious legal battle over the production rights. And most recently, Davidson tangled with playwright David Mamet, abruptly canceling the Los Angeles premiere of the off-Broadway play “Oleanna” when the two clashed over casting decisions in the two-hander drama.

“Gordon is a social animal who surrounds himself with people the way Clinton goes jogging,” says one former staff member. “And he is very good about letting you go 99% of the way with something. But inevitably he has the last word.”

During a recent meeting in his memento-filled L.A. office, Davidson listened like some canny Henry V as his staff members batted arguments back and forth about the 1994-95 season--a discussion that at times took on less of a Shakespearean quality than a strained Alphonse and Gaston act among those competing for their boss’s elusive nod. “Gordon, have you read the plays?” asked a somewhat beleaguered Frank Dwyer, the Taper’s literary manager. No, in fact, he had not.

“He just sits there and watches to see if anything excites him,” says Eustis. “It’s pretty passive, but it’s also a very effective management style. He gets a lot of what he wants that way.”

There is some evidence that Davidson may be loosening his bureaucratic hold on the Taper. In response to his growing workload and some internal staff pressures, most notably a sabbatical taken last year by his heir apparent, producing director Robert Egan, Davidson recently reorganized the Taper’s brain trust, promoting Egan, Eustis and Corey Beth Madden, the theater’s associate producing director. “Gordon has, in essence, like three or four jobs now,” says Madden. “He recognizes that he is not able to do everything.”

“I have always believed that part of building an institution is to train the next generation--whether that means sending people out into the rest of the community or it becomes a question of successorship,” says Davidson. “Part of me would be happy running that theater--the Taper--forever, but I also think that it is healthy to change with the times.”

Some detractors maintain, however, that the recent staff changes are largely bureaucratic and that Davidson has no intention of relinquishing his hold of either his theaters or his place in the front lines of producing new American drama. And challenges remain. While he has forged impressive links with New York’s and Britain’s theater communities, he has not seen the Taper’s influence extend to the creation of a truly indigenous theatrical climate--one of the chief criticisms leveled by local artists. The city’s theater community remains fragmented, composed almost exclusively of the Taper and more than 200 sub-100-seat theaters, many of which serve primarily as artists’ showcases. The demise in 1991 of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Taper’s only real competitor in size and scope, was seen as a product of the recession but also of the city’s underlying indifference to the performing arts.

As gatekeeper of the nation’s second-largest theater market and a producer who has wrested national recognition to a city traditionally accustomed to touring road-shows and summer stock revivals, Davidson still must maneuver within the long shadow cast by Hollywood, a second-class status embodied in TV producer Grant Tinker’s infamous reference to the Taper as “minor league.” Despite Davidson’s reputation as artful statesman and consummate schmoozer--”Everyone in town knows who he is even if they don’t know why,” says Sidney Ganis, president of marketing and distribution at Columbia Pictures and a member of the board of trustees of the Center Theatre Group--any relationship between his theaters and the larger Hollywood community remains in the formative stages at best.

“We need a Joe Papp of L.A. to create that synthesis--between theater and the entertainment industry,” says Kathleen Kennedy, the co-producer of such films as “E.T.” and “Jurassic Park” and a theater group board member. “Gordon has been that to some extent, but he cannot do it alone.”

Many observers maintain that the upcoming season at the Taper--including Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon,” Luis Valdez’s “Bandido!” and “The Heavenly Theatre,” a musical play written by Tony Kushner--will generate little of the critical heat of the past two years. At the very least, it represents what many say is the real problem besetting not only the Taper but theater in general, a paucity of exciting new plays, a situation that even the ablest of producers is hard-pressed to resolve.

Even Davidson concedes that “Angels in America” may be that rare animal, “a highly political play that is not afraid to entertain.” Kushner, he adds with a note of concern in his voice, is perhaps unique. “How many talents like his will come along?”

That fear, that theater is becoming a dying art form, is one main reason that Davidson remains adamant about his role linking the nonprofit and commercial worlds. “The lure of Broadway is of no interest to me, because Broadway isn’t Broadway anymore,” he says. “Some people have those old perceptions that Broadway is corrupt and if you go there you’ve sold out. But the reality is Broadway isn’t healthy, there is no regular audience anymore and the finances make it too difficult.”

If there is any model for his future, Davidson says, it is London. “There is a healthy relationship between the subsidized and commercial theaters there and nobody asks why you’re moving a play to the West End,” he says. “What interests me is the continuity of the work and you can’t get it all done in one shot, one place.”

By almost any measure, his accomplishments are a lifetime away from his upbringing in Brooklyn as the eldest of three sons born to Jo and Alice Davidson. His mother was a pianist, his father an aspiring actor and a professor of theater at Brooklyn College. For most of his childhood, the family lived in the first floor of a rented duplex in Flatbush, where, as one of the brightest students in his class at Brooklyn Technical High School, Davidson spent long hours huddled over his architectural drawings and science books. He had a natural technical bent, “a real sense of exactness and a desire to get things right all the time,” recalls his brother, Michael, a Washington, D.C., attorney. “He wanted to be precise and on target. My greatest transgression was spilling ink on one of his drawings.”

His move into the arts came later, after a scholarship to Cornell University and several months working for General Electric designing missile guidance systems left him feeling a profound sense of frustration about such a career. He obtained a masters degeree in theater at Western Reserve University (now Case Western University) in Cleveland. His first job in theater was as a stage manager--a decidedly vo-tech way into the arts by today’s standards, “but at the time, that was how people became directors,” he says.

He was known as an exacting stage manager. For several seasons, Davidson “did the New York shuffle,” working at Connecticut’s American Shakespeare Festival (where he met John Houseman), New York’s Phoenix Theater, the Dallas Opera and with Martha Graham’s dance troupe. It was a heady time in New York art circles when Davidson came under the influence of the nonprofit experimental acting troupe Group Theater, which had begun to challenge Broadway’s more bourgeois entertainments with its emphasis on socially activist drama.

He was just breaking into directing when the call came in 1964 to assist Houseman, who was leading a UCLA theater group. Three years later, Dorothy Chandler invited Davidson--by then the company’s managing director--and the rest of the troupe to become resident artists at the new Music Center.

“She truly believed in what this theater could be and for which there was no model,” recalls Davidson. “I had free rein.”

He wanted to create theater “attractive to those people who are socially aware and culturally inquisitive.” But he also saw his mission as providing a link between Los Angeles and his old hometown. “When I started I thought I had two obligations: to learn what Los Angeles was--its audience and its talent pool--and, because I was a New Yorker, to bring the best talent here that I could.” While many other nascent regional theaters were largely devoted to classical theater, Davidson set his sights on new plays and unorthodox productions of less well-known dramas, including his own staging of the Taper’s premier production, “The Devils,” which amplified the already controversial religious politics in the John Whiting play.

That formula fostered what became the theater’s halcyon days, a decade when Davidson’s repertoire captured the country’s turbulent social issues and established a national reputation for the Taper as a playwright’s theater. These socially ambitious and critically acclaimed plays included “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” and Luis Valdez’s “Zoot Suit,” the first mainstream theatrical hit by a Latino writer in the United States. By 1980, Davidson had five Taper productions simultaneously running on Broadway; 11 Tonys, five Obies and a Pulitzer Prize for “The Shadow Box.”

That track record proved difficult to maintain. As the social activism of the ‘70s began to subside, Taper hits became fewer and farther between. Subscribers were greeted with productions, such as “Green Card,” more akin to agitprop than fully realized drama. And his own commitment to the theater fluctuated. As Davidson began spending more and more time away from Los Angeles pursuing outside directing and producing projects, rumors ran thick and fast that he too was leaving--for a career in film, for Lincoln Center, for the Kennedy Center, anywhere but more seasons at the Music Center.

But he stayed; some said for lack of alternatives. He was denied what many thought would be a certain Tony award for directing “Children of a Lesser God” and was subsequently refused the opportunity to direct the film version, a major disappointment. Meanwhile, several of the theater’s hits, especially “Zoot Suit,” bombed in New York. “But I am,” he says, “stubborn and I stick to it, this job, the family, Los Angeles. I don’t give up easily on anything.”

When “The Phantom of the Opera” moved into the Ahmanson in 1989, a move that coincided with the retirement of the theater’s longtime artistic director, Robert Fryer, Davidson took over that theater during its temporary residency at the Doolittle Theatre. He turned a seldom-used stretch of Vine Street into off-Broadway West, stocking the Hollywood-based theater with New York touring companies, with plays like Neil Simon’s “Jake’s Women” and Herb Gardner’s “Conversations with My Father,” and Broadway-bound shows including August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” and the musical “The Most Happy Fella.”

He regained his footing, it was said, because he relinquished his directorial ambitions for a return to his strengths as a producer. Although he nurses a dream “to spend my twilight years doing all the Chekhov plays,” he concedes that he “feels somewhat intimidated” by such directorial ambitions.

Today, Davidson seems comfortably ensconced in his role as the city’s cultural eminence grise. He lives comfortably if unostentatiously in Santa Monica Canyon, where the sole diversions from work include the occasional bout of gardening, the odd trip to Mexico with his wife and spending time with his children--27-year-old Rachel, associate artistic director at the Williamstown Theater Festival, and Adam, a 29-year-old filmmaker who won an Oscar in 1992 with his short film “The Lunch Date.”

“There is no question when you hit 60--as you can see there is no loss of energy or appetite--but there is an awareness of time,” he says. “And I have to give some real thought on how best to spend it. And while I seem to be doing a lot, I no longer feel compelled to do it all.”

It is heading toward 6 p.m. and outside the Algonquin, dusk has begun to fall. Inside, the lobby is aglow, bustling like a theater on opening night. Davidson and Lahr are expansive in their corner now, trading shop talk about productions, London’s current season, as well as some speculation about who would succeed Frank Rich at the New York Times. As if on cue, a woman with a tangled mane of hair tentatively approaches. “Are you Gordon Davidson?” she asks, wide-eyed at this chance encounter.

Although it is clear that Davidson has no idea who the woman is, her recognition sparks a story about the retirement of Ingmar Bergman, the acclaimed Swedish film and theater director.

“Somebody once asked him, ‘If you had to give up film or theater, which would it be?’ ” says Davidson. “ ‘Film,’ Bergman said, ‘because you can grow old gracefully in the theater.’ And it’s true,” Davidson says, glancing around the room, the whirl of waiters and New Yorkers, its seductive light and warmth. “It’s true,” he says again, no trace of irony to his voice. “You can grow old gracefully.”