Out of the Shadow? : After almost leaving the Mark Taper Forum last year, Robert Egan is now even more of a force there since becoming producing director. Yet, he says, he, the theater and mentor Gordon Davidson are still evolving

Robert Egan, the Mark Taper Forum’s producing director, takes a deep breath after sliding into a restaurant booth. He’s just completed another long day directing rehearsals for Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” which opens Thursday on the Taper main stage. He’d rather be eating at home, but Egan’s troubled marriage has suddenly dictated that he find shelter elsewhere.

Peering through horn-rimmed glasses, Egan, 43, sighs. “It’s such an interesting time of transition,” he begins. “The Taper is going through many changes.”

Since being hired by Taper Artistic Director Gordon Davidson in 1984, Egan has played an ambiguous role. Yes, he’s responsible for creating the Taper’s influential New Work Festival, a program that has helped develop a remarkable number of American plays, including Pulitzer Prize winners “The Kentucky Cycle” and “Angels in America,” and the Broadway hit “Jelly’s Last Jam.” Yes, Egan has directed numerous Taper main-stage productions, including “Sansei” by the jazz-fusion band Hiroshima. And he has made a profound impact on Jon Robin Baitz, directing the acclaimed young playwright’s first major work, “The Film Society,” at Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Yet few know this man. Despite his many claims to fame, Egan remains a backstage figure, in the shadow of his ever-in-the-spotlight boss. When Davidson is out of town, Egan runs the show at the Taper. He also directs at least one main-stage show annually, in addition to directing and organizing the New Work Festival. And he’s involved in all the day-to-day activities at the theater.

In some ways, Egan resembles the man Davidson was when he founded the Taper in 1967. Both are charming, articulate and diplomatic. Both are workaholics. Both have dedicated their lives to the American theater. Both are drawn to plays evoking contemporary political issues.

Last year, Davidson gave Egan the title of producing director, creating the position to keep Egan from leaving the Taper. The promotion also appears to confirm the longstanding rumor that Egan is being groomed to one day succeed Davidson, now 60, when he retires. Ask Egan if this is true and he’ll respond diplomatically: “Gordon is very aware that part of his responsibility as a leader is to prepare for transitions. He didn’t create this institution over 27 years to have it destroyed. He should create a kind of leadership that he believes will continue what is essentially the work of this theater. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m still here.”

Ask Davidson if this is true and he too will respond diplomatically. “I’m neither leaving nor retiring” from the Taper, Davidson says by phone from Manhattan, where he’s directing Sybille Pearson’s “Unfinished Stories” for its February opening at the New York Theatre Workshop. “But I do feel there are different ways to look at both the job I do and the job that other people do. I certainly would be happy to be unburdened from the day-to-day administration details. Putting (Egan) in the job of producing director places him in a prime leadership position to deal with whatever changes come up in the future.”

For now, Egan is obsessed with a far different ambition: Recently separated from his wife of 11 years, actress Kate Mulgrew, he’s attempting to apply the painful insights gained from his personal crisis to directing “Death and the Maiden.”

“Sadly, it’s a great time in my life to be directing this play,” Egan confides. “This personal crisis that I’m in has taught me that if you don’t confront truthfully what’s going on between two people, there’s no future. And if you don’t confront truthfully the past, there’s no way forward. You’ll always be in the prison of these warped and confining rituals from the past.”

Dorfman’s political thriller was a late addition to the Taper schedule, replacing David Mamet’s “Oleanna” when Egan and Davidson refused to approve the playwright’s casting. It depicts a triangular struggle among a torture victim, her husband and her torturer. Jimmy Smits, a former regular on “L.A. Law,” plays a human-rights lawyer appointed by the new democratic government of a South American country to investigate abuses by the previous dictatorship. An accident brings a doctor (Tomas Milian) into his home, where the lawyer’s wife (Wanda de Jesus) accuses the stranger of supervising her torture and rape, often to the music of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden.” The question becomes whether she is telling the truth or suffering a nervous breakdown.

“The tragedies in one’s life help fuel your understanding for art,” Egan says. “Pain and grief and mourning and suffering help you peel a layer back.” Egan pauses, swallows, reflects.

Egan has always pondered questions of conscience; a third-generation Irish American, he was reared in Washington, D.C., by a social-worker mother and an FBI agent father, and was trained early in rigorous self-analysis by demanding Jesuit high school teachers.

“Living with another person, you get absorbed into habitual kinds of behavior,” he continues on the subject of marriage, “which is why these rehearsals have been so important to me. The individuals in this play are attempting to stop the behavior of 15 years, during which she never confronted the demons. (The wife) had them in their little box and kept controlling and maintaining them, but she would not allow herself--and her husband would not allow her--to confront the demons and get to this moment of truth and honesty.”

Egan’s ability to intellectualize experience is a result of his considerable academic background. A graduate of Oxford and Stanford universities, Egan studied Marxist literary theory, economics and literature, and he prizes research. In preparing for “Death and the Maiden,” he organized weeks of round-table discussions with his cast and crew, diagnosing case histories.

“To be in the theater, one’s commitment has to be evangelical,” Egan says. “For any of us in the theater, there’s never going to be a financial reward. You’ve got to believe in something else about theater that’s collegial, that’s spiritual, that’s intellectual, that’s political.”

Egan initially discovered theater as a profession while studying at Oxford. The British political playwrights--Howard Brenton, David Hare, David Storey, Edward Bond--gave dramatic expression to the moral, social and economic debates that Egan was obsessed with. While studying dense theoretical tomes, he volunteered backstage at the Oxford Playhouse theater, gathering invaluable practical experience.

After Oxford, Egan pursued further studies at Stanford. Midway through his doctoral dissertation, Egan interrupted his studies to run the graduate program in political studies at the University of Washington. While in Seattle administering the program, Egan was hired in 1979 by Seattle Repertory Theater director Daniel Sullivan to create a new play development program. In 1980, he formed his own theater company, Home Productions. Then, four years later, Gordon Davidson beckoned Egan south to the Taper. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“I really loved the idea of coming to a theater whose primary reputation was built on political work, which was very much a part of Gordon’s aesthetic. Also, Gordon wanted me to rejuvenate the new play side of the Taper.” But there was a second reason, too, for accepting Davidson’s offer. Egan was married to Mulgrew after meeting her during a touring production.

“My wife said: ‘I need to get to L.A. to get my career going again. Either I go with you or I go without you.’ So I chose for us to go together.”

At the Taper, Egan champions new work and has helped make reputations for once-obscure playwrights, including Shem Bitterman, Oliver Mayer, Han Ong, John Steppling and Kelly Stuart. His controversial staging of “Richard II” included a multi-ethnic cast that became a topical focus of discussion, since the play ran during the 1992 riots. He also developed and directed the world premiere of “Sansei.”

“We like to call Bob the fifth member” of the band, says Hiroshima co-founder Dan Kuramoto. “It was through him we fleshed out ‘Sansei.’ We felt really good about his work with Asian Americans. Robert’s crucial to this city right now. His vision of theater in Los Angeles is very grass-roots. Gordon (Davidson) is an extraordinarily savvy theater guy, but I would like to see the next evolution of the Taper focus on relevant Los Angeles. I’d love to see the L.A. street energy have a voice in theater. I think Egan has a great passion for doing this. I can think of no one in theater who would be more plugged into it than Egan.”

Another opinion of Egan’s work at the Taper is offered by Mick Collins, co-founder and artistic director of the Circus Minimus theater and workshop. “Bob is this corporate director,” Collins says of his experience acting under Egan’s direction on Steppling’s “The Dream Coast.” “He has that efficient, intelligent approach to directing that is going to give you a top-notch show and satisfy the subscribers. But as far as passion, he seems tethered to this intellectual post, doing his job as defined by the Taper, Gordon and the corporate institution. He just seems so bound to his obligations, intellectual and corporate, that he never breaks free.”

Breaking free is something Egan almost did do, however. In 1992, he took a six-month sabbatical (it actually only lasted four months) to re-examine his priorities. When he returned, he was on the verge of leaving the Taper. He had been offered jobs elsewhere, including one in film and television, one in academia and another as artistic director of a prominent theater he would not name.

“I knew my journey at the Taper had to go forward,” Egan says. “I had to take more responsibility. . . . I was going to leave. In order to recommit, I needed a certain amount of responsibility to exercise my leadership. I’d been an associate artistic director for 15 years. It was time for me to move on, either here or to somewhere else.”

When Davidson met with Egan after the sabbatical, their discussion was candid.

“We were trying to figure out the next step,” recalls Davidson, “including the possibility of Bob having to leave. I know he looked at a few other theaters because he wants to run a theater. I couldn’t give enough definition to associate artistic director, so I kind of invented the idea (of producing director) based on my feelings. It came from his own interests and energies to help revitalize aspects of the production work, and it eliminated the confusion over succession.”

Could that mean Egan is Davidson’s chosen successor?

Davidson answers ambiguously: “Some of that decision will be his choice, some mine, some of it the (Taper) board’s. We’re dividing (responsibilities) up differently. I said we’d talk about what he’d do (later) and see where I am at the end of this period,” Davidson said, referring to the current downtime at the Ahmanson, which is being remodeled, and the fact that Davidson is now spending a lot of time on projects in New York.

Taper Consulting Dramaturg Leon Katz, currently assisting Davidson in New York on “Unfinished Stories,” offers insights into the nature of succession at the Taper: “With Gordon, it’s not as though he handpicks people,” Katz says. “People sort of wear into (a position) over the course of years. You work your way up from the mail room, so to speak. Egan has the capacity to be extremely judicious and at the same time get things done very expeditiously and courteously. But people near the top are not exactly sure what their terrain is at the Taper.”

But at the restaurant interview, such career ambitions are far from Egan’s thoughts. Now he’s talking about “spending lots of time with my boys,” 9-year-old Alec and 10-year-old Ian, and how proud he is of their soccer prowess.

And he’s talking about how sad the marital crisis has made him. And how uncomfortable it is to spend nights in a friend’s unheated cottage, without electricity or a phone.

“Everything’s in a major moment of transition,” he says with a sigh, “and where it’s going to go, nobody knows.”*