It’s a Heavenly Assignment for Tony Kushner, but Not This Season

Pulitzer winner Tony Kushner might just be America’s busiest playwright. He might also be the most overbooked.

Shortly after we digested the news that the “Angels in America” scribe’s “The Heavenly Theatre” was being postponed from its slot at the end of the current Mark Taper Forum season, we also learned that his adaptation of Brecht’s “The Good Person of Setzuan” will be produced at the La Jolla Playhouse during the same summer months that “The Heavenly Theatre” would have been at the Taper.

“Heavenly Theatre” had been planned for that Taper slot for nearly a year. As far back as 1991, the Taper received a $125,000 grant from the W. Alton Jones Foundation to stage the play. Shouldn’t it take priority?

The two projects “have nothing to do with each other,” replied Kushner. “The La Jolla thing is a straightforward adaptation. It’s a very easy piece of work. I’ll have it done within a couple of weeks. My part in it is minimal.”

He added that he hopes to collaborate on the “Setzuan” script with playwright Eduardo Machado, and Los Lobos, the celebrated East L.A. rock band, has been asked to do the music and lyrics. Playhouse officials confirmed they were talking to Los Lobos and Machado, but added that nothing had been settled; a spokeswoman for Los Lobos agreed with that report.

“The Heavenly Theatre,” which is set in 16th-Century France, is “much more complicated” than “Setzuan,” Kushner said. “It’s the first thing I ever wrote (in 1985), and I have to figure out how to change it without losing its naivete.” Kushner finds plot and storytelling to be the hardest part of writing plays, so originals are more difficult for him than adaptations.

Kushner, “Heavenly” director Brian Kulick and composer Mel Marvin will meet for “a secret workshop” on the project in May or June. But in the meantime, he’s also wrestling with his screenplay adaptation of his award-winning “Angels in America.” So he didn’t feel he had enough time for “Heavenly,” and “I didn’t want to get rushed into it.”

He emphasized that his decision in no way reflects any dissatisfaction with the Taper, which carefully nurtured his “Angels in America”: “My loyalty is first and foremost to the Taper.”

PICKETS AT THE ALEX: A picket line greeted theatergoers at the first performance of the restored Alex Theatre’s inaugural production, “Sayonara,” on Jan. 27. Since then, many customers have been handed leaflets by disgruntled union workers as they walked in.

Theatre Corp. of America, which manages the Alex, doesn’t hire members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes--including stagehands, wardrobe and box-office workers--at either the Alex or its sister theater, the Pasadena Playhouse. With productions at both theaters now being exported to circuits of other Southland theaters, union officials are afraid they’re being frozen out of an expanding empire.

The union accuses Alex officials of spending $6.5 million of taxpayer money to refurbish the theater but discriminating against hiring those particular taxpayers who belong to the union, of paying “bottom-of-the-barrel” wages, and of endangering actors and the public by barring union stagehands and hiring “less experienced” workers. The leaflet passed out to theatergoers said Theatre Corp. actions were illegal as well as unethical.

Jim Wood, secretary treasurer of Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, joined the cause, signing a letter to other union leaders saying that if the Alex management is allowed to “escape unscathed, we invite management throughout the industry and the region to believe they can trample on us and violate our rights.”

Theatre Corp. officials declined all comment. However, a leaflet included in the programs boasted that “our industry’s finest stagehands and technicians” were hired “without regard to their membership in any particular organization. It remains the policy of the Alex Theatre to provide equal opportunity to all tradespersons.”

“I hate to see the opening blemished by something that’s so silly,” said Laurence Clarke, chairman of the Alex Regional Theatre Board, which hired Theatre Corp. to run the theater. But “anyone watching the performance would be hard-pressed to say it isn’t professional.”

The fracas is between the union and the Theatre Corp., not his own board or other civic officials, Clarke said. However, it’s his impression that Theatre Corp. simply hired workers they’ve used for a long time, he added. He’s “very happy” with the Theatre Corp. management.

MUSIC OF THE NIGHT: Talk about powerful quakes--the Jan. 17 shaker even stopped Andrew Lloyd Webber, at least for a few months. The producer-composer had booked a Warner Bros. recording studio in Burbank for two weeks, beginning Jan. 16, to record the “Sunset Boulevard” cast album. When the studio was damaged and an alternate site couldn’t be found, “we lost our timing,” said a Lloyd Webber spokesman. Lloyd Webber’s other commitments will prevent him from returning to oversee the recording session until April. But the project is not in any danger of being derailed completely, said the spokesman.