COMMENTARY : The Appeal of Getting Back to the Classics : Multiculturalism is the unlikely fuel for the burst of classical repertory work in some local theaters. Take Chekhov’s ‘Wood Demon’ at Taper for instance

Los Angeles has never been a mecca for classical theater buffs. The overweening influence of the film and television industries, with their emphasis on pop culture, has affected even what gets produced on local stages.

Yet in the past few years, there’s been a surge of interest in the classics--the Western canon generally thought to include everything from Greek tragedy to such vintage Americana as Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” with an emphasis on such giants as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov. The opening this week of Anton Chekhov’s “The Wood Demon” by the Antaeus Company at the Mark Taper Forum marks the high point so far in this trend.

For the past two years, the Taper has provided rehearsal space and workshops for the Antaeus Company, a group of established actors committed to creating permanent classical repertory in L.A.

“The Wood Demon” is the inaugural production for the group, and although the Taper is not committed to producing the group beyond this staging, its backing of this show by a local company signals a potentially significant turn of events for classical theater here.

This is not the first time the Taper has presented a classical repertory company, but it is their first presentation of an L.A.-based classical company, despite doing a series of works in repertory in the early ‘80s with many local artists. The Taper’s imprimatur is particularly significant given the venue’s dominant position in the community.

Antaeus has not, however, been the only local company trying to advance L.A.’s cultural image. Glendale’s A Noise Within, founded in 1991, operates a 99-seat theater and has done well with both audiences and critics. There have also been sundry other groups at work, from new companies like L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company, to workshop-oriented groups like the Classical Theatre Lab to the more seasoned troupes like Shakespeare Festival/L.A., among many others.

But it’s one (admittedly impressive) thing for a 99-seat theater like A Noise Within to make a go of it, and another for the city’s flagship theater to throw its weight behind such a project.

And not for nothing is it happening now.

Yes, L.A. finally seems to have an audience for the Bard and others--witness the crowds for Le Theatre du Soleil and the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1984 at the Olympic Arts Festival, Kenneth Branagh’s Renaissance Theatre Company at the Taper in 1990, and Ian McKellen’s “Richard III” at UCLA in 1992.

Also, New York’s depressed economy has driven more conservatory-trained actors and directors here to work in film and TV than ever before, and many of them still want to work in their favored medium.

But there’s more to this sudden push than supply and demand. The trend that helped move classics to the fore, ironically enough, has been multiculturalism.

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L.A.’s relationship to classical theater has always been different from that of other major cities. In addition to L.A.’s populist image, there’s the fact that L.A.’s major cultural institutions came into being much later than those of New York, Boston, Washington or any number of other places, and the European-based traditions have never been as rooted here as they have elsewhere.

Los Angeles theater is a child of the ‘60s. That’s when the Music Center and the city’s other major institutions--those places traditionally charged with propagating the canon--were built. It was also a time of counterculture, not classical repertory.

The Taper, founded in 1967, put itself on the map with political docudramas like “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” (1968), about the physicist who pioneered the development of the first atomic bomb, “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine” (1971), a courtroom docudrama about a Vietnam war protest, and “Zoot Suit” (1978), Luis Valdez’s Pachuco-era drama inspired by a historical incident. And while the Taper has always presented about one classical work per season, it has also stayed the topical, politically charged course, up to and including Anna Deavere Smith’s “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992.”

Recently, and particularly in the wake of the demise of the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the Taper has jumped on the multiculturalism bandwagon--making nods to racial (if not gender) representation in the artists whose works they choose to develop as well as what they put on their mainstage.

In this way the Taper is emblematic of L.A. theater in general, for even as multiculturalism has flourished on local stages in recent years, there has been an increased focus on the classics. Call it a backlash, a desire on the one hand for traditional actors--white and non-white--to work on time-tested texts and on the other hand to carve out a niche for themselves in the way multicultural advocates have.

1991 appears to have been the turning point. That year, the Taper, Too, which had long served as the Taper’s primary venue for new works, broke with practice, presenting three conceptual productions of older European texts. A Music Center document at the time listed “a repertory company” as one of the “top priorities of the Mark Taper Forum,” noting the success of Branagh and company and that “there is no regularly scheduled classical theater.”

Also in 1991--the same year that A Noise Within was launched--LATC added a Classical Theatre Lab to its list of ethnic and gender-based groups. (The Lab continued after LATC, under the direction of Robert Machray.)

And so we have a paradox. For while early multiculturalism disdained the classics as the theatrical equivalent of the Great Books, the movement has helped to bring the canon to a city historically unenthused by it.

Significantly, though, it’s not simply a reactionary backlash of Anglo traditionalists; this may be the next step for multiculturalism. Plenty of non-white theater artists are interested in subjects other than ethnic identity, as is evident from the diversity in the ranks of both Antaeus and A Noise Within.

In fact, the current interest in racially integrated casting of classical fare--a “non-traditional” approach made popular by Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival and used in the Taper’s 1991 “Julius Caesar” and 1992 “Richard II”--is proof that the L.A. stage community wants to move beyond the parochialisms of both the traditional institutional theater and early multiculturalism, both of which have practiced de facto, if not ideological, separatism.

Multiculturalists have long been pitted against the classicists, when their objectives don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Classic texts speak to us about age-old problems that cut across divisions of race, gender and class, and hopefully L.A. is at last be ready to listen.

In “The Wood Demon,” for example, the titular protagonist finds new resolve even as the forest of Telibeyevsk burns. His contradictory emotions are likely to ring strangely true for people who live in L.A. But then, what better playwright to illuminate the sense of futility and forbearance that Angelenos feel than Chekhov?

* “The Wood Demon,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Runs Thursday through May 22. $28-$35. (213) 365-3500.