Mark Taper Forum Season Has a Caribbean Accent

A pair of Caribbean-flavored epics will bracket the Mark Taper Forum’s 1994-95 season.

The season will begin with “Floating Islands,” Eduardo Machado’s two-part Cuban series, and end with a West Indian-oriented dramatization of Homer’s “The Odyssey” by Derek Walcott.

In between will be Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of John G. Neihardt’s “Black Elk Speaks,” Jon Robin Baitz’s “Three Hotels” and the U.S. premiere of Terry Johnson’s “Hysteria.”

The lineup (initial date is the first preview):

* “Floating Islands” (Oct. 5-Dec. 11). The first half (“The Family Business”) of this four-play cycle consists of “The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa” and “In the Eye of the Hurricane” and follows several Cuban families from 1930 through Castro’s revolution. It will be part of the subscription season. The second half (“After the Revolution”) includes “Fabiola,” set in Cuba in 1960-62, and “Broken Eggs,” set at a Cuban American wedding reception in Woodland Hills in 1979. It will be offered as a bonus to subscribers. Artistic director Gordon Davidson said that the different subscription status of the two parts is no reflection on their value; it’s just that it was impossible for this one epic to take up two subscription slots without “impeding other work.”

Taper associate artistic director Oskar Eustis, who leaves next month to become artistic director of Trinity Repertory Co. in Providence, R.I., will return to direct Machado’s epic.

* “Black Elk Speaks” (Jan. 3-Feb. 26, 1995). Sergel spent 20 years dramatizing Neihardt’s book about an Oglala Sioux holy man who had witnessed Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee. Several versions of Sergel’s efforts were staged over the years. Sergel died while this latest version was in rehearsals last summer at Denver Center Theatre Company, but his wife, Gayle, and director Donovan Marley, who’s also the company’s artistic director, supervised the completion of the project.

The Denver company will revive it next fall, after which the production will be imported to the Taper, featuring an all-Native American cast--including some from Los Angeles. It will be the first Taper mainstage production to focus completely on Native American themes. In exchange for “Black Elk Speaks,” a Taper production will appear in Denver sometime in the next two years--this part of the agreement is “what makes it affordable,” Davidson said.

* “Three Hotels” (March 12-April 30, 1995). Baitz’s trio of monologues about an American businessman who sells baby formula in developing countries and his stressed-out wife was seen on public television in 1991, winning Baitz a $25,000 Humanitas Prize. The stage version opened in New York at the Circle Rep in 1993, directed by Joe Mantello (Louis in “Angels in America”), who also will stage the Taper’s production. Ron Rifkin (“The Substance of Fire”) was in “Three Hotels” in New York and will probably repeat his performance here. Earlier this year, San Diego Repertory Theatre presented the play’s West Coast premiere.

The characters are two of the same ones who were in his 1989 play “Dutch Landscape,” one of the Taper’s all-time fiascoes. Davidson sees the newer play as the end of “a successful journey” that started with the earlier one.

* “Hysteria” (May 7-June 25, 1995). Terry Johnson’s eight-actor play about an encounter between Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud won an Olivier Award as best comedy for its 1993 staging at the Royal Court Theatre in London. The same director, Phyllida Lloyd, probably will stage it here. It’s not to be confused with Tracy Young’s “Hysteria,” a 1992-93 production that’s being revived by the Actors’ Gang, opening Saturday.

* “The Odyssey” (July 16-Sept. 3, 1995). Walcott, who won the 1992 Nobel Literature Prize, adapted his 1990 epic poem “Omeros,” a Caribbean retelling of “The Odyssey,” for the Royal Shakespeare Company. It opened in Stratford in July, 1992, then reopened in London last summer. The Taper production will use American talent. Walcott is best known to veteran Taper audiences as the author of “Dream on Monkey Mountain,” which played the Taper stage in 1970; he wrote 1974’s “The Charlatan.”*