MULTICULTURALISM AND THE TAPER

As a subscriber to the Mark Taper Forum from the outset, I sympathize with Gordon Davidson’s need to “go with the flow” and do multicultural plays (“Whom Do You Serve First?,” by Jan Breslauer, April 16). However, there is a basic principle that can never be overlooked. Whatever is done for a paying audience must be intrinsically worth doing. Agitprop drama for its own sake has never proven to have long life in the theater.

For example, neither “Bandido!” nor “Floating Islands” was memorable, not to mention the peculiar casting of “Islands,” where the same characters were played by different actors in succeeding scenes, making it quite a confusing production.

On the other hand, some of the Taper’s plays mentioned in the article (such as “Trial of the Catonsville Nine” and “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer”) remain strong pieces of theater because they involved the audience in their characters, had plots and were not obtrusively didactic, despite having political overtones.

Plays that become “classics” within their lifetimes, such as “Death of a Salesman” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” speak to audiences at a number of levels. They have universality to the point where they can be performed in non-English venues (such as “Salesman” in China) and still be understood and appreciated.

It is not that every new play must be considered a candidate for classicism; it is, however, in the interest of both the Taper and its audience to produce plays that are more than merely “politically correct” voices for any particular segment of the society.

EDYTHE M. McGOVERN

Los Angeles

As a disappointed 10-year subscriber to the Taper, I found that Breslauer’s article missed the point. For those few of us who remain loyal to the theater and continue to leave each production shaking our heads, we would like Gordon Davidson to move on.

Blow off the smoke screen of “multicultural programming” and you find a director with no sense of what makes exciting theater. That’s why his “multicultural” audience is deserting his theater.

STUART FINK

Los Angeles