THEATER : Enough to Drive You Crazy : Phyllida Lloyd adjusts to staging the Freudian comedy ‘Hysteria’ in L.A. (not many female directors around here--but there sure are lots of people in therapy).

Phyllida Lloyd didn’t expect to be thought of as such an anomaly. Yet the London-based stage director, who’s here on her first assignment at a major American theater, feels as though she has been zapped “back to the future.”

It has to do with her gender. “I’ve been amazed here how many [people] have said to me ‘What’s going on, who did you pay to get [to direct] here?’ ” says the quiet, affable Lloyd, seated outside the Mark Taper Forum during a rehearsal break. “That surprised me, which must mean that women are more integrated in England than they are here.”

Such matters, it seems, are always relative. “My girlfriends who are in the theater [and I] talk a lot about how to get more women in, to give young women a leg up,” Lloyd continues. “But when I come here, it’s thrown into relief. It made me realize that actually things aren’t quite as bad over there.”

Yes, quite.

Lloyd is here to stage the American premiere of English playwright Terry Johnson’s “Hysteria,” opening Thursday at the Taper. She also directed the play in its 1993 premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

At the Taper, she is a rare female figure. Since the Taper’s 1991-92 season, only one woman per year has directed on the main stage. Lloyd is this season’s only female director, and there won’t be any women directing works in the coming season. While the Taper is not unusual in this regard among American theaters, it differs markedly from analogous theaters in England. Consequently, more British women are considered to be in the top ranks of directors there than here.

“We certainly have a number of women [directors],” says Lloyd. “If you had to name the top five directors in England, say, two of them would definitely be women. I think nobody would quarrel with that.”

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Lloyd herself might well turn up on such a list. Along with Katie Mitchell, whose Royal Shakespeare Co. adaptation of the “Henry VI” trilogy was seen at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts in 1994, Lloyd is currently considered among the most noted English directors. Her productions of theater and opera have been seen not only at the Royal Court, but also at the RSC, Covent Garden and other major venues.

Yet aside from a small 1987 production at Rutgers University, Lloyd hasn’t worked in the United States before. “Hysteria” may well be an apt vehicle for her major U.S. debut, especially since the work’s stylistic complexity makes it just the kind of text that suits Lloyd’s particular talents.

Known for her ability to bring an overarching conceptualization to works (such as Shakespeare’s “Pericles”) that have their own internal changes in style, Lloyd may be just what the doctor ordered for Johnson’s play.

“A collision of the most unlikely ingredients [including] farce and child abuse, which butt up against each other,” as Lloyd describes it, the four-character comedy centers on an aging Sigmund Freud and a strange young woman who challenges him.

Critical response to Johnson’s play was mixed in London, but Lloyd’s work was generally considered solid. London Sunday Times’ critic John Peter wrote: “Phyllida Lloyd’s direction has the precision and free-wheeling imagination of a magician-philosopher.”

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson did not see the Royal Court production of “Hysteria,” although he had admired Lloyd’s direction of “Pericles.”

“ ‘Pericles’ is a hard play and she took some bold chances,” he says. “It’s a piece that deals in fantasy and fairy tale and also a quest. It was her storytelling and theatricality that I thought would serve ‘Hysteria’ well.”

Davidson also chose Lloyd for “Hysteria” because he wanted to allow the director and Johnson to be able to continue their collaboration. “If a director and a writer have made a connection, then I believe [enabling] them to continue the relationship is the right thing to do,” he says.

Now, Lloyd feels she must rethink her approach to “Hysteria” for a different set of sensibilities. “The really important thing is the different audience,” says Lloyd. “What will this mean to them?

“Maybe a Los Angeles audience is more versed in Freud and analysis,” says Lloyd. “In London, it’s quite a rarefied activity to be on an analyst’s couch. Here, you meet a lot of people who’ve done it.”

For Lloyd, having done the show before may be an advantage. “I had a trial run, which really helped,” says Lloyd. “It’s the first time I’ve ever done anything twice. And I’ve decided that this is how prepared one needs to be.”

L loyd, 38, was born in rural Bristol, into “a very un-show bizzy family,” as she puts it. “I’m a freak of nature around my parts.”

She attended the all-girls boarding school Great Malvern. “It was a school that was dedicated to training women to be able to [conduct] charity on behalf of their husbands,” says Lloyd. “But we learned to dance and sing and speak in public.”

The early exposure to the performing arts led Lloyd to want to become an actress. “My family thought that would be a bad idea,” she says. “So I went to Birmingham University and read theater.”

It was at Birmingham, in fact, that Lloyd first met playwright Johnson, who was in the class ahead of her. She also discovered that acting probably wasn’t as rosy a life as she had first imagined.

“I realized that I didn’t think I could stand the psychological battering that actors have to withstand,” she says. “I just felt I wasn’t cut out for that kind of self-promotion.”

There were other jobs in the theater, though, that didn’t seem so unforgiving. “People say, ‘Well, surely it’s worse as a director,’ but it isn’t, because you’re not having to sell your body,” says Lloyd. “If you have bad hair and you bite your nails, nobody expects that you can’t direct plays.”

After training to direct in college, she still had dues to pay: “It’s hard in England to get to be paid to direct plays when you just have college, so I went and worked at the BBC as a gofer on TV drama for a couple of years.”

During her tenure at the BBC, Lloyd also began to direct unpaid fringe theater in the London pubs. That gave her just enough exposure to land her first paying gig, and her break came in 1983.

“Somebody gave me a job, saying, ‘I’m looking for a woman director to do a play about Sylvia Plath,’ ” she recalls. “It was the most inauspicious event, in a room that was attached to a theater somewhere, but [at least] somebody paid me a wage.”

I n 1984, Lloyd won an Arts Council scholarship to work as a director-in-training in regional theater. The grant came just as many artistic directors were increasingly looking for women to work in their theaters.

“It was partly a mixture of a happy accident and aptitude, at a time when there was pressure on men to bring female colleagues in and give them opportunities,” she says.

In the years that followed--during which she directed an array of new plays and classics--Lloyd also was an associate director at both the Bristol Old Vic and the Manchester Royal Exchange Theaters. After seven years, she went out on her own.

“I started working in London and I’ve been free-lance ever since,” she says.

It didn’t take long for her to reach the most prestigious houses: Lloyd’s first directorial outing at the Royal Shakespeare Company was a 1991 production of Shadwell’s “The Virtuoso.” Two years later, she made a splash at the Royal Court with the highly successful 1993 London premiere of “Six Degrees of Separation,” which subsequently transferred to the West End. Also in 1993, she mounted “Hysteria.”

Last year, Lloyd made her debut at the Royal National Theatre with “Pericles.” The London Times called her production “extraordinary, unpredictable and unforgettable.”

Similarly, the Guardian described Lloyd’s current National production of Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw” as “beautifully paced and [with] absolute understanding of Orton’s peculiar mix of verbal precision and sexual anarchy.”

Over the years, Lloyd has also ventured several operas--including a production of “Gloriana,” which played the Royal Opera House Covent Garden--and her equally bold work there, as in the theaters, has inspired both much strong praise and the occasional stinging criticism.

L loyd’s 1994 “Pericles” marked only the fourth time a woman had been at the helm of a production in the National’s largest house, the Olivier. The largest houses, it seems, still represent the last frontier to gender equality on the British stage.

It is a situation that Lloyd ascribes to the dearth of female artistic directors. “There still aren’t nearly as many women running theaters,” she says. “It’s sort of obvious [that] the big institutions [such as] the Royal Shakespeare Co. are all run by men.

“Inevitably, however good their will is to try and restore the balance or be [gender] blind about giving out the jobs, they’re going to cast in their image,” Lloyd says.

The imbalance may not, however, be solely a reflection of enduring gender bias. “I think women have been reluctant to run theaters, but then my generation has been reluctant to run theaters because they’re all under economic siege,” Lloyd says. “Who wants to take on a building that’s already in a budget deficit?”

Women do, though, continue to be well-represented throughout English theater as writers and directors. “It’s quite usual,” Lloyd says.

The situation is so good, in fact, that gender discrimination has not been an issue for most of Lloyd’s career.

“In fact, from the first time, when this man said to me in the early ‘80s, ‘I think I should have a woman director direct this play about Sylvia Plath,’ I don’t think I heard the words ‘woman director’ until I began to work in the big institutions, where men are very definitely there in the big leather chairs,” she says. “And then one began to think of it.

“Women can’t get away with mistakes as easily,” she says. “Men are allowed to fail in a way that women aren’t forgiven for doing so.

“We are forced to be internally vigilant,” says Lloyd. “It’s less to do with the scene itself than one’s own self-censorship.

“One catches one’s own reticence to throw one’s weight around, to shout and be very demanding and maybe throw tantrums because as a woman, you just aren’t used to getting your way by a lot of hysteria in the workplace,” Lloyd continues.

“Sometimes one thinks if one just shouted louder and made demands. . . . But I don’t know if that’s ‘women’ or me. It’s both, probably.”

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“Hysteria,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2:30 p.m.; Sunday, 7:30 p.m. $28-$35.50. (213) 365-3500. Ends Sept. 3.