Fugard, Stoppard Works on Taper Lineup

Playwright Athol Fugard is slated to direct and star in his two-actor “Valley Song” as part of the Mark Taper Forum’s 30th season next year, Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson announced Thursday. The 1996-97 season will begin with three new productions of plays that have been on Broadway in recent seasons, conclude with a play previously staged only in Seattle and revive a long-dormant Taper program, New Theatre for Now.

The season:

* Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (Sept. 19-Oct. 27), a heady comedy set in both 1809 and the present, directed by Taper producing director Robert Egan.

* Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney” (Nov. 14-Dec. 22), about an Irish woman who, blind since she was a baby, regains her sight after an operation.

* Bessie and Sadie Delany’s and Emily Mann’s “Having Our Say” (Jan. 16-Feb. 23), Mann’s dramatization of “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years,” an autobiographical account of the lives of two African American sisters.

* Fugard’s “Valley Song” (March 13-April 26), the South African’s first post-apartheid play. His co-star will be LisaGay Hamilton, with whom he performed in East Coast productions of the play. The West Coast premiere opens this Sunday at La Jolla Playhouse, but Fugard is not appearing in or staging it there.

* New Theatre for Now on the mainstage (April 27-June 29, 1997).

* Leslie Ayvazian’s “Nine Armenians” (July 24-Aug. 31, 1997), about three generations of an Armenian American family, which the Taper’s Davidson will direct because “it’s rich, ethnic, full of the need to remember history. It reminds me of my family, and it brings a voice from an extraordinarily large community in Los Angeles.”

The new season will bring higher ticket prices. For the first time in Taper history, subscribers will buy a package of six shows, instead of five plus an option to buy an additional play or plays. The range of subscription prices will rise from the current season’s $97.50-$177.50 to $126-$222. Davidson said a majority (last year, 61%) of Taper subscribers buy the sixth show anyway, and “it’s healthy to have the extra variety” that a sixth show provides. “It keeps the blood flowing in the subscribers’ veins. It keeps them young.”

Regular single ticket prices also are going up: to $23 for previews (up from $22), $29-$34 for most post-opening performances (up from $28-$32.50), $31-$37 for Saturday nights (up from $29.50-$35.50) and $37 for opening nights (up from $35.50).

The return of New Theatre for Now, a Taper institution from 1967 to 1986, began as a way to use the stage on Monday nights for run-throughs of developing plays with audience feedback and gradually grew into two-week “mini-productions,” Davidson said. “It became harder to do on the mainstage and still keep a sense of it as in-progress,” so it was moved to other locations in the city.

Eventually it was replaced by the more rudimentary readings and workshops of the New Work Festival, usually held at the Taper, Too, but Davidson said he’s “concerned about getting developmental work back on the mainstage so the audience doesn’t lose contact with what it takes to bring a play to its final stages.”

The New Theatre for Now slot next spring will include two or three plays, probably titles that already have been through the New Work Festival but are not yet deemed ready for a full production. Davidson said he is “pretty sure” that one of them will represent the Taper’s Latino Theatre Initiative.

The productions will be “low-tech, with the emphasis on the text,” Davidson said. Subscribers will get one play as part of the package and receive an option to buy discounted tickets for others. Davidson said subscribers should “use this slot as an adventure.”

Ticket information: (213) 972-0700.