Getting to the Long and Short of Taper’s Season

The Mark Taper Forum’s 1997-98 season, announced Tuesday by artistic director Gordon Davidson, will begin small and end big.

The grand finale will be a two-part, large-cast epic based on John Irving’s novel “The Cider House Rules,” complete with marathon weekend performances. Its immediate predecessor will be the first of Anna Deavere Smith’s documentary dramas that will go beyond the monologue form, featuring a cast of at least eight.

But the first two-thirds of the season will operate on a smaller scale. First up is David Hare’s three-actor “Skylight,” followed by the four-man Flying Karamazov Brothers, a Charlayne Woodard monologue and a commissioned play by Ellen McLaughlin with a cast of four or five, Davidson said.

For the third season in the theater’s 31-year history, half of the playwrights represented are women.

The season has strong links to Seattle. Four of the six plays will have played at three Seattle theaters before L.A. And there is another link to the opposite corner of the country--two of the six plays are set in Maine.

Hare’s “Skylight” (Sept. 18-Oct. 26) is the story of a wealthy businessman reuniting with his ex-lover, a liberal teacher in northwest London. It premiered in London in 1995 and played on Broadway last year. Taper producing director Robert Egan will direct.

Two of the plays are in shorter slots. The first is the Flying Karamazov Brothers in the show-biz farce and former Marx Brothers vehicle “Room Service” (Nov. 20-Dec. 21), by John Murray and Allen Boretz. It will originate at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre and also play Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., before L.A.

The second of the short slots will be filled by Woodard’s “Neat” (Jan. 11-Feb. 1), a sequel to her earlier autobiographical monologue “Pretty Fire,” which won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award in 1993 after productions at the Fountainhead and Odyssey theaters. The L.A.-based Woodard plays more than a dozen characters in “Neat,” including her aunt, whose name was taken as the title. It has already been seen at Manhattan Theatre Club and Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Although the Taper commissioned McLaughlin’s “Tongue of a Bird” (Feb. 19-March 29) and developed it in the 1995-96 New Work Festival, it will premiere at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre before its Taper production, with Lisa Peterson directing both engagements. It tells the story of Maxine, a search-and-rescue pilot who’s trying to find a kidnapped girl in the mountains of Maine. McLaughlin is best known to Taper audiences for playing the angel in “Angels in America,” though she won’t act in “Tongue.”

It isn’t clear yet if Smith will perform in her long-awaited piece on the U.S presidency (April 16-May 31, 1998). It will open next fall at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., which commissioned it, followed by runs at the Taper and the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, which are co-producing it with Arena. Although at least eight actors will play different roles, Davidson said they will continue to cross gender and race lines, as Smith has done in her monologues, including the Taper’s premiere of “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” about the L.A. riots.

Peter Parnell dramatized Irving’s 1985 novel “The Cider House Rules” for an adaptation presented at Seattle Repertory Theatre earlier this year. However, Davidson said the Taper work-shopped Part 2 of the epic in L.A. and contributed money to a Seattle reading of both parts last year. “There is still a lot of work being done on Part 2,” Davidson said, but “I think we will finally bring it all together” for what he called the first “completed version” of the play (June 13-Sept. 27, 1998). It’s set over several generations in rural Maine and deals with abortion-related issues in Part 2.