Taper’s Millennium Lineup Features Three World Premieres

The Mark Taper Forum’s 1999-2000 season will include a new Neil Simon play, “The Dinner Party,” and two other world premieres--more than in any Taper season since 1988-89.

Alan Alda will star as the colorful Caltech physicist Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate, in the premiere of an as-yet-unfinished and unnamed script by Peter Parnell, a project Alda brought to the Taper. The third premiere, “The Poison Tree,” is by Robert Glaudini, a writer, director and actor whose style was partially forged in collaborations with one of L.A. theater’s most famous rebels, playwright John Steppling.

The Taper commissioned another play on the list, Lisa Loomer’s “Expecting Isabel,” but it premiered in October at Washington’s Arena Stage. The other entries in the season are Tina Landau’s “Space,” which was produced at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre in 1997, and August Wilson’s early play “Jitney,” which he revised in preparation for a round of productions in the Northeast that began at Boston’s Huntington Theatre last year.

Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson said the Taper would be doing even more premieres “if we had a second space,” but he believes the increase in new plays is “a nice way to end the century.”

The season, in sequence:

* “Space” (Oct. 7-Nov. 14), Landau’s drama in which a therapist investigates patients’ reports of alien abductions. Davidson said “Space” is “a perfect millennium piece” and that the Taper is the play’s “logical physical space.” Landau co-created “Floyd Collins,” seen recently at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre.

* “The Dinner Party” (Dec. 2-Jan. 16), a rare Simon excursion away from America into a fashionable restaurant in Paris, where the host has arranged a surprise for several couples. Originally slated to open in London, Simon “finally decided he’d rather do it in his hometown,” Davidson said. Why the Paris setting? “My sense is that he wants to remove it from conventional American interpretations of relationships.”

* “Jitney” (Feb. 3-March 19), Wilson’s examination of a group of cabbies in his home city of Pittsburgh in the ‘70s. The director will be Marion McClinton, who staged the play’s recent Eastern productions. Previous Center Theatre Group stagings of Wilson’s work were at the Ahmanson or Doolittle theaters, but the more intimate Taper is the right space for “Jitney,” Davidson said, and he wants Taper subscribers to see Wilson’s work.

* The still-unnamed play (April 6-May 14, 2000) based on the writings of Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton, including “Tuva or Bust,” Leighton’s account of his and Feynman’s attempts to visit the obscure Asian land of Tuva. Parnell also adapted the 1998 Taper production of “The Cider House Rules.”

* “The Poison Tree” (June 8-July 16, 2000), Glaudini’s tale of a La Jolla woman whose friendship with a poet-guru places her husband, a judge, in a compromising situation. Glaudini acted at the Taper in “Widows” in 1991. Robert Egan will direct the play, which emerged from the Taper’s most recent New Work Festival.

* “Expecting Isabel” (Aug. 3-27, 2000), about a couple struggling to have a baby. Loomer’s “The Waiting Room” was a Taper hit in 1994. Douglas C. Wager, the former Arena Stage artistic director who staged the premiere in Washington, will do the same here.