Taper to Redo Show Due to ‘Arrest’-ing Developments

Anna Deavere Smith’s “House Arrest,” the long-awaited examination of the presidency and the media that had been scheduled as a full production at the Mark Taper Forum in May and June, has been converted into a modified work-in-progress slated for a shorter, April 9-18 Taper run under the title “House Arrest: An Introgression.”

It has been replaced on the Taper season by the English-language premiere of “Enigma Variations,” by French playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, with Donald Sutherland starring as a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. “Enigma” is scheduled to open May 6 and run through June 13.

Smith is best known for researching, creating and performing “Fires in the Mirror” and “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992,” solo works that probed real-life, hot-button events that had recently occurred. But “House Arrest,” which includes a cast of actors, covers a much broader canvas, the history of relations between the presidency and the press. First produced at Washington’s Arena Stage in 1997, before the eruption of the current White House scandal, the show garnered mixed reviews. Originally scheduled to arrive at the Taper last spring, the show was delayed as its subject continued to evolve. The Taper hosted a closed workshop last spring but postponed the full production for a year, so that Smith could incorporate post-Lewinsky material.

More recently Smith realized she could not immediately offer a finished production because her “subject wouldn’t stay still,” according to Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson, referring to the Clinton impeachment. “How can she not talk about what’s happening this minute?” He said it would be difficult “to get an aesthetic distance on the subject in the time that we have, so I offered this alternative idea to her, that will relieve her of the burden of having to produce it fully.”

The first act of the new version will be a 90-minute play, featuring a cast of 10 or 11 actors, probably not including Smith. It will use historical research on former presidents as well as material from the more than 300 interviews Smith has conducted on the Clinton presidency. Unlike the first edition of “House Arrest” and last year’s Taper workshop, Smith is directing this version herself.

The second half of each performance will be an open discussion among invited guests, including “a very skilled facilitator from the L.A. community” and the audience, Davidson said. He called it “a community conversation” and emphasized that it won’t be “a post-performance discussion” of the sort in which, he noted, audience members ask questions like “How did you learn all those lines?”

The invited guests could include principals in the D.C. events, Davidson said. Monica Lewinsky, perhaps? “You never can tell. She lives in Los Angeles,” Davidson said with a laugh, adding that “it’s more important to include responsible social, cultural and political thinkers.”

Tickets, priced at $15 and $25, will be available first to Taper subscribers, then to others on March 21. “We hope to have not only our regulars but also another audience that might not regularly go to the Taper,” Davidson said. “That’s why the ticket price is lower” than the usual Taper prices of $29-$40.

Davidson acknowledged that many Americans may feel they’ve heard enough about the Clinton scandal, but he said “they’re frustrated because they have no way of engaging it other than by just receiving it.” He hopes the Taper production will allow theatergoers to respond “and to hear opposing views among like people.”

“Enigma Variations,” which will replace “House Arrest” on the Taper season, is “a wonderful philosophical thriller,” Davidson said. Jamey Sheridan will co-star with Sutherland. Previously produced only in Paris and Hamburg, Germany, the play was discovered in France by Sutherland’s wife, Francine, Davidson said. The Sutherlands took it to London-based producer Duncan Weldon, who brought in Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg and then Davidson. Jeremy Sams did the English translation. The production will mark Sutherland’s L.A. stage debut.

The following slot in the Taper season, officially reserved for Athol Fugard in his own “The Captain’s Tiger,” has been a question mark for months now, ever since Fugard’s agent said last summer that the famed playwright did not intend to appear in the Taper production. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Fugard said that his current performance of the role in New York would be his final bow as an actor. “We’re all in discussion about it,” Davidson said Thursday.

The final play scheduled for the Taper season, “The First Picture Show,” is still on track for August, but since the original announcement it has become a co-production with American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, which will present it first, with a May 12 opening scheduled.