Ron Link; Directed ‘Stand-Up Tragedy,’ Other Stage Hits

Ron Link, whose kinetic staging of such plays as “Stand-Up Tragedy” and “Bouncers” made him one of the most honored stage directors in Los Angeles, died Monday at the age of 54.

He died at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Hollywood of complications from a pulmonary embolism suffered during surgery.

Link recently won lifetime achievement awards two years in a row, from the L.A. Weekly in 1997 and from the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle in 1998.

Although his roots were in New York’s off-off-Broadway movement and he was best known for guiding the development of edgy, adventurous work in Los Angeles, Link also directed the work of more conventional playwrights--Neil Simon, Herb Gardner and C.P. Taylor--in Australia and Belgium.

Born and raised in Ohio, Link arrived in Manhattan in the early 1960s as a teenager. His first steady theatrical work was stage managing such relatively mild off-Broadway musicals as “The Fantasticks” and “Little Mary Sunshine,” but he later made his name as a director with considerably wilder fare: Tom Eyen’s prison spoof “Women Behind Bars.” He directed 22 shows at the avant-garde outposts Caffe Cino and La Mama.

“Women Behind Bars” also served as his ticket to L.A.; he staged it at the Cast-at-the-Circle in Hollywood in 1983 and later moved that production to the Roxy on the Sunset Strip. He moved to Los Angeles in 1984, and his first indigenous L.A. production was John Bunzel’s “Delirious,” at the small-venue Pilot and Matrix theaters in 1985. A year later, his work on John Godber’s “Bouncers” at the Tiffany Theater was showered with local theater awards.

He became known to a wider L.A. audience with his 1988 and 1989 stagings of Bill Cain’s “Stand-Up Tragedy,” which traveled from a Mark Taper Forum workshop to the Taper main stage to Broadway. The production about a teacher in an inner-city school was panned by the New York Times but won considerable praise from some of the other New York critics. In L.A., former Times critic Dan Sullivan wrote that Link’s production was “like watching a play on fast-forward. Yet the message doesn’t get garbled. . . . No Los Angeles show has ever put out more heat.”

A favorite project of Link’s was his 1992 Cast Theatre staging of “Melody Jones,” which Dan Gerrity and Jeremy Lawrence adapted from a novel by David Galloway. Set in a strip joint, the acclaimed drama was revived in 1998 at Theatre/Theater.

On larger stages, Link was hired to direct Neil Simon’s Broadway-bound “Jake’s Women” at the Old Globe Theatre in 1990, but he was fired five days before opening night after disagreements with Simon. He returned to the Taper main stage in 1996 to direct Oliver Mayer’s saga about a sexually confused boxer, “Blade to the Heat.”

During a 1996 Times interview, Link said “there’s usually an attraction to lean, mean, sex and death” in his favorite projects. “For being such a homebody with my dogs and fireplace, I save all my insanity and Fellini-esque [impulses] for [the theater].”

While accepting his lifetime achievement award from the Drama Critics Circle in 1998, Link joked that when he occasionally contemplated changing careers, “only one other thing comes to mind: ‘How many in your party?’ ”

Link is survived by his partner, Gerrity, his mother, Rita Link of Columbus, Ohio, and his brother, Carson Link of New York.