Way Off Broadway

Director David Schweizer sits on a saggy couch, just a couple of feet away from a round wooden table and chairs, in the lobby of the Actors’ Gang Theater in Hollywood. The sofa is the kind of serviceable number you’d expect to find in the front room of a nonprofit company. But the table and chairs seem even older, and slightly out of place.

In fact, the grouping looks suspiciously like the theatrical set that looms in the background, just over the director’s shoulder. As well it should. This may be the theater’s lobby, but it is also part of the set for Schweizer’s current coup de theatre, a highly stylized adaptation of the 1926 Philip Dunning and George Abbott melodrama “Broadway,” which runs through April 17 at the theater.

This kind of spillover will hardly shock fans of Schweizer’s expect-the-unexpected ways. He is, after all, an artist known for blurring lines and crossing boundaries--of genres, media and conventional mores of many kinds.

What may come as a surprise, however, is the enthusiasm, conviction and independence that Schweizer has managed to sustain. After decades of dramatic ups and downs, you’d think a director might be more worn out, or jaded. But not this one.

Schweizer, 49, is, after all, sensitive and sincere to a fault. A bohemian at heart, he has lived in the same artfully cluttered Venice beach pad for years, drives a funky Volkswagen convertible and appears largely unfazed by any need to conform to L.A. ways. What’s more, he continues to make work choices based on projects that excite him, rather than what might be most strategically advantageous to his career.

To hear him tell it, his is a willful and indispensable suspension of cynicism. “There’s something about placing work on a stage in real time, to groups of assembled people, that is both so simple and so complicated, so beguiling and awkward, and such an anachronism in today’s culture that I really don’t think anyone sticks with it for a lifetime if they don’t have a huge sense of wonder at the basic magic of things,” he says in his characteristically energetic yet contemplative way. Schweizer clearly takes the matter of discussing his art as seriously as the work itself, or so it seemed on this recent afternoon.

“A big part of me, for better or worse, is that I have always maintained that sense of wonder, and that attitude toward the work. What has been tricky, and comes and goes in different times, are ways to express that--outlets, venues.”

No kidding about the last part. A life in the theater is difficult for anyone to maintain these days, but it’s particularly hard for an avant-gardist who lives in Los Angeles. Indeed, there’s been a price to pay, even for this onetime Robert Brustein-Joe Papp protege, who has reigned for nearly two decades in the L.A. world of performance as one of the city’s most innovative and independent directors.

Schweizer is the man behind some of the most striking and edgy recent productions in theater and opera, including last year’s “Salome” at the Actors’ Gang and “La Indian Queen” at Long Beach Opera. Yet only in recent years has he been able to move from working in smaller, and sometimes far-flung, venues to get his due through regular work on the main stages of the nation’s major regional theaters.

“I’ve been extending my sensibility out into something closer to a mainstream theatrical context,” he says, referring to his raft of ‘90s engagements at such prestigious venues as the Mark Taper Forum, Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I., and Second Stage in New York. “I have been working consistently in more stable, wider-ranging assignments, and it has been a very rewarding time.”

“Broadway,” while it marks a return to the tiny 99-seat Actors’ Gang Theater, is nevertheless an outgrowth of such mainstream success. Inspired in part by his experience staging Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s “Once in a Lifetime” at Trinity Rep in 1996, Schweizer began looking for other early American works to direct. “There was a wackiness, a kind of jazz beat and an inherently surreal but located energy to these American works of the ‘20s and ‘30s that was really appealing to me,” he recalls. “Suddenly I was looking at these plays, and they seemed so touching. It opened a door to a whole kind of American phase in my work.”

When he first came across the Dunning-Abbott play, he was “breathless,” he says. “There was such a sense of wanting to break the theater wide open in order to tell a new story. It’s gangland melodrama meets backstage romance--preceding the endless films and works that would come after that would mythologize all of these things.”

Initially, “Broadway” was a possibility for Trinity Rep or the Williamstown Theatre Festival. But the play requires a cast of 18, and it didn’t really fit into what either venue had in mind for their upcoming seasons.

Meanwhile, Schweizer’s ongoing relationship with Actors’ Gang, where he has staged four works during the past five years, brought a different opportunity. “I was not going to submit anything for the so-called Tim Robbins slot [one work per year, funded by the founding artistic director] because I had done it for several years,” Schweizer says. “But they were having difficulty finding something that everyone wanted to do, and this was a big project, and it was lively, and a bell went off.”

“Broadway,” which was a hit in its day, is a yarn about a love triangle, with a vaudeville performer vying with a bootlegger for the affections of an ingenue hoofer. The bootlegger, meanwhile, is being pressured by his uptown rival, who eventually kills him. There’s much more to Schweizer’s atmospheric staging than the story, though. As interpreted by the iconoclastic director, cabaret numbers and other interpolations make “Broadway” into a piece of rich and complex theater.

The topic becomes more the mythos of Broadway than its reality. “It’s a haunted play about people with bigger dreams than they might ever be able to achieve--dreams of a world that might not have ever existed, but which everyone yearns for,” he explains.

The “Broadway” experience has led Schweizer and Actors’ Gang to broaden their relationship to a kind of ongoing resident consultancy, which includes dramaturgy and directing, as well as advising the company. “It’s about using my expertise and experience I’ve had out in the world to bring to this company on an ongoing and partner basis, as opposed to just coming in, doing a show and leaving,” says Schweizer, who has committed to staging a work--yet to be named--at the theater next year.

Schweizer’s style also matches the company’s aesthetic. “The Gang’s slant, with its strange combination of presentational clowning and the heightened reality of certain moments was perfect for me,” says the director, who is known for both a sophisticated literary sensibility and a bold, high-energy and often Brechtian style with strong psychosexual components.

“In David, the Gang has found an ideal collaborator,” says Actors’ Gang managing director Mark Seldis. “Working with David Schweizer has not only had an impact on the art, but also on the individual ensemble members and the Gang’s public image. The wonderful thing about David is that he manages to take all of us to a new place while never demanding that we be something that we’re not.”

Such testimonials from peers and colleagues are not hard to come by. What’s particularly striking, however, is that Schweizer is liked equally within a number of very different arenas. He has another artistic home of sorts at Long Beach Opera, where his 1998 staging of Guillermo Gomez Pen~a’s adaptation of Henry Purcell’s “The Indian Queen” was hailed for its innovation.

“That he has a highly original directorial voice used with unimpeachable artistic integrity is admirable,” says Long Beach Opera General Director Michael Milenski, who plans another Schweizer staging in 2000. “That he has been able to turn three unlikely projects [“Death by Opera” in 1994, “Elegy for Young Lovers” in 1996 and “La Indian Queen” in 1998] at Long Beach Opera into credible theatrical evenings demonstrates only one area of his professionalism. Another is that he got all this onto the stage with few perceivable frustrations displayed during the difficult and tense production periods. David gives definition to theatrical professionalism. He is perhaps the ultimate professional.”

Schweizer also continues to win the hearts of actors and solo performers. “Working with David has been fantastic,” says writer-performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh, whose “Bad Sex With Bud Kemp” was staged by Schweizer at Second Stage in New York and at the Tiffany Theater in L.A. in 1998, and who plans to collaborate with the director on her “Aliens in America” in L.A. this summer or fall.

“As a solo performer who writes her own material, working with a director is always a tricky proposition,” Loh says. “Your writing and performing is wired to you in a unique way. But David has such an amazing bedside manner. I have seen him work with incredibly fragile divas, and he has an amazing gift. He’s like a lion tamer. He really uses the material that he’s given, and then hones it into something that has his vision allover it.”

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Born into an old-line Baltimore family, Schweizer was sickly as a child and spent a lot of time fashioning dream worlds. As a result, it wasn’t much of a leap for him into the world of theater. He enrolled as an undergraduate at Yale University intent on a stage career and came under the influence of noted critic Robert Brustein, then dean of Yale’s school of drama. Almost overnight, Schweizer found himself accorded the privilege of taking graduate classes and staging work at the prestigious Yale Repertory Theatre.

When Brustein left for an extended sabbatical at the end of the 1960s, however, Schweizer also abandoned academia. He resurfaced at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, where he launched a second company and eventually met many of the artists who continue to be his associates today. Their association with Joe Papp led Schweizer to the New York Shakespeare Festival, where Schweizer became one of the impresario’s favorites, and throughout the 1970s he staged works for Papp and worked at other regional theaters.

In the late ‘70s, Schweizer came to L.A. to direct Len Jenkin’s “Kid Twist” at the Taper. He also ended up taking a staff job at the theater, running a festival of new work then known as the Lab, and eventually deciding to make California his new home.

The ‘80s proved both fruitful and frustrating. He attended the American Film Institute, directed some short screen pieces and extended his exploration of alternative stage forms into directing solo and other kinds of performance. From the mid-’80s to the early ‘90s, Schweizer also staged a number of well-received shows for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, but he didn’t get much work from the kind of major venues he’d worked for during the ‘70s, and he spent more time than he would have liked working away from home.

Indeed, there were times in the early 1990s when Schweizer seemed to be getting invitations from everywhere but Los Angeles.

Things seemed to turn around in 1994, thanks largely to his staging of Lisa Loomer’s “The Waiting Room” at the Taper. And if it’s still not easy to be a freelance theater director in L.A., at least Schweizer’s been able to develop enough of a following to have a presence.

“In Los Angeles, when you make a theater piece and you expect people to come and see it, you almost have to create context,” he says. “The artists you go to see are people who take it upon themselves to gauge why this particular piece could draw someone to come and see it, at the very moment that it’s being put on, in Los Angeles. It’s not about PR or hype. It’s about a resonance, an atmosphere, a pull around a project that people can feel, which tells them that someone’s reaching out to them.”

Even so, the next act in Schweizer’s career may not take place in the theater, or at least not only there. As it does with so many directors, film seems finally to have begun calling him. For the past couple of years, Schweizer has been trying to make a film about Liberace, with a Michael Sargent script, called “Sugar Daddy.” Olympia Dukakis, Buck Henry and Frank Langella--all of whom, over the years, have been directed onstage by Schweizer--have committed to being in the film, but the financing has yet to fall into place, he says.

Meanwhile, Schweizer, who recently directed an installment on Michele Lee for the Lifetime Channel’s “Intimate Portraits” series, is preparing to shoot a short. Written by Doris Baizley, it tells the story of a young girl at a swap meet who is suddenly able to see the history in the objects being sold. It is being executive-produced by Victor Syrmis of Strand/New Oz productions, who encouraged the director to do it as a calling card.

Schweizer is happily looking ahead, welcoming these new opportunities with the same characteristic enthusiasm he has always brought to his theater work. Yet he also remains thankful for, and perhaps even a bit surprised at, where he’s been so far.

“I feel extraordinarily grateful to have been able to live a freelance life in the arts for so many years,” he says. “It’s an astonishing pleasure and unbelievably nourishing to the soul, the heart, the brain, the gut. I am lucky enough to have never gotten so discouraged that I felt like I had to stop and get ‘practical.’ I would love to be a kind of living advertisement to younger artists that it is really worth it. No amount of money could buy the pleasure I have taken in making my work.”

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“Broadway,” Actors’ Gang Theater, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. (No show on April 4.) Ends April 17. $15-$20. (323) 660-TKTS.