Exploring Deeper ‘Space’

Beware the questions about little green men. Such queries pop up annoyingly often when you write a play about alien abductions--or even a play that only seems to be about that, as is the case with Tina Landau’s “Space,” which opens at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday.

When Landau began the project about four years ago, she was as wary of the topic as one might expect of an Ivy League-educated 37-year-old New Yorker with a fast-rising stage career.

“I wasn’t even sure that it was a worthy topic,” the quietly engaging writer-director said during a rehearsal-break conversation. She’d been inspired by a scientist she’d seen on TV, but even when she began to develop the play, she was skeptical. “I entered the piece rolling my eyes a lot,” she said.

Nevertheless, “Space” premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater in early 1998 to mostly positive reviews. The Taper’s production will be the show’s second staging, and a third is waiting in the wings: The Public Theater in New York will present another production of “Space,” also directed by the playwright, shortly after the Taper production. Landau also is at work adapting the piece as a screenplay.

What’s more, her take on the alien question has changed. “I feel that the phenomenon is a real one and deserves legitimate attention,” she says. “I don’t think people who claim to have been abducted are hoaxing it. I don’t think they’re crazy. I think there is authentically something going on that no one has found an answer for, and that no one discipline can answer.”

Although “Space” focuses on the experiences of a noted scientist who becomes a magnet for people claiming to have been kidnapped by aliens, that’s not the whole story. “The piece to me is not about abductions,” says Landau. “They are there, and the people who believe they’ve been abducted are a springboard for what actually happens in the story, which is a person’s reconsideration of the world.”

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Born and raised in New York, Landau is the daughter of two film producers. She moved to L.A. at the age of 14 and developed an interest in the stage during her years at Beverly Hills High. She then went on to study theater at Yale, before moving to New York to launch her career.

Since the late 1980s, Landau has been gaining a reputation as an artist adept at both musicals and avant-garde work. Her most widely known project to date is the musical “Floyd Collins,” which she created with composer Adam Geuttel. The piece premiered at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia in 1994, played off-Broadway in 1996 and was staged at San Diego’s Old Globe in February.

Landau has also won notice for her stagings with En Garde Arts, a site-specific New York company founded and run by Anne Hamburger, now artistic director designate of the La Jolla Playhouse. “Tina has an exacting vision,” says Hamburger. “She has very specific notions about what she wants to see on stage and an uncanny ability to make sure it appears. She embodies qualities not often found within one artist: an auteur and a populist; an extraordinary image maker with a keen intuition for moving and original stage pictures; a sentimentalist with a flair for the cutting edge.”

Like many successful artists, Landau has cultivated a loyal group of frequent collaborators. “I’ve seen her directing and her writing evolve immensely over the years,” says actor Steven Skybell, who has known Landau since 1980 and worked on 15 shows with her. “She has a big open heart, which brings such an emotional feeling into the rehearsal room and into the production.”

Landau has the kind of self-awareness that artists often acquire at their prime, connecting the dots between her personal and creative growth. “I grew up in New York City and I don’t think I knew the sky, or had any relationship to it,” she explains. “I remember distinctly going through a period where that shifted. It was in my early 30s, and it was simply because I was at an age where friends and people were having country houses.

“That corresponded with what I think is a natural development in terms of age, which was [having] questions about faith and wondering did I have a religion, and what does it mean for me to be Jewish.”

Landau believes there are recurrent themes in her recent works. “I see a huge connection between ‘Space’ and ‘Floyd Collins’ and this musical I did in New York this spring called ‘Dream True,’ ” she explains. “All three pieces ask a similar kind of question that definitely is in the realm of the spirit.

“There’s definitely a movement from a person searching for something externally, going through some sort of ordeal and arriving at a place that is an interior one,” she continues. “There’s an image that is the same in each,” she says, “which is a person standing against a sky.”

Landau has at least two additional musicals in progress, as well as directorial projects at Steppenwolf and, tentatively, La Jolla Playhouse. What’s more, although she will neither confirm nor deny it, she is also reported to be working with Disney Theatrical Productions on a musical version of “Pinocchio.”

If so, that fits with where she wants to go next--not into outer space with aliens, but a place that some might consider equally strange and remote. “I hope in the next years I’ll be working more in New York and perhaps on the Big White Way, which has been a childhood dream of mine,” admits Landau, suddenly self-conscious that this revelation will cast doubt upon her avant-garde credentials. “I used to be so ashamed to say it, and I now joke constantly about being a Broadway slut. I want to direct Broadway musicals. There, I said it.”

* “Space,” Mark Taper Forum, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 14. $29 to $42. (213) 628-2772.