Writing From the L.A. School

Robert Glaudini is a theater person’s theater person. For more than 30 years, he’s been influential in shaping theater--in San Diego, New York and Los Angeles. He has founded a number of noted small theaters, collaborated with key figures of the experimental scene and worked extensively as an actor, director and writer. Yet he remains largely unknown outside the theater world.

That’s about to change, however. For the first time, a wider audience will be introduced to his stage work when his play “The Poison Tree” premieres at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday, directed by Robert Egan. Set in present-day La Jolla, the drama revolves around a volatile woman, a younger male poet-professor and the woman’s husband, a judge presiding over a high-profile murder trial.

It’s a big moment not just for Glaudini but also for Los Angeles theater artists. For while the Taper has sometimes been criticized for being too dependent on bringing in the latest New York success, this is very much a Southern California play. Not only is it set in La Jolla, but “The Poison Tree” was written by an artist who grew up in and had his artistic identity shaped largely by California. Moreover, the play was commissioned by the Taper, developed in the theater’s Writers’ Workshop and seen in workshop form in its 1998-99 New Work Festival.

If there is such a thing as an L.A. school of playwriting, this may be a good example of it. “What I love about L.A. writers, Bob has,” says Taper producing director Egan, who has been a key force in launching and nurturing the careers of such noted L.A. playwrights as John Steppling, Kelly Stuart and Glaudini. “His plays are poetically or imagistically structured--where you’re on the brink of something terrifying or tragic about someone’s life, and then in the next second, they’re laughing. It’s a celebration of language too. He has this very unusual, precarious balance of tone and a rhythm, which, if you don’t get, you really can’t deliver the play.”

The style is a reflection of the substance, which often has more to do with the chaotic interior states of Glaudini’s characters than with their situation. “A lot of playwrights will talk about the sociopolitical world and use that membrane to then talk about personal politics,” Egan says. “Bob uses the sociopolitical world to talk about an internal politics. He is a kind of political scientist of the unconscious--sexual urges, drives, betrayal, jealousy.

“Bob writes in a very instinctive way,” Egan continues. “He writes from within character, and within what might be described as emotional zones. The story is unfolding in the transactions that are going on between people, as opposed to ‘plot’ events. There’s a heightened level of behavior that is almost surreal. It’s deeper, more about how people behave in their unconscious lives, although they act it out in a naturalistic arena.”

Like most writers, Glaudini, 55, transforms his own experiences into plays, although the works aren’t what you’d normally call autobiographical. “I don’t really invent anything when I write,” says the soft-spoken playwright, seated in the front room of the downtown home he shares with playwright Stuart and their two daughters, Kathleen and Isabella, ages 13 and 10. Glaudini also has a daughter from a previous relationship, 27-year-old Lola Glaudini, who appears in “The Poison Tree.” “It’s stuff that I experience, and it comes from the faulty perception of those experiences. The difference is that it’s been a female voice that has been leading my plays on.

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“I carry around ideas for a long time,” Glaudini says. “An experience or a certain assemblage of stuff begins to loosely find its presence in me, and then the character that is going to be speaking is going to tap into that.”

In the case of “The Poison Tree,” for example, Glaudini called upon memories of people he’d met while running a theater near La Jolla in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “For a long time, I had thoughts about writing something set in San Diego or La Jolla because I had tremendous experiences there,” he says. “It was a very conservative place, but there were also all of these liberal to radical scientists and philosophers, and literary people. So it was a very lively time.

“Part of the heart of the play is knowing this feeling and what people were going through then,” he says. “There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of heartbreak during this period, but there were feelings of political and cultural politics joining together with that. The remarkable thing about the period is that they were informing each other.”

He chose to bring the vestiges of that milieu forward into the present day by way of one individual’s experience. “I started thinking of the heart and soul of someone who had that experience, perhaps, and was still in La Jolla, after people had left and people had died. That was percolating in me for a while, and I didn’t know how to get at it. And then once I started writing, this woman’s voice started appearing. I just followed that voice.”

The result is a morally and emotionally complex female protagonist aptly named Rockie. “The more you work on the character, the more you realize how deep and multilayered the play is,” says Anne Archer, who plays Rockie. (Bob Gunton plays her husband; Christian Camargo plays the poet-professor.) “He’s written a vibrant, interested, energetic woman who thrust herself into the middle of life at an early age. She definitely drives the play.”

Egan first encountered “The Poison Tree” about 2 1/2 years ago, when Glaudini had written only a rough draft of the first act. His early encouragement was crucial in persuading Glaudini to forge ahead with the piece.

“The first thing I responded to reminded me at the time of a Greek play,” Egan says. “I’d recently seen ‘Medea’ again, and I was struck in awe of the ability of Euripides to write about a woman who kills her children--and yet you kind of understand her dilemma. You don’t judge her in the way we, in the moral configurations we have today, might.

“When I saw the first act of Bob’s play, I felt he had tapped into a deep and powerful undercurrent, which was really about adultery, infidelity and jealousy in this marriage. In a world where the two people actually loved each other, the demon package was full. I felt it was about archetypal, primal undercurrents in our lives.”

Glaudini developed the piece in the context of the Taper’s Writer’s Workshop, a group of playwrights that meets on a regular basis and is supported by the theater. Glaudini also received feedback from Egan and other members of the Taper artistic staff.

“As the play developed, I was struck with how Bob had captured something very important and disturbing about the time we live in,” Egan says. “There is a moral vagueness about the world, a confusing and disturbing welter of sameness. We can rationalize all sorts of very bad behavior--very self-centered, narcissistic behavior--through all this verbiage of morals and values and ‘finding ourselves.’ ”

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Born in New Orleans, Glaudini moved with his family to San Diego when he was 5. His father worked in the defense industry, the main source of jobs in Southern California at that time.

His family eventually moved toward the beach areas, where Glaudini attended high school and became involved in the surfer community.

Like many teens, he was often on the lookout for adventure. Unlike most, he found it in an unusual place. “One night we found ourselves in Balboa Park for no particular reason,” he says. “And we started wandering around and went into the Falstaff Tavern [now the Old Globe Theatre’s second stage].

“There were about a 150 or 200 there, and they were all excited and talking about acting and theater,” he says. “I guess they’d decided to start a theater workshop at the Globe, and I just wandered in accidentally and was very impressed that all these people were there of their own volition.”

Among the people he met there was actor Cleavon Little, who encouraged Glaudini to visit an acting workshop. “They were so serious, and they were talking about ‘Waiting for Godot’ when I went there,” Glaudini recalls. He then became part of that group, for about a year or so.

After high school, Glaudini “went back East to New York and hung out, not with a clear idea of anything.”

He returned to San Diego, intending to stay for just a short while before departing for Europe, but ended up getting involved with the start-up theater company that would come to be known as the Actors’ Quarter Theatre. Located in a hotel basement near downtown’s Balboa Park, it would become San Diego’s first avant-garde company, producing works by such writers as Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Max Frisch, Eugene Ionesco and Bertolt Brecht.

While still in his 20s, Glaudini left Actors’ Quarter and started another theater, this time in an area adjacent to La Jolla. Theater Five, his new venture, would focus on the works of living American writers, including Megan Terry, Sam Shepard, Murray Mednick, Jean-Claude van Itallie and Paul Foster.

To this day, the success of Theater Five is remembered in San Diego. Local newspapers and even some L.A. periodicals consistently ran rave reviews of the plays Glaudini produced there, and the theater had a reputation that far outstripped its modest size.

A heady mix of radicals and members of the local intelligentsia congregated there. “I had Eldridge Cleaver and Herbert Marcuse in the theater; I introduced them,” Glaudini recalls. “This was just before Cleaver left the country. In fact, it was the night before.”

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Glaudini returned to New York in the mid-’70s, bringing the Theater Five company with him. They performed at Theater Genesis, located at St. Mark’s Church on the Lower East Side, an important hub of off-off-Broadway activity.

There Glaudini furthered his association with Shepard. He directed several of the writer’s premieres, including an American Place Theater staging of “Cowboy Mouth,” starring Shepard and his co-author, rock poet Patti Smith, that holds a place in New York theater lore.

Glaudini himself began experimenting with playwriting--something he would return to, off and on, over the course of the next two decades. While teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, he created pieces in collaboration with students and the New York artists he would bring up to visit the campus.

After a decade spent going back and forth between New York and California, Glaudini moved to L.A. in 1985, primarily to collaborate, as both actor and writer, with independent filmmaker Jon Jost.

Together with Steppling, arguably one of the most influential playwrights to have come out of L.A. in the last 20 years, Glaudini founded a company called Amoeba Behemoth. In later years, the two would found another troupe, Heliogobalus, which would produce such California writers as Steppling and Stuart, and Europeans Franz Xaver Kroetz and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Glaudini’s association with the Taper and with Egan also began in the mid-’80s. “I met Bob when I met John Steppling,” Egan says. “We did [Steppling’s] ‘The Dream Coast,’ and Bob played the lead. There’s a speech by a guy who’s talking about taking a bus ride from Oklahoma to L.A., and I’ll never forget hearing him do that. He was mesmerizing. He was extraordinary and soulful.”

Glaudini continued acting, directing and producing in the late 1980s. He appeared on the Taper main stage in Egan’s production of “Widows,” signed with an agent and began getting some commercial work in film and TV.

“When I started doing that, I did what other people do: I said, ‘Some of this I know I could write better,’ ” Glaudini says. “So that’s what made me decide to start thinking about writing again. “I knew an actor in a series [“NYPD Blue”], so I wrote a spec script and showed it to the producer, David Milch,” he says. “Eventually I wrote an episode, the finale of one of the years.”

More recently, Glaudini appeared in a three-part story that concluded with the murder of Sharon Lawrence in last year’s final show.

The work paid well, of course, but was less satisfying in other ways. “What you miss is doing the writing and then having the work go all the way,” he says. “And I’d written a couple of spec movies, and they’d gotten nowhere, so I thought I’d write a play.”

Glaudini’s “The Claiming Race” was presented at the Falcon Theatre as part of the Taper’s 1997-98 New Work Festival. The play, which focuses on a young girl, her half-brother and the girl’s manipulative sugar daddy, was recently presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre, as part of the A.S.K. Theater Projects exchange program.

As with “The Poison Tree,” something of Glaudini’s own experience is embodied in that of the female lead. “It actually came out of being promised something that I had put my heart into happening, and then realizing that the promise was just something the person had to make, not necessarily to manipulate me, but because the person felt more alive when the person was promising me something,” Glaudini says. “But what it did was make me totally and stupidly dependent on the dream of that.”

At the Taper’s most recent festival, Glaudini was represented by a reading of a comedy called “The Identical Same Temptation.” The piece involves a triangle of two women and one man, and was staged by Egan.

“I think that came from my observations of people’s sexual relationships, and also, to get stupidly personal, my own,” Glaudini says. “Then, after I’d thought all that through from a male’s point of view, of course, the women just burst into view, larger than life.”

For Egan, the piece is notable for its dark humor and musical qualities. “I loved doing it, because it was, again, about rhythm and tone,” he says. “He has people say the same thing eight times in a row. You need actors that understand that and can trust that the language and the form will completely inform them about the emotional realm of the play.”

“The Poison Tree” was given its first public outing at the New Work Festival, also held at the Falcon, a year ago last fall. Egan staged it and then shepherded the process of trying to bring it to the main stage.

“Bob was behind this, and bodyguarded this, and had been working with me on it, and wanted it to be,” Glaudini says. Taper artistic director Gordon Davidson was out of town during the play’s New Work Festival outing, and so a separate reading was arranged for him.

“Then we went and had a meeting with [Davidson], and he made a couple very hard but inspired notes,” Glaudini says. “He has helped me, and he has helped this production.”

Shortly after that, “The Poison Tree” was given one of the coveted main-stage slots in the following season--then about 14 months away. “Then we could start looking at the play again and deepening it,” he says. “Then it’s just the normal dialectic of two people talking about the same object.”

In some respects, it’s just another opening, another show. But in other ways, there’s more riding on this production. “I love the brutality of the situation in this regard,” Glaudini says. “That’s why you do theater, because of the intensity of the experience. I mean, that’s why I do it. Hopefully, it’ll go over well, and it might mean that more [L.A. writers will be] done. And if it doesn’t, the belt is tightened, right? So I like the fact that there’s a lot at stake.”

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“The Poison Tree,” Mark Taper Forum, Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30. Ends July 16. $29-$42. (213) 628-2772.