More Than Four Actors Need Not Apply

Glorious things can happen in the theater with the right material and four actors. Or three, or two. Or just one.

But it can get a little lonely sometimes.

It’s nice to be around people.

Now and then, you just want to see a few bodies up there--enough, at least, to qualify wholeheartedly as “a clump.”

In case you’ve been flipping through your program, trying to figure out which three performers play which three parts: This is not a heyday of expansive, large-scale theatrical exploration at our mainstream professional nonprofit houses. The same holds for the commercial arena. And since the two have essentially become one, in the name of survival and synergy, the situation appears mired in this country’s stubborn lack of subsidy for the arts.

Thirty or 35 years ago in the American theater, a large-cast play meant work for 30 or 35 actors. Twenty years ago, the meaning of “large” had become smaller, indicating a cast of perhaps 20.

Today, “large” carries different definitions for different people. But “large” has shrunk. It means “10 or 12,” if you’re Mark Taper Forum artistic director Gordon Davidson. It means “eight or 10,” if you’re South Coast Repertory dramaturge Jerry Patch.

To Lawrence Harbison, senior editor for the theatrical publishing company Samuel French Inc., it means . . . “I don’t know. More than four?”

In both the nonprofit and commercial worlds, the incredible shrinking cast size has been a grim fact of theatrical life, a metaphor for a belt-tightened, bottom-line era. The year 2001 in America, a time and place of shaky subsidy, will not be remembered as the Epoch of the Large Canvas, nor the Renewed Era of the Spear-Carrier. Rarely do you see anyone carrying a spear anymore. Rarely do the phrases “crowd scene” or “various supporting roles” crop up, outside a theater history seminar.

Playwrights may by definition be foolish dreamers, but fully half of them aren’t idiots: They can spot a trend. They know which plays of which size get read, and occasionally produced, and which do not.

Every year American Theatre magazine publishes a list of the upcoming season’s 10 most popular titles (excluding Shakespeare and “A Christmas Carol”). The magazine’s 2000-01 season preview ticked off the hottest numbers on the nonprofit resident theater circuit.

No. 1, with at least 30 professional productions and hundreds more to come: Yasmina Reza’s “Art,” a play requiring three performers.

The list also included the musical revue “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” (four performers); “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” (four); Patrick Marber’s “Closer” (four); and “The Weir,” currently at the Geffen Playhouse, employing five actors. Another popular title, Warren Leight’s “Side Man” (due in May at the Pasadena Playhouse), requires seven. It’s practically a pageant by today’s economic standards. By contrast, Leight’s latest work, “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine,” which recently closed its Taper run, is a four-actor piece, more economical (though not as effective) nearly by half.

The character tally is “always a consideration,” says Los Angeles-based playwright David Rambo. His play “God’s Man in Texas” debuted at the Louisville, Ky., Humana Festival and has since been staged at San Diego’s Globe Theatre, among others. Early drafts of the script required seven actors. Eventually, he cut it down to three.

Suddenly his commercial prospects looked a lot better.

“We want to be produced,” Rambo says. “That’s why playwrights are always thinking: How few actors can I tell this story with?”

This may be a crucial practical question. And with playwrights who know what they’re doing, it can be a freeing one. It’s a pleasure to watch good actors inhabit a variety of roles in one play. It’s magic, in the right hands.

Yet the practical question--how small can you go?--isn’t always the most inspiring one.

“We all have to nudge each other out of the tendency to write in monologue,” says playwright Heather Dundas, manager of A.S.K. Theater Projects, “or writing yet another scene of two people talking to each other. We’re too used to doing it. Too many playwrights end up censoring themselves.

“And oddly, if you do write something for a large cast, you’re committing yourself to getting it done in a tiny theater.”

Those hungry for bigger, more populous evenings of theater typically find what they want at a musical, produced commercially or at a not-for-profit. Shakespeare’s an exception to the small-cast phenom; with him, at least, no royalties.

Beyond that, the huge L.A. sea of sub-100-seat theaters affords a pretty fair chance of larger, messier, more ambitious work. That’s the odd part. For a large-cast classic, familiar or not, for a mid-size title, even, the tiny broke companies are the place.

The larger companies would say: Well, yes, the nonunion stages can afford it. And to be clear: At the Taper, four-person plays, such as the recent “Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine” or “Closer,” require nine Equity contracts covering the four actors onstage, the understudies and the stage manager.

Still, too often the big work remains confined to the little outfits. The recent Evidence Room staging of Edward Bond’s 10-character “Saved” afforded audiences a blue-moon opportunity to see a sharp revival of a harsh slice of mid-1960s London. You didn’t feel as though you were at a “big” show, necessarily. Yet Bond’s stark universe came to life, fully inhabited, with a particularly strong performance by Nick Offerman.

Closing today, the stylish Circle X production of Brecht’s rarely revived “Edward II,” at the Actors’ Gang space, imparts a similar sensation: That of vivid theatrical storytelling (14 actors in this case), nicely wrought.

The recently closed new musical “bare,” however naive and unfinished, afforded Hudson Theatre audiences a look at a huge cast and a decent-sized band, crammed into a tiny, energized performing space.

“One of the joys of working at the Globe in San Diego,” says Sheldon Epps, now the artistic director of the Pasadena Playhouse, “was watching [artistic director] Jack O’Brien work with big crowds of people.” (The Globe interpolates some student actors in large-cast works, as part of the Globe’s association with the University of San Diego; in a smaller way, the Geffen Playhouse does the same with UCLA students.)

“I just admired that specific skill of dressing the stage effectively, even a bare stage with a huge company,” Epps recalls. “It’s a great skill. And it’s one that most of us don’t get to practice on a regular basis.” Epps’ current project, a production of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” features a cast of nine--practically a mob by today’s non-Shakespearean, nonmusical norm.

“I look back in wonderment at some of the seasons we did early on,” says Taper artistic director Davidson, on a break from the new play he’s directing, “QED.” “Two, three, four big plays, beginning with the very first one, ‘The Devils’ [which opened the Taper, controversially, in 1967].

“I honestly believe,” he says, “that the Taper can work with Charlayne Woodard standing up there by herself, as she will later on this year with ‘In Real Life.’ ‘QED’ we hope will function well on the Taper stage.

“But if you only get a steady dose of what you could call ‘the interpersonal play,’ you don’t get the larger canvas. The art form can and should sustain both.”

The cast shrinkage problem, says Odyssey Theatre Ensemble founder Ron Sossi, rates as “one of the two or three biggest curses of the American theater, the thing that separates us from the best of subsidized European theater.”

Sossi’s at work on a mid-size version of Goethe’s “Faust.” While he’s doing what he’s doing on the Westside, director Peter Stein’s massive, multimillion-dollar staging--all 20-plus hours of the epic Goethe spent most of his life writing--has proven the toast of Berlin and, more recently, a hot ticket in Vienna.

The mere mention of a 21-hour, 35-actor “Faust” would serve as a punch line in the season planning meetings of just about every U.S. regional theater. More than ever, everyone’s on the hunt for the new “Dinner With Friends” (four characters) or “Copenhagen” (three). Or “Fully Committed” (one).

But when one’s company and two’s a crowd scene, we can truly say it may be time for our artistic directors and managers to consider reallocating what resources they have--in the direction of the actors.

During its last main-stage season (1999-2000), the Taper--the big dog in town--spent about 12% of its $8.1-million main-stage production budget, about $972,000, on actor-related expenses. That’s a typical percentage.

It’s also not much to crow about, according to--no surprise here--Alan Eisenberg, executive director of Actors’ Equity, the performers’ union.

“Given the magnitude of the Taper’s budget,” says Eisenberg, “they don’t spend a lot on actors.”

Countering the current trend, the Taper’s Davidson says that for next season, “we’re talking about opening with something that’ll strain our resources--it needs at least 20 people. I’m not sure if we can pull it off. We’ll know in a few weeks.”

And with that undisclosed possibility dangling, Davidson rings off to return to his task at hand: Making the most and best of the next Taper offering, Peter Parnell’s “QED,” about the late, great Caltech physicist Richard Feynman--a two-character piece, very much a symbol of our times.