Beyond Song and Dance

For his Summer Splash Critic’s Picks, Times Theater Critic Michael Phillips chose to concentrate on musicals (Splash Pullout, Page S3), but plenty of theatrical productions will take place this summer in which the characters are not required to burst into song or dance.

Here are a few that may pique the most interest.

Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Other than the man usually known as Shakespeare, a wide range of possible candidates has been proposed over the centuries. Amy Freed’s “The Beard of Avon,” at South Coast Repertory, June 1-July 1, began “as a send-up of the improbable hagiographies that have been created from the few facts documenting Shakespeare’s life,” or so Freed wrote in American Theatre magazine. But then she got caught up in the search for Shakespeare’s real identity, and finally--well, she won’t say how her play ends, but she wrote that it’s “my attempt to bring up some real questions.”

Speaking of South Coast, “California Scenarios” sounds intriguing: five short plays about the Latino experience in California that will be presented in Isamu Noguchi’s sculpture garden near the Costa Mesa theater, June 22-July 1, as part of South Coast’s Pacific Playwrights Festival. The project may revive fond memories of the late Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, which for years was Site-Specific Central for Southland theater.

Randolph Bourne was an early 20th century writer, opponent of American involvement in World War I--and a man with birth defects that disabled him physically. The Mark Taper Forum examines his brief life in John Belluso’s “The Body of Bourne,” June 7-July 1.

At roughly the same time, June 7-July 8, Uta Hagen and David Hyde Pierce go through “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” in Richard Alfieri’s play at the Geffen Playhouse. Actually, this sounds like a play in which the characters will have to burst into dance.

After an airplane crash, investigators want to find the “black box” and hear what those often-final words might reveal about what happened. “Black box” is also a theatrical term, meaning a small, flexibly configured venue where the premium is on intimacy. Both meanings merge in “Charlie Victor Romeo,” June 27-July 15, in which the script is taken entirely from the black box transcripts of six major airplane crashes, and for which UCLA’s 180-seat Macgowan Little Theater will be configured to suggest an airliner cockpit. Created by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory of Collective: Unconscious, the production won awards in New York last year, especially for its sound design. The title? It’s code for Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR).

It May Take a Village or Just One Person

Some of the most solidly satisfying low-key experiences in recent L.A. theater have come from the pen of Pennsylvania playwright Ed Simpson. His “The Battle of Shallowford,” about a small town’s reaction to the 1938 broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” plays July 9-Aug. 8 at Theatre 40, which returns to Beverly Hills after a period of uncertainty about its status.

The Mark Taper Forum offers two soloists this summer. First, Charlayne Woodard continues her heretofore compelling autobiographical saga (“Pretty Fire,” “Neat”) with a chapter from her young adulthood, “In Real Life,” July 29-Sept. 16.

Then Marc Wolf’s “Another American: Asking and Telling” joins Woodard’s show in repertory, Aug. 12-Sept. 15. It examines the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about homosexuals in the military, using the Anna Deavere Smith techniques of characterizations based on interviews.

A potential companion piece for “Another American” opens at about the same time, but farther south, at La Jolla Playhouse. “The Laramie Project,” Aug. 5-Sept. 2, also uses Smith’s techniques, but with a larger cast, to discuss the murder of Matthew Shepard and the reaction of the people of the Wyoming town where he died. It was assembled by Moises Kaufman, whose “Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,” played the Taper in 1998.

Older plays will be represented, too, including such relatively obscure items as Balzac’s “Mercadet, the Napoleon of Finance” (Antaeus Company at Ivy Substation, June 2-July 1) and Friedrich Schiller’s “Don Carlos” (Evidence Room, June 8-July 8).

Too bad this taste for the unusual hasn’t seeped into the seasonal Shakespeare offerings. Rival “Hamlets” open June 29, and you also can find “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Comedy of Errors,” “Twelfth Night,” “As You Like It” and, of course, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”--the usual summer suspects. But we can always hope that each of these productions will tell us something about the play that had never occurred to us. Directors, start your engines.