L.A. Theater Scene’s ‘Moses’ Will Bow Out

Gordon Davidson, a shrewd showman from Brooklyn who grabbed the reins of Southern California’s theater community amid the tumult of the late 1960s, then stayed to guide the Mark Taper Forum to national prominence and take over the Ahmanson Theatre, will step down from his top job at the Center Theatre Group in 2 1/2 years.

That move, to be announced today, signals the close of an era of profound change in American theater. While Davidson, 69, was building his organization into a cultural force and voice for diversity in Los Angeles, he was also marching at the forefront of a regional theater movement that broke New York’s virtual monopoly on serious theater in America.

If the transition goes according to plan, his successor will inherit an enterprise with 65,000 subscribers; an annual budget of more than $40 million; a new third stage to complement the Taper and Ahmanson; and a legacy of inclusive programming that has given voice to Latinos with 1978’s “Zoot Suit,” the deaf with 1979’s “Children of a Lesser God,” gays with 1992’s “Angels in America,” and Asian Americans with last year’s reworking of “Flower Drum Song.”

Davidson, who sidestepped the word “retirement,” called the decision “a moment in which we acknowledge a change is going to happen.” He stressed that “I’ve still got 2 1/2 years to run this theater. Then we can stop and evaluate what’s good and what’s bad.”

Davidson and Richard Kagan, president of the CTG board, said they hammered out details at a private meeting May 26. A transition committee will be formed within the next month, Kagan said, and an executive-search firm will be hired shortly thereafter. Current staffers, including Taper Producing Director Robert Egan and Associate Artistic Director Corey Madden, will be among those considered in an international search, Kagan said.

For the theater community, Davidson’s disclosure means that for the first time in 35 years, theatrical life in Los Angeles may not be dominated by the silver-haired impresario whom Time magazine once labeled “the reigning godfather of the American regional theater movement.” That prospect cheers some critics, who suggest that as his reign lengthened, Davidson didn’t cultivate enough creativity in his own backyard and worried too much about exporting shows to Broadway.

“He was the Moses of theater in Los Angeles. Now, is he still the Moses? No. Now we have a lot of active theaters, and each theater has its own voice. Now there are a lot of people here,” said Gil Cates, a friend and producing director at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

Citing Davidson’s sense of history and respect for the spoken word, Cates said Davidson “made a national presence not only for himself, but for Los Angeles theater. That’s the best part of it. The question now is: Where do we go from here?”

Davidson has served as artistic director at the 745-seat Mark Taper Forum since it opened in 1967, and since 1989 has also handled duties as artistic director-producer at the 2,100-seat Ahmanson Theatre. He has staged premieres of work from many of the country’s most celebrated playwrights, including Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, George C. Wolfe and Jon Robin Baitz, and sent more than 35 productions to Broadway.

Along the way, Davidson became one of the highest-paid arts administrators in the U.S.--drawing $337,000 yearly, according to the CTG’s 2000 tax filings.

Collectively, Davidson’s productions have earned 18 Tony Awards and three Pulitzers, including back-to-back Pulitzers in 1992 and 1993 for Robert Schenkkan’s “The Kentucky Cycle” and the first installment of Kushner’s “Angels in America.” The Pulitzers were the first awarded to plays produced outside New York.

But Davidson’s greatest achievement, former associate artistic director Oskar Eustis suggested, may be simply that “he has managed to make serious theater in the eye of the celebrity hurricane.”

Eustis, who worked as associate artistic director for Davidson from 1989 to 1994 before becoming artistic director of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., said, “What Gordon has done consistently is stand for the idea that a serious American theater has to be a theater of inclusion, and that we have to bring everybody into the tent.”

Eustis added: “He’s gone out of fashion, and I hope very much that it’s an ethos that’s coming back into fashion.”

Although the Taper and Ahmanson theaters both belong to the Center Theatre Group and are neighbors in downtown’s Music Center, they follow different missions.

The Ahmanson has served most often as presenter of road productions born elsewhere. The Taper has built a reputation for nurturing new works and sending promising shows to Broadway.

Under an agreement with the CTG board of directors, Davidson will retain his dual titles through Dec. 31, 2004, then serve as consultant for three years. That timing, Davidson said, will allow him to see through the $11-million effort to renovate and open the new 325-seat Kirk Douglas Theater in a converted 1947 Culver City movie house.

Davidson’s successor--or successors, if the Taper and Ahmanson jobs are again divided--will be expected to take over programming beginning with the 2005-06 season.

“Five or six years ago, I began to think maybe I should begin to figure out when is the appropriate time to let go,” Davidson said. His 70th birthday on May 7, 2003, seemed a logical answer. But as the prospects improved for adding another venue to the company’s operation, he and board members resolved instead that he would stay on another 18 months to reach that opening date.

Davidson, born in Brooklyn to a theater professor father and pianist mother, took his first theater job in the 1950s as an apprentice stage manager at the American Shakespeare Festival in New York, where he met director John Houseman.

Davidson had just moved from stage managing to directing in 1964 when he was recruited by Houseman to join the artistic leadership of the 6-year-old Theatre Group at UCLA.

Three years later, the Music Center’s most powerful booster, Dorothy Chandler, wife of former Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, invited the group to take up residence at the Taper and tapped Davidson to serve as artistic director.

“There was no plan. I had to make it up, and sell it, and do it,” Davidson recalled, sitting in his corner office at the Taper Annex amid memorabilia from productions spanning four decades.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, many institutions that made up America’s first wave of resident theaters emphasized classical repertory, with ongoing companies of actors.

But Davidson found himself running a theater in a city where lucrative jobs in movies and TV prevent many actors from making the long-term stage commitments required of classical repertory. So the Taper began focusing on plays that were new, or at least new to the area.

The first Taper season in 1967 started with “The Devils” by John Whiting. The city’s archbishop denounced the production, which concerned the tale of a libertine priest, a nun and their sexual fantasies. The season was made up of two world premieres and two West Coast premieres.

Succeeding seasons sprinkled in more classics, but the company’s reputation stemmed from new plays that often bristled with social or political commentary.

Even as the institution won audiences, prizes and national attention, however, Davidson’s critics complained that he was continually glancing to the East Coast in his programming decisions, or overlooking Southern California talent, or choosing works more politically correct than politically challenging.

“The Gordon Davidsons of this world are making the American theater very uninteresting to someone like me,” said Justin Tanner, who spent most of the 1990s as an L.A. playwright and now writes for television but never was produced at the Taper. “It’s all polished and it looks gorgeous, but all the art has been drained out of it. It’s so safe. To me, theater was supposed to be where you could say what you couldn’t say on television or film.”

Davidson said it’s up to others to judge his work, but for him the joy in this job has been that “you come together, actors and audience, and you tell a story to each other. It’s the campfire. It’s meant to be experienced at that moment, for that moment.”