Civic agenda

Behold the theater of municipal infrastructure -- audacious, thriving, and sure to raise the spirits of anyone whose pulse is quickened by the words public works.

On a stage in lower Manhattan, a gang of young dramatists shines a spotlight on a visionary bureaucrat named Moses as he seizes power, builds an empire of bridges, tunnels, parks and expressways, then falls to ruin amid knowing jokes about urban planning.

In New Haven, a Pulitzer-winning playwright sculpts an inner-city drama whose narrative hangs on the subtleties of redevelopment and demolition.

And in Los Angeles, the performer-provocateurs of Culture Clash huddle to plot their next locally originated show. The last one was an investigative story about public housing and the Dodgers. The new one follows cops, gangs, power and faulty public utilities.

“There will have to be a song called ‘Zoning,’ ” says writer Richard Montoya, who may or may not be kidding.

Nobody in or around these shows can recall the last time so many such productions showed up so close together. Though no actor has jumped up and hollered “deferred capital maintenance!” in a crowded theater, comparably strange things have happened.

The Moses show, for instance, features caged live rabbits, occasionally fornicating, to illustrate a point about high-density housing.

“At last, people are recognizing the very real dramas that go on in our lives,” says Kathryn Welch Howe, an architectural historian and head of the Getty Conservation Institute’s Los Angeles Historic Resource Survey Project.

Welch Howe -- whose life teems with urban issues, not rabbits -- counts herself among many architects, engineers and planners who see this as an overdue moment.

“Places and spaces,” she says, “are important to people.”

Life isn’t imitating art

Yet in the real world of civics that lies beyond theater doors, the picture isn’t so encouraging. Less than 18 months ago in New York, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on that city’s voters to step up and abolish the city’s partisan primary system, a meager 12% turned out. (And most disagreed with the mayor.) In March, a mere 28.5% of Los Angeles voters bothered to vote after a hard-fought, accusation-filled mayoral primary campaign whose rhetoric teemed with potholes, transportation plans and inclusive zoning. Turnout for Tuesday’s runoff between incumbent James Hahn and challenger Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa may be better, but probably not much.

In other words, with the right civic script and stagecraft, it’s apparently easier these days to fill a small theater with paying customers than to fill a large polling place with engaged citizens.

The Manhattan Moses show -- formally, “Boozy: the Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier and, More Importantly, Robert Moses,” presented by Les Freres Corbusier -- opened in SoHo in February, sold out its two-month run in a 99-seat space and moved to a 300-seat Greenwich Village venue May 1. The redevelopment drama in New Haven -- August Wilson’s “Radio Golf” -- will advance from the Yale Repertory Theatre to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in late July. The new Culture Clash show is set to open at the Taper in 2006.

Meanwhile, the tiny Theatre of Note, also in Los Angeles, has built its popular annual holiday production around a dam-building, water-stealing Scrooge who goes by the name William Mulholland.

Local politics have certainly infiltrated the theater before, in works from Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (an 1882 drama about a doctor who is shunned for speaking up about threats posed by pollution in his town’s celebrated waters) to “Fiorello!” (the 1959 musical about New York’s mayor from 1934 to ‘45).

But this isn’t just a spate of shows about local politics. Each of these plots depends somehow on large volumes of concrete, steel, earth or water, and the operation of heavy machinery. If they have any close relatives among shows on Broadway in recent years, it might be “Urinetown,” which stands unchallenged as the American theater’s first restroom management musical.

In the current flurry, the biggest name by far is Wilson, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.

His underlying aim in “Radio Golf” -- as in nine previous plays, each dedicated to a different decade -- is to trace the African American experience through the 20th century. But Wilson looks at that experience through the prism of a Pittsburgh ghetto, and some of the key plot points in “Radio Golf” sound like items on a planning commission docket: Will the federal government declare the Hill District “blighted,” thereby unleashing federal redevelopment money? Can the money be diverted to buy a radio station before tax laws favoring minority owners are repealed?

All this fast talk makes clear that the affluent African American deal-makers in this show have come a long way from rural poverty, but it’s also made several critics nervous. Ben Brantley of the New York Times called “Radio Golf” the first Wilson play “that might appeal to someone whose sole reading matter is Barron’s or the Wall Street Journal.” Brantley and at least two other critics wrote that they were hoping Wilson would trim liberally.

Montoya and his Culture Clash compatriots faced a similar staging challenge when they brought “Chavez Ravine” to the Mark Taper Forum with director Lisa Peterson in 2003. That show, a fast-moving story drawn from a deep gleaning of city archives, begins in the 1980s with Fernando Valenzuela on the mound in Dodger Stadium and a fond discussion of the L.A. Latino community’s affinity for baseball.

But then it flashes back, and audiences find themselves learning how city leaders misbehaved 50 years ago in the course of leveling a Mexican American neighborhood on the land where that stadium later rose.

Not only did the usual theater crowd turn up for it, so did a fair number of local pols, some of whom hung around afterward.

“Many nights we’d end up at the bar with these guys,” says Montoya, “picking their brains, about the life that they lead and the power that they wield and the redefining of the city itself, from potholes to freeway-building.”

And so their new show was born.

Moses sets down the law

While Wilson and Culture Clash wrestle with real and imagined current events, the Moses gang and the Mulholland guys -- both smallish, youngish companies with a taste for absurdity -- have pointed their popguns at municipal history.

More specifically, they’ve seized upon a pair of civic giants who loom like bookends over either coast: Moses, the unelected bureaucrat who largely ruled Manhattan’s bridges, tunnels and public spaces from the 1920s to the 1960s, and Mulholland, the Irish-born engineer who irrigated Southern California’s aspirations in the early 20th century.

In the Moses show, the action begins with director Alex Timbers -- 26 and four years out of Yale -- addressing the audience.

“I used to be like a lot of you people,” he says. “I had doubts as well about ‘the state of urban planning.’ I had concerns about, like, how public works are conceived and executed, about single-use-zoning, how much space a man needs to live.”

Then, for the next 100 minutes or so, the stage fills with dancing Freemasons, the rabbits and supporting characters, including Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and architect Daniel Libeskind.

These and other antics have prompted sniffing by many critics -- “pretentiously esoteric,” pronounced Gabriel Mitchell-Marell in Variety -- but the architects and designers seem to like it. The show’s opening run sold out. Some nights, Timbers says, the producers had to turn away dozens at the door.

The idea for the show dawned about four years ago. Long intrigued by the Swiss architect and theorist Le Corbusier, Timbers and his collaborators wanted to write about “someone being able to tell everyone else how to live.”

Then came 9/11, and soon New York was preoccupied with the planning and reconstruction of lower Manhattan. As political jousting and design by committee threatened to overwhelm every interesting idea, Timbers says, he thought of the days 50 years ago when Manhattan was in the opposite situation. When, for better and for worse, Moses was the man.

The more he and collaborators Juliet Chia and David Evans Morris talked about Moses, says Timbers, the more “we were shocked that this guy -- this arguably diabolical character, racist, classist, villain -- was not more well known.”

So they did the logical thing -- or at least, the logical thing for a theater company whose last project was an unauthorized children’s Scientology Christmas pageant. They huddled for a year, then emerged with a provocative revisionist farce featuring a heroic, misunderstood Moses and a femme fatale Jane Jacobs, who until now has been fondly remembered as the critic-activist who finally stood up to Moses and brought him down. The climax comes in a 15-minute fantasy trial scene.

“For the theater people in the audience, that’s actually the least interesting part of it, because it’s people talking about esoteric subjects,” says Timbers. “For the planning community, though, that’s always their favorite section, because it’s the meat and potatoes.”

‘It’s one fine dam’

Back in Los Angeles, meanwhile, Bill Robens and Kiff Scholl are in their fourth year of communion with the ghost of William Mulholland. Robens and Scholl are the writer and director, respectively, behind “A Mulholland Christmas Carol,” which in November will begin another holiday run at Theatre of Note.

In that show, holiday sentiment mingles with civic corruption and catchy tunes are wedged between portrayals of greedy L.A. movers and shakers, the suddenly dry Owens Valley and the completion of the St. Francis Dam. At one point, the cast members raise their voices in tribute:

“It’s splendid, it’s grand, it’s leaking, it’s one fine dam.”

Then the 600-foot-wide dam bursts and hundreds die -- a spectacle the troupe fearlessly portrays in a 49-seat theater. (Lots of light effects and loud noises, and a dam made of plywood on hinges.)

In history, the dam disaster happened in Ventura County in 1928. In the Mulholland “Christmas Carol,” it’s Scrooge-Mulholland’s cautionary vision of Christmas future. From this nightmare, Mulholland wakes and changes his ways. He refills Owens Lake. Now Los Angeles, says Robens, “will become what it always should have been, a small Mediterranean hamlet, while the Owens Valley soon becomes the Athens of the Southwest.”

The show ends in song and celebration. And then the audience members spill out of the theater to resume their lives amid the cautionary water-management tale that is real life in Southern California.

Not every city has a Moses or a Mulholland to sing about. But once you encounter a play like these, you start looking for stories behind structures, says Julie Burros, director of cultural planning for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and a city planner by training.

In fact, Burros has been daydreaming lately about Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, the pioneers whose landmark plan for Chicago was unveiled 96 years ago.

“Burnham was this huge figure, the father of American city planning,” says Burros. “It would be this fat, juicy role ...”

She’s unlikely to get any help from Timbers or Robens, however. Timbers is already musing about Buckminster Fuller, the man behind the geodesic dome, and Robens says he’s been thinking about the golden age of zeppelins in the early 20th century and how great it would be to explode a blimp nightly. There may be small stages in the theater of infrastructure, but there are no small ideas.

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Contact Christopher Reynolds at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.