He’ll have plenty of stuff to remember

MAKE ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry. Lend a shoulder, crack a whip.

Gordon Davidson is touching all the bases, pulling all the levers, going deep into his playbook -- what you will, metaphorically and cliche-wise -- as he tries to nudge peak performances from 22 actors gathered in the large room with no fixed furnishings that has been his laboratory for 38 years.

It’s the bottom of the ninth for Davidson, his last directing job as artistic leader of the Mark Taper Forum. He says he’s not thinking about anything but doing justice to the play at hand, “Stuff Happens,” and that trying for a closing flourish “would be the worst decision I could make.”

David Hare’s part-imagined, part-documentary play recounts tugs of war in halls of power that led to the dogs of war being unleashed on Iraq.

Davidson, 72, will retire Sept. 1 from the job that has defined, and often consumed, his life (there has been overlap since January, when his successor, Michael Ritchie, came on board as artistic director and began shaping new policies while Davidson saw out the current season under a new title, founding artistic director). Barring a return someday as a guest director, he’s working for the last time in the large off-white room on the ground floor of the Taper Annex at Temple and Grand.

It’s the same space where, 38 years ago, Davidson convened a cast to rehearse the Taper’s first play, “The Devils.”

“Gordon Davidson Rehearsal Room,” the signs over the doorway say -- a new designation ordered last December by the board of the Taper’s parent institution, Center Theatre Group.

“To me, it’s Rehearsal Room A,” Davidson will say later.

He hangs his black pinstriped sport coat over his swivel chair and approaches the actors, who are seated at a long, L-shaped arrangement of tables. First comes a report on a phone message Hare has left on Davidson’s answering machine. “I just want to make sure everything’s OK,” Davidson says, mimicking a plaintive, helplessly worrying tone. “It made me smile,” he tells the cast. “A playwright concerned about his play.”

Davidson’s own voice is slow, reedy yet dark-grained, and weather-worn -- like the soft creaking of tree branches. Soon it is cracking with emotion as he stands reading the answer he e-mailed to Hare. “They are the most joyous, committed group of actors I’ve worked with in a long time,” he reads, then looks up. “That’s true.”

The cast applauds, and somebody affirms, “Well done, Gordon.”

Davidson peers at the paper again, and continues. “Of course, with all that I’m apprehensive....”

The cast laughs when he relates Hare’s e-mailed reply: “Great. Just keep it under three hours.”

The hours of rehearsal that follow bring the director some apprehensive moments and some that back up his assurance to Hare that “when they’re hot, it’s thrilling to watch.”

*

Complex choreography

He supervises what amounts to a game of musical chairs without the music, as the actors, who must double as stagehands, work on menial tasks they’ll need to accomplish on the fly if the play is to fly, in long montages meant to unfold with whirling, scene-shifting, newsreel-like speed. They move black chairs and gray-topped desks around, timed and choreographed so the action can rocket from the U.N. to a private white-linen dinner in a New York hotel suite to the Oval Office.

Early in the sequence a cellphone goes off. It’s Davidson’s, and his assistant, Jess Bard, gets up from her seat next to him and reaches into the pocket of his doffed jacket to silence it.

Displeasure comes into his voice several times as the tricky laying and removal of the tablecloth unfolds. “It was not clean and purposeful. Go back and do it again.”

Tyrees Allen, the intense actor who plays Colin Powell, curses under his breath as he comes up a loser in musical chairs, having failed to segue quickly enough from a standing tirade to the sitting position required for the next rapid-fire scene. Davidson lays a hand on Allen’s shoulder, trying to assuage his frustration.

During occasional lulls, Davidson, who always addresses the players by their characters’ names, conducts some one-on-one coaching. He huddles with Keith Carradine -- who plays George W. Bush -- on how to convey with gestures alone a tense moment when the president’s teleprompter fails during a high-stakes address. Later they confer again, as Davidson advises Carradine to try for a pleased but astonished double-take as waves of applause greet Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln before his “Mission accomplished” speech.

Eventually the furniture choreography falls into place. But with all the attention paid to pushing stuff around, many of the actors now are struggling with their lines, garbling or just forgetting them as they try to roll through the second act.

Davidson rises, steps forward and tries to rally the troops.

“OK. It is crucial ...,” he begins, and finishes the thought with a little war-dance step, with urgent, arm-pumping gestures of encouragement. The scene resumes and quickly falters.

Now, having seated the cast in a semicircle, Davidson confronts each player as he or she speaks the lines. He’s like a conductor giving close, individual inspection during an orchestral rehearsal. “Every bit of urgency, and more,” he exhorts. “You’re all working on the same team. We have told this much of the story. Don’t let it down. One more time. Concentrate. Run it again.”

After a lunch break, Davidson watches as the cast does the entire play without interruption -- and with few botched lines.

“Thank you for pushing through and doing it so well,” he says as they adjourn for the day, having performed the play briskly enough to meet Hare’s three-hour edict with 15 minutes to spare. Then, as they chat among themselves or organize their belongings, Davidson makes the rounds of his room, offering to each actor a few words, together with a hug or a clasp on the shoulder.

“You -- you keep making the same mistake,” he says to one of them, amiably chiding.

Carradine, wearing a New York Fire Department T-shirt and a red presidential tie knotted around his bare neck, approaches to report on the silent reactions he’s tried at Davidson’s suggestion.

“See you in the morning, boss,” he says. “It was terrific. It works.”