Coming in from the fringe

LEE BREUER is theater’s horse of a different color.

As a writer, Breuer has created his own “Animal Farm” of talking, philosophizing, monologue-spouting, pun-obsessed, satirically self-undermining critters, focusing a 3 1/2 -decade progression of sometimes interrelated plays on a beaver, a pig, an ant, a cow, a dog and its bunny and, at the beginning of it all, a horse. A red one.

These shows are seldom staged, and when they are, even audiences steeped in the avant-garde have been known to get a bit confused.

“At some point, I just stopped trying to make sense of it all and let the piece wash over me,” Providence (R.I.) Journal critic Channing Gray wrote last year, trying to assess “Summa Dramatica,” a cow’s dissertation intruded upon by Marge Simpson.

Still, several of Breuer’s plays -- produced and performed by Mabou Mines, the loosely confederated but durable, egalitarian collective he co-founded in 1970 -- are considered classics of experimental theater, remembered vividly by the lucky few who’ve seen them.

As a director and adapter, however, Breuer (pronounced “brewer”) has cantered into the mainstream every 10 years or so. “The Gospel at Colonus,” his fusion, with composer Bob Telson, of a black Pentacostal church service and “Oedipus at Colonus,” Sophocles’ contemplative play about the death of Oedipus, has toured 24 cities since 1983. Most critics have embraced it for flashing back to the religious ecstasy believed to have been at the core of the playgoing experience in ancient Greece. “Peter and Wendy” (1996), hailed for its poignant, inventive, puppet-populated take on the “Peter Pan” story, has played on several regional stages, including La Jolla Playhouse and Geffen Playhouse. Now comes “Mabou Mines DollHouse,” opening Nov. 29 for a two-week run at the Freud Playhouse as part of UCLA Live’s International Theatre Festival.

It’s Breuer’s liberties-taking staging of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” in which very small men, no taller than 4 feet, 2 inches, play opposite unusually tall actresses. The women, including Maude Mitchell (Breuer’s romantic partner of seven years) as Nora, literally don’t fit in the production’s patriarchal world, where all the furnishings are kid-size to accommodate the men. Breuer has tried to mine the comedy he finds in Ibsen’s original while fashioning an operatic, wrenching finale, featuring the puppets he loves to deploy for the sake of beauty and strangeness.

“DollHouse” has been harvesting critical bouquets, a frequent, though by no means constant, perk of Breuer’s career. Margo Jefferson of the New York Times hailed its 2003 premiere as “so fascinating -- thrilling here, confounding there -- that it must be seen,” and applauded Breuer as “a wizard-director, an alchemist who blends ideas, genres, styles, texts and technologies to make new kinds of theater.”

“He’s got a wonderful, wonderful theatrical imagination, and takes you on trips you didn’t expect to be taken on. He can move you in ways you never expected to be moved, and the pieces are gloriously beautiful,” says Nigel Redden, the Lincoln Center Festival director who, as a fledgling manager of New York’s seminal experimental clubhouse, La MaMa, and later as general director of the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., has worked several times with Breuer since 1972.

Independent and unpredictable

DESPITE his excellence, Redden says, it’s no surprise that Breuer, who lives in Brooklyn, doesn’t have the profile of fellow experimental directors Robert Wilson and Julie Taymor. “Not that they’re careerists, but they’ve had the ability to adapt to a different context,” Redden says. Breuer did have one shot on Broadway, with “The Gospel at Colonus” in 1988, but the show lasted just two months after being panned by the New York Times’ Frank Rich as “a marriage of glib intellectual convenience” that trivialized Greek tragedy and gospel music alike.

Redden thinks that Breuer’s independent, unpredictable methods and visionary ends aren’t what the commercial theater or most of the major nonprofits are buying or selling, anyway. “If there’s a complicated way to get from A to B, he’ll find it. Life is a bit of a constant adventure for him. If I were a producer for Disney, I might be a bit concerned” by a project with Breuer attached, Redden said, chuckling at the understatement.

“I think I belong just where I am, right in a little pocket, in a little puddle, with a little audience I trust and trusts me,” Breuer says, while holding out hope that ventures such as “DollHouse” -- and further engagements for “Colonus,” which played in June at a festival in Vienna, and “Peter and Wendy,” which is being revived next spring at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. -- may expand his realm by “a grain of sand here and there.”

Perched on a big couch in a stately reception room at UCLA’s Royce Hall, he’s a compact but muscular man, looking and sounding younger than his 70 years. There is no hair on his head, and just a few deeply etched lines on a leathery face that’s perfectly centered by a large, almost sculptural nose.

Raised in North Hollywood, he went to UCLA and plunged into the deep waters of Sartre and Camus, idolizing them not only for their intellectual leaps, but also for their personal aura of star-quality cool. He vibrated to the rhythms of the Beats, hitchhiking from L.A. to San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore to pick up -- shoplift, actually, he confesses with roguish pride -- a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems.”

He speaks with the streetwise informality of a prizefighter’s corner man, but can apply that earthiness to commentaries on conceptual art and the directorial principles of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold and Bertolt Brecht -- ideas he no doubt has expounded while teaching budding directors at the Yale School of Drama and elsewhere. He’s been hailed as one of theater’s true originals, but hides his creativity behind no mystique, acknowledging specific influences and sources like an ace rock guitarist giving props to Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

Talk to Breuer for any length of time -- and if there were a talkers’ Olympics, the U.S. would be well represented with him on the team -- and you find he’s also uncommonly open about certain tribulations that many would rather hide. His architect father died of an aneurysm when he was 16, prompting his mother’s emotional breakdown. Later, Breuer says, he spent most of the $355,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” he won in 1997 settling debts stemming from her care late in life, and paying for the rehab of a drug-addicted former lover. Now his youngest son, Wah, 16, has broken a hand at arts boarding school -- “he had a number with his girlfriend and he put his hand through the wall” -- and the emergency room bill is $4,000 that Breuer says he doesn’t have. “My life with money is such a ... joke.”

As for his life with actors, Breuer believes the most important thing is never to say neigh. Or, rather, nay.

“I’ve never given a negative direction in my life, and I never will, because it’s just bad business. You don’t critique somebody and try to get them to work creatively. If you have anything to say, it should be coming up with a new idea.” Everyone concerned with a production should be free to suggest and try out ideas, Breuer believes. One of his strangest sorties was the Southern-accented, brutally panned “Mabou Mines Lear” (1990), a version of “King Lear” that he set in 1950s rural Georgia, with Shakespeare’s male characters played by women, and vice versa, and six big guard dogs -- real ones -- standing in for the dispossessed monarch’s small train of loyal men.

Actress Ruth Maleczech, who has been along for the entire journey since Breuer’s college days -- she’s an acclaimed actress, Mabou Mines co-founder, and mother of the first two of Breuer’s five children with four women -- vouches that he’s lived up to his directorial ideal of staying positive with actors and never dismissing ideas.

“He’s very good at seeing what the actor already possesses and encouraging it to grow,” she says, adding that a key to Breuer’s approach is his willingness to volunteer emotionally fraught episodes from his own life, calculated to make actors feel safe in rummaging through their own baggage for useful humiliation and pain.

Content with his status

MALECZECH wishes that more people could know Breuer’s writing -- including such pieces as “The Shaggy Dog Animation” (1978), a canine’s erotically charged “Dear John” letter to its master, replete with vivid love poetry, and “Hajj” (1982), an actress’ Beckett-like rumination in front of dressing-table mirrors, a piece hailed for its imaginative use of real-time video.

“Because he’s a very accomplished director, people are more drawn to appreciate that side of things,” Maleczech says. “I think he’s our best dramatic poet, and that’s not often talked about, which I think is unfortunate.”

Breuer says he wants to emphasize his writing in the years ahead, including finishing “La Divina Caricatura,” a three-part work in book form that puts a pig, an ant, a cow and a dog -- what else? -- through Dantean paces. New theatrical collaborations with Telson (a dramatized Bach cantata), Harvey Keitel (they’re exploring Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”) and Breuer’s musician son Chappa (a reggae-inflected staging of crucifixion scenes from the medieval York Mysteries) are on his agenda.

He can live with it if most theater fans can’t place him, and if experimental pieces he’s created live only in distant memory. Far from being daunted by growing older, he’s enjoying the benefits: Breuer says that turning 65 was a big deal because it qualified him for Medicare, the first time he’s had health insurance. Now he can afford checkups and pills for the high blood pressure that did his father in.

“Somebody said, ‘As soon as you start feeling sorry for yourself, remember, you can make a living doing anything you want, any place in the world,’ ” Breuer muses. “It’s still incredibly hand-to-mouth, but still, how many people can work anywhere in the world and do anything they want? On that level, I’m insanely lucky.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com

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‘Mabou Mines DollHouse’

Where: Freud Playhouse, UCLA campus, Westwood

When: Opens Nov. 29. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays,

2 and 7 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Dec. 10

Price: $42-$60

Contact: (310) 825-2101