A LACK OF DIRECTION

There are few cities in the world that have such an enviable population of working actors as Los Angeles. From the hills and valleys to the beaches and beyond, the region is positively teeming with them. And they’re not just congregating at the Ivy or the bar at the Chateau Marmont, or my high-octane West Hollywood health club, where I often feel surrounded by their killer abs. These professional players are part of a staggeringly widespread theater scene, and their presence on our stages is one of the defining contours of the cultural landscape here.

Not surprisingly, a good portion of what’s presented at the smaller venues is actor-driven. The sub-100-seat houses, granted a special dispensation by Actors’ Equity to accommodate the desire of many of its members to work regardless of wage scale, provide an endless stream of opportunities. Yet something seems missing. Time and again, I leave one of these magical mouse holes marveling at the quality and commitment of the actors on display but desperately wishing they were in more adept directorial hands.

The lingering doubts about whether L.A. is a “theater town” tends to make me a bit snappish. Of course it is: How many other cities in the world boast such extensive offerings? But whether it’s a theater town that’s particularly hospitable to directors is an open question. And its answer may just determine whether this is a leading theatrical capital or an accidental oasis where, amid some serious work, an army of actors more interested in film and TV keep themselves fresh.

Most recently, it was a production of John Patrick Shanley’s “Danny & the Deep Blue Sea” at the Elephant Stageworks that had me admiring the performances while shrugging my shoulders about the otherwise shaky direction. These sorts of mixed feelings usually take hold whenever I visit one of the local companies operating under the mistaken principle that a show is equal to the sum of its acting parts.

To its considerable credit, this production of “Danny” was deeply inhabited on a moment-to-moment basis by its actors, Deborah Dir and Daniel De Weldon. Subtitled “An Apache Dance,” the play is a disorienting tango of intimacy involving the pickup of a roughneck single guy by a nutty divorcee in a Bronx bar. Nothing more than gritty authenticity would seem to be required.

Yet Shanley’s two-hander, which explores the inevitable blurring of romantic fairy tale with unromantic personal history, is as much about storytelling as it is about falling in love. And this loftier dimension of the drama -- the freewheeling way in which truth and fantasy amorously collide -- was given short shrift by the director. If earthbound realism was all you cared about, you came to the right place. But that approach made Shanley’s narrowly focused play appear even narrower.

Sometimes it’s the more memorable aspects of a production that sharpen your regret over the lack of directorial finesse. At the end of “The Women of Lockerbie” at the Actors’ Gang last spring, I sat for a while in my car, unable to drive out of the parking lot. The soul-mauling shrieks of Kate Mulligan, who played a distraught New Jersey housewife whose son was killed in the 1988 Pan Am flight brought down by terrorists, and the persevering compassion of the Scottish women who were witnesses to the shocking tragedy, left me emotionally wrecked.

After I was able to consider the production with a cooler head, however, I remembered my frustration at the scattershot staging. The playing area was ill-defined, the actors never threaded into an ensemble, and there was little effort to find a compelling imagistic life for the piece. The pathos of Deborah Brevoort’s powerful though problematic play managed to come through -- it’s a devastating subject -- but the jerry-built production seemed cobbled together by a committee rather than guided by an assured, integrating sensibility.

Weak directing, however, doesn’t customarily result in a net-positive. The turbulently affecting journeys of “Danny & the Deep Blue Sea” and “The Women of Lockerbie” are anomalous. Generally speaking, it takes more than a few robust performances to save a show. The rightness of Eddie Jones’ ordinary-as-cold-cuts Willy Loman wasn’t enough to rescue the sluggishly paced revival of “Death of a Salesman” at the Odyssey Theatre last fall. Nor was Robert Mandan’s truly magisterial Lear able to eclipse all that was wrong with the disjointed, acting-class version of Shakespeare’s oversized masterpiece at the Electric Lodge last summer.

When the play is fiendishly over-the-top, the damage can be even more blatant. (Surface realism can mask a multitude of sins.) Last spring, the Actors Co-op’s revival of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” a blithely anachronistic tragicomedy, never found its footing. The cast looked like it wanted to have fun but rarely felt secure enough to let go in a production that lacked the courage of its playful convictions.

Similarly, Circus Theatrical’s handling this spring of “The Adding Machine,” Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic drama about a bookkeeper chewed up and spit out by thankless industrialized capitalism, balked at going too far in the direction of a contemporary update -- with the result that actors seemed stranded in a limbo of half-measures.

The director’s creed

What do we who care about the theater want from directors anyway? What can they do for us?

Well, in addition to coaxing the best out of an ensemble, they’re also in a position to shape how those individual performances will fit into the work as a whole. Acting may provide the indispensable paint of a work of art, but it needs an artist with an external perspective to vary how it falls on the canvas.

What directors bring to the table -- interpretive shading, pacing, three-dimensional color -- makes possible the transformation of dialogue on the page into theatrical language. In the process, the link between a play and the wider contemporary world is elucidated. This doesn’t necessarily mean setting Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” in Pasadena or having solo artists crawl into audience members’ laps. But it does involve communicating a sense of the urgency behind producing a work at a given time. Too often this aspect is neglected.

In short, though the actor may be on the front lines in a theatrical battle plan laid out by the playwright, it’s the execution of the director that spells the difference between victory and defeat. It’s a huge responsibility, and with responsibility comes power, which tends to provoke ambivalence, particularly in playwrights who believe their stage directions should have the final word, and actors, who think that the less they’re meddled with the better their performance will be.

The profession of stage director as we have come to know it dates only to the late-19th century. Before that, actor-managers would arrange everything conveniently around their star turns, and before them, playwrights could be relied on to stage their works. It was in the 20th century that the director’s art came to full fruition. In the wake of Stanislavsky and his new science of acting, the director evolved from being a mediator between playwrights and performers to being a crucial architect of the theatrical invent.

With the rise of the director’s theater, which exploded after the breakthroughs of Artaud and Brecht, the new interpretive artistry became for certain auteurs not a means to an end but an end in itself -- a development that only exacerbated the rising tension over whose show it was anyway. Were directors now assuming authorship? Many playwrights bitterly complained that they were being rewritten, while actors often bristled at the way they were being trampled by despots who were more concerned with creating dazzling stage images than with nurturing human truth.

In America, the director’s theater has been in decline since its heyday in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s with Andrei Serban, JoAnne Akalaitis and Peter Sellars, to name just a few. Stage directors of every stripe have been implicitly on parole ever since, though of course everyone in the theater community just adores them and would love to join them on their next project, kiss, kiss. Send a script and maybe they can rearrange that voice-over.

This back story may partly account for the attitudes and animosities that continue to charge the rehearsal hall. It may also help us better understand the bias of a largely actor-dominated theatrical landscape. Is there any city in the world that has more artistic directors that are actors? And is there any major theatrical capital that treats the art of directing as such an afterthought?

My thinking on the subject is fairly straightforward: Playwrights and actors constitute the building blocks of theater, but directors guide the art form into the future. Without their innovative influence, the stage tends to revert to its trunk of shopworn tricks. What’s more, as the team commanders of synergy, they provide a basic check on the delusion that any one contribution is greater than the collaborative whole. I really don’t want to sit through another unresonant directorial shuffling of Shakespeare (a “Macbeth” with UFOs, a Hamlet as a ganja-smoking Jamaican dude, both of which I’ve suffered though), but I have even less interest in seeing an uncaptained ship of actors perform O’Neill, Shaw or one of the other canonical playwrights “straight.”

Showing how it’s done

So where do we go from here? Look to the next generation that’s right in our midst. I may have grown slightly drowsy by the end of Bart DeLorenzo’s stylized reworking of “The Cherry Orchard” at the Evidence Room last spring, but I left with no doubt about his ability to steer a group of idiosyncratic talents in startling new directions. Better still, he has a gift for cultivating what our theater needs more of than anything -- a live connection to a hip community that wants to be engaged.

Another director to closely track is Jessica Kubzansky, whose gripping staging of “Bleed Rail” at the Theatre at Boston Court this spring impressed me with its savage theatricality and flexible control. Mickey Birnbaum’s ferociously interesting play spun into more than its share of tailspins, but the production was largely successful in keeping things within comprehensible bounds. Suffice it to say that the playwright’s harrowing voice found a perfect match in the director’s unflinching capacity to listen and lead.

Clearly the problem isn’t a shortage of blazing young directing talent, but the proper appreciation of the director’s vital role. Abigail Deser, who extracted maximum quirky delight out of Adam Bock’s capricious “Thursday,” in the Echo Theater Company production last winter, strikes me as someone worth investing in every bit as much as the current flavor of the month in playwriting. And the Black Dahlia’s Matt Shakman, lately in evidence with Stephen Adly Guirgis’ “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot,” seems to have the potential to turn his company into a national force, especially if he were to find the resources to focus on new projects with local writers.

When it comes to conjuring visual splendor, Blank Theatre’s Daniel Henning and City Garage’s Frederíque Michel are in a class of their own. And who can forget the way Simon Abkarian galvanized the Actors’ Gang last summer with his painterly production of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labor’s Lost.” His jaunty staging not only demonstrated that an actor can also be a first-rate director but also that an ensemble can be inspired to new heights by fresh ways of seeing.

One of the remarkable things about the 99-seat-or-less movable feast is the diversity and abundance of the programming. But quantity is no substitute for quality. And for quality control there is no more key player than the director -- every magical mouse hole in town should open themselves up to being challenged by the best and the brightest among them.

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com