New Plays, Now Ideas--and No Waiting

‘The theater exploded,” declared Edward Parone.

Parone, a New York director who had been brought west to launch the Mark Taper Forum’s New Theatre for Now program in 1967, was recalling “The Scene,” the evening that climaxed the program’s first season. Nine short plays by cutting-edge writers (among them Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard and Jules Feiffer) occupied the first half of the evening, followed by a somewhat longer new play, John Guare’s “Muzeeka.”

“The theater was brand-new, the plays were new, L.A. was on the upswing,” Parone said. “It happens only once in a lifetime.”

Nonetheless, the Taper is trying to bring back some of that same excitement by reviving New Theatre for Now--dormant for the past 11 years--in this, the Taper’s 30th anniversary season.

Four new plays are slated in three separate programs over the next two months, opening Wednesday with a double bill of Kelly Stuart’s “Demonology” and Quincy Long’s “The Joy of Going Somewhere Definite.” Jose Rivera’s “The Street of the Sun” opens May 27, followed by Winsome Pinnock’s “Mules” on June 17.

The productions are not full-fledged, and all four plays together cost the Taper about as much as one regular production, said artistic director Gordon Davidson. David Schweizer, who’s directing this week’s double bill, said he got three weeks of rehearsal time before tech rehearsals, as opposed to the five weeks he had for his 1994 regular-season production of “The Waiting Room.” The design of the plays is kept simple.

New Theatre for Now arose in 1967 as a way to circumvent the usual method of introducing a play--which was to get a Broadway producer to option it. “Agents would say that new plays had to be done on Broadway first,” which could mean long delays while the right theater or star was sought, Davidson said. “Then, maybe after the official tour, other theaters could have them.”

Davidson said he wanted “to figure out a way to cut down on the time before a new play is actually seen. Most of the other nonprofits and off-Broadway producers were doing classics or other standard fare. But we were committed to new plays, to letting playwrights see their work in front of an audience. The irony is that now there isn’t an agent alive who wouldn’t welcome a chance for a play to be done elsewhere [before or besides New York], because New York is so precarious.”

New Theatre for Now was started with a $14,550 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, intended for a bare-bones production of one new play. But Davidson extended the money to cover four Monday evening performances--each one different--that wound up including a total of 14 new plays (counting among them the nine brief works in the first half of “The Scene”).

Parone, now retired in New Mexico, claimed that “no one ever liked” the moniker New Theatre for Now. He called it “ghastly” and “redundant.” Davidson begged to differ, calling the name “a very apt description of what we were doing.” “New” meant “new forms as well as new plays.” And “now” conveyed “immediacy [of production], as opposed to the more traditional ways plays came into being.”

After the first experiment, the Rockefeller Foundation made a second grant of $200,000, covering 1968-70, which was supplemented by funds raised by the Taper board. Davidson recalled that Center Theatre Group board President Lew Wasserman informed board members of the need to raise more money by immediately announcing that he was pledging $100,000.

“Bam!” Davidson said. With Wasserman taking the lead, “you’ve never seen a board respond like that.”

The program quickly expanded; the number of performances of each play grew from one to two to five to two weeks’ worth. In 1969, New Theatre for Now included 18 titles--although, again, 13 of them were short enough to squeeze into one long evening. That evening had originally been scheduled for a foreign tour sponsored by the State Department. But it was canceled by the then-new Nixon Administration, ostensibly because the scheduled destinations weren’t considered politically stable enough, although Davidson suspects that the plays themselves also were too unstable for State Department sponsorship.

Some of the early productions graduated to larger productions in the regular seasons, among them such famous titles as “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” and “Zoot Suit.”

As the schedule grew, the Taper mainstage no longer could accommodate all of the New Theatre for Now productions as well as the regular Taper season, so other venues were found, including a 20th Century Fox sound stage and a coffeehouse at USC. Schweizer came to L.A. for the first time to stage two New Theatre for Now plays in 1978-79, at Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood. The 1981-82 season was at the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood.

Money helped spur the expansion. The Rockefeller Foundation had given New Theatre for Now another $300,000 in 1971, and it added a final $200,000 in 1974 in order to help New Theatre for Now plays advance to the regular season. But then the program was folded into the regular Taper budget “until we had to tighten the funding, and then we had to pull back,” Davidson said.

After 1974-75, New Theatre for Now took a two-season break, and it took another one after 1978-79. Parone left the Taper in 1979 in order to make more money directing television. New Theatre for Now returned in 1981-82, but it then skipped every other year until it finally ceased after the 1985-86 season, which was held at the 99-seat Taper, Too. The Taper didn’t stop doing new plays above the workshop level, but it presented them in riskier regular-season runs or in reduced circumstances at the Taper, Too.

The issue of where to do New Theatre for Now remains open. On the one hand, Davidson has long sought a mid-sized space for just this kind of production, and Center Theatre Group is investigating the possibility of converting the Culver Theatre in Culver City into such a venue. On the other hand, Davidson believes that new work also deserves mainstage attention and that regular-season subscribers deserve a sample of the excitement involved in creating it.

Schweizer agrees. “My big crusade now is that new and untried material can pull its weight in these bigger spaces for bigger audiences,” he said.

He believes that the two plays he’s directing could do that. However, he acknowledged that “there is too much competition for the one space” to do this kind of work throughout the year.

“It would be difficult to book an entire season of new work that the subscribers have never heard of, in the hopes of filling a 750-seat space,” he said.

Because new work is less certain to fill seats, it usually requires special funding. This year’s New Theatre for Now has received it from AT&T; and the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust. However, the plays themselves get funding from other sources as well; there are many more play development programs now than there were 30 years ago.

Although all four of this year’s plays passed through some form of Taper workshop, only one--”The Street of the Sun”--will receive its official world premiere here. The two plays opening this week have both been produced in New York, in versions that broke each of them into two acts, as opposed to the no-intermission works that will be seen here.

As L.A’s flagship theater, the Taper must serve many constituencies. The New Theatre for Now authors include two women and two men; two whites, one Latino and one African American. “We didn’t tally it up,” Davidson said. “I try to do a balanced season, but a new play festival doesn’t have to be balanced in and of itself”--although, he added, he wouldn’t want four plays that were all set in bars, or courtrooms, or another single location.

There were 20 “first-class plays worthy of consideration,” but “we want the plays to benefit from the intensity and simplicity of this process, so I wouldn’t choose something that required a complicated design.” Also, he looked for writers with whom the Taper has had a past relationship--yet “you don’t have to be a member of the club.”

Davidson said he didn’t try to second-guess what the audience might like. “TV has to worry about market shares--at least in this phase, I don’t. What we’re trying to do is get these plays into the light of day.”

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“DEMONOLOGY” and “THE JOY OF GOING SOMEWHERE DEFINITE,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends May 18, to be followed by “The Street of the Sun,” May 27-June 8, and “Mules,” June 17-29. Prices: $29-$37. Phone: (213) 628-2772.