Dean Drama

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In 33 years as artistic director and producer for the Mark Taper Forum, Gordon Davidson has shocked, entertained and entranced Los Angeles theater-goers

Gordon Davidson, the artistic director/producer for the Mark Taper Forum, should be nominated to the Guinness Book of Records. He has held the same job for the past 33 years, and it’s been a heck of a ride.

To open the Taper on April 9, 1967, Davidson chose a powerful drama, “The Devils,” a searing tale about a priest and a nun and their sexual fantasies. The production shocked Catholic officials and the County Board of Supervisors, who added a punitive tax on the theater, which stands on county property. Davidson was just 33 at the time of the flap, but he stayed the course, winning Tony Awards and Pulitzer prizes for many of the more than 250 plays he has produced and directed at the Taper. In 1977, the Taper itself won a Tony Award for theatrical excellence.

A decade ago, Davidson added the larger Ahmanson Theater and its Doolittle Theater to his duties.

Davidson’s career in the theater began serendipitously. While at General Electric as part of his engineering program at Cornell, he worked evenings at Tanglewood, the home of the summer music festival in upstate New York.

Question: How would you describe the state of L.A. theater, beyond what you are doing?

Answer: When they want to trot out the figures, there is a lot of activity. But most of it is in equity waiver theaters, which are 99 seats or less and nobody gets paid, or you get car fare. There is a lot of activity and people go to it, but there is no commerce, even in nonprofit. There’s us, the Geffen Playhouse and the Pasadena Playhouse, but there should be 10 of us in a city this size. There should be more activity. There aren’t that many choices.

Q: Is New York still the major leagues for theater in America?

A: I don’t think that is the apt phrase. New York is still in many ways the standard bearer, but not in such an exclusive way as it once was. That is to say that the acting you see on a stage of a Broadway house is not necessarily so many cuts above what can be seen elsewhere. But New York remains a place that is filled with so much activity Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway. Stuff is always going on.

Q: What has been the impact of TV, films and the Internet? Have they pushed theater aside?

A: I tell you where they have pushed theater aside and that’s in the newspapers. This is certainly true of New York and Los Angeles. The number of full-page ads that occupy the Arts and Leisure section (of The New York Times) and Calendar section (of the Los Angeles Times) for the Academy Award nominations is amazing. I know there has been some very good work in film, so you can’t complain, but what it has literally done, say in The New York Times, is push the theater section to the back. In the L.A. Times, which has small-sized stories to start with, again the theater is pushed to the way back physically, as well as symbolically. The theater’s attention has been usurped by film and then films on television.

Q: Have creative people abandoned the theater?

A: The Internet is too new, so I can’t tell you that except that a lot of people are making money on it. Yes, we have lost people to film and TV because of huge pay differences and because it seems to many people that this is where it’s at. The theater has to keep reinventing itself and going back to the Greeks, going back to Shakespeare, and going back to storytelling. There will always be people writing for the theater, and there will be an audience for it, although it might be more selective.

Q: What is the state of Broadway?

A: The marketplace for plays has shrunk. What has replaced it are residence theaters around the country, which will do new plays and revivals, and they have audiences, and that is where it may be. It is a decentralized art. It isn’t like a sports franchise where you try to get the most expensive players and have it all in Minnesota or San Diego. That’s a lot harder in the theater.

Q: Do you agree with those who argue that the high price of theater tickets on Broadway and in Los Angeles makes theater an elitist event?

A: I hear that a lot. There are things that counteract that discount tickets, student and senior citizen tickets. What I am concerned about the most is what high prices will do to the frequency of going to the theater. People will choose one expensive production, instead of two or three less expensive productions. That breaks the frequency of going to the theater.

Q: You once said that all artist decisions are business decisions and all business decisions are artistic. What did you mean by that?

A: When you make an artistic decision, you one way or another affect business. Are you going to take a risk and use six actors and go into debt, or use one or two and not? The big fear these days is that it is harder to do big plays because the costs have multiplied. There is great pressure to do two- or three-character plays or one-set plays, and I have done my share of them. Usually when I have a big play like “Cider House Rules,” I balance it with a few smaller plays (throughout the season). Sometimes, a one- or two- or three-character play can be very satisfying, but if you give people too much of that, my audience will let me know.

Q: How important is the subscription base to the economic health of your theaters?

A: Very important. I know that a number of my colleagues say they don’t want a subscription audience. The audience is all the same age and gray-haired. I understand what that is, and I am always happiest when the audience is mixed in age. But the subscription audience is like a big advance sale. Broadway wants something bigger and the way they can get a big advance is with a star. My star is the theater and the variety of the plays, and I need people to sign up. I also really believe in continuity and repetition of experience. So I treasure them.

Q: Most plays don’t last more than a year in Los Angeles. Why?

A: I am not sure it is even a year. We normally play eight weeks. But then you get a phenomenon like “Les Miserables,” where people keep coming back and others come who have never seen it before. But even a play like Neil Simon’s “The Dinner Party,” which was sold out before the first performance because it was Neil and Henry Winkler and John Ritter and a few others, I’m not sure that, if we ran another eight weeks, we would have had capacity (crowds).

Q: How expensive is it to mount a musical or a drama or a comedy in New York and Los Angeles.

A: A Broadway musical is $6 million at the lowest and $9 million at the top. Plays cost $2 million, sometimes $1.5 million on Broadway. At least $750,000 of it is press (advertising). If an Off Broadway production wants to move across the street to Broadway, it costs $1.5 million because $700,000 to $800,000 goes into advertising; $700,000 or $800,000 goes into what we call load in, load out union costs. There is not much room to wiggle, and this is without jacking up the salaries in any way.

Q: How important is the government’s funding of the arts?

A: It is very important, and it has virtually disappeared, and it is very sad. In the heyday of the National Endowment of the Arts, we were getting $300,000-plus a year, and we were at the high end (nationally). Now I am lucky to get $70,000.

Q: Has anybody stepped in to fill the gap?

A: Individuals, including subscribers who feel responsible and generous. Some of it has been replaced by people who have made a lot of money in the stock market, and who are building endowments. Museums and symphonies have had a head start on (tapping into) this.

Q: Was there any point that you wanted to quit?

A: I never wanted to quit. There were a number of seductive approaches I had over the years some in film, which involved people saying to me, “Why do you want to do theater?” Or, “When are you going to do a film?” The two most concrete offers (to leave the Taper) were from the Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center, and I declined them both. I thought all in all, with whatever difficulties and challenges I have here, this was the place to be.

Q: So after three decades, is it still fun?

A: Yeah, I do a lot of tap dancing and you get tired, but when I go into that rehearsal room or put something on stage and see it connect, I never have lost the excitement for that.

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