'I'm too powerful for my shirt.' (Gordon Davidson, artistic director for various Los Angeles dramatic theaters)

Right said, Gordon--for better or worse, you've pieced together an unprecedented empire that controls nearly every major stage in L.A.

It wasn't exactly hip Hollywood on a recent evening in March at the posh Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. There was Lemmon on the left, Heston on the right and Angie Dickinson and Kathy Bates in between. But most of the attention was concentrated where it belonged, on faces anonymous perhaps outside L.A. but instantly recognizable to the cognoscenti anywhere within our boundaries as people to whom attention must be paid: Lew Wasserman, Mickey Ziffren, Barry Taper, Armand Deutsch, Walter Mirisch, Franklin Murphy, David Haft.

They'd come together to pick up thanks and Bulgari trinkets, which they needed like a Harry Winston loaner. (The cost of the diamonds and the face-lifts alone in the elegant reception room could have bailed out Albania.)

The purpose of the gathering was singular: to launch a five-week celebration--what Wasserman called "a Polish wedding" of gala balls, theatrical performances and congratulatory outings of all stripes--for the 25th anniversary of the Center Theater Group at the Music Center, that more or less beloved collection of stark gray buildings to which all downtown roads lead.

This was a sizable chunk of L.A.'s power, and they had gathered not to honor but to be honored--for their support of his projects--by Gordon Davidson, a man who knows a thing or two about that particular commodity.

In the film business, in which Davidson has occasionally dabbled, studio heads are lucky if they last 25 months, let alone 25 years. In politics, a field that has always interested him, only Fidel Castro has been around longer--and his fiefdom is considerably less secure than Davidson's.

Starting as a virtual unknown, a lowly stage manager when he arrived in 1964 to take the job of assistant director to the late John Houseman for a production of King Lear at the Pilgrimage Theater with the great Morris Carnovsky, Davidson has ascended to become, at 58, the capo di tutti capi of Los Angeles theater, not only handpicking but often developing all the projects for the major theatrical venues.

First and foremost, of course, he is longtime artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum. More recently, he took under his sway the Ahmanson at the Doolittle over in Hollywood, which was designed to keep subscribers on board while the Phantom does his overwrought thing downtown. And when the masked man departs (reportedly at the end of this year), that behemoth venue will be his to play with as well.

But that's not all. Also under his spreading wing comes the literary cabaret at the Itchey Foot; the Taper Too; his showcase for new work at the John Anson Ford Theater; the Improvisational Theater Project for children; the Theater Lab; the annual Taper Lab New Works Festival; and assorted community-service programs, including the Disabled Actors project.

Today, Davidson is the chef d'orchestre of the biggest theatrical band in the country. With the demise of Bill Bushnell's troubled Los Angeles Theater Center, if you like theater you can't get very far from Gordon Davidson--except for the occasional emergences from darkness at the Shubert and, even more occasionally, at the Wilshire or Pantages. (And what Davidson doesn't run, wife Judi's PR firm represents.) There is, simply, no one in American theater with tentacles reaching nearly as far and wide.

He has made friends and influenced people all along the corridors of power, not only in Los Angeles but on Broadway and on London's West End, to which he absconds regularly, keeping his finger on the pulse of the international stage, seeing five plays in four days on a recent Blighty jaunt. Insiders speak of his inexhaustible vitality, his theater savvy, his drive, his ability to balance the unbalanceable--the demands of business, county bureaucracy and aesthetics--and his contributions to the cultural life of our city.

Even those who decry his theatrical taste--impossibly middle-class and middle-of-the-road (if you're a fan of the avant-garde) or weird, pessimistic and depressing (if your tastes run to Neil Simon)--find him personally agreeable, warm, articulate, accessible and genuinely committed to the, alas, outmoded idea of theater as service to the community. All qualities that have allowed him to juggle more balls than anyone outside of the Moscow circus and enabled him to cajole and carp, persuade, encourage and occasionally browbeat writers, directors, moneymen and politicians.

There have, however, been naysayers. "There are those," says disgruntled writer-director Charles Marowitz, "who bitterly resent the imposition of one man's taste and standards over five of the major theaters in the city. If, in our time Honecker has gone, Ceausescu has been toppled and Gorbachev replaced, are you going to tell me that Davidson's retirement is not long overdue?"

Other critics maintain that Davidson's power over what happens on the commercial stage in our city is all encompassing and prevents other, more original voices from being heard. But most would agree with former Los Angeles Times theater critic Dan Sullivan, who insists the "power trip" label is unfair. "He's no more interested in power than Joe Papp was--and maybe even a little less. And he's been as loyal to his community as Papp was. If we admire that in Papp, we can't knock Gordon."

Says Ed Parone, Davidson's first assistant director, "I don't think it's been bad for L.A. theater to have him. He has his ego and his megalomanias like all of us, but he's pretty wide-ranging in his interests and in taking people in." But, he adds, "power matters a lot to him. The thing that used to curl my toes is the way he referred to himself as the Boss."

"If you disagree with |Davidson~," says Madeline Puzo, former general manager of the Taper and now at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, "you know you'll have a very hard fight on your hands. You have to have a lot of passion if you want to go in your own direction. He let me have massive fights with him in public in front of his staff. At least three times, we'd have a peacemaking dinner where he'd say, 'If you keep this up, I'll have to fire you.' And I'd say, 'If you keep this up, I'm gonna quit.' I think Gordon not only likes the fight, he demands it."

Adds attorney Doug Ring, a CTG board member and former board president of the now-defunct LATC: "Every time someone goes to a play they don't like, they come out saying Gordon has run his course. If they like the play, he's a genius--and that, by the way, includes board members. The nature of what he does ensures a certain failure rate."

Indeed, until the powerful nine-play Kentucky Cycle opened recently at the Taper, plays at the Music Center had been as exciting as warmed-over noodle pudding. With the Ahmanson occupied with The Phantom of the Opera, that seemingly unending cash cow ($100 million and still a-milking), and with a program at the Doolittle that seems more intent on providing a little something for every taste than anything designed to arouse the passions, the fire seems to be, if not out, at least flickering dangerously.

But Davidson's star seems not in the least diminished by brickbats. Ring puts the general consensus this way: "We live in a youth culture where once you pass 25 or 30, you should be put to death. If Gordon continues to be as good at his job and continues to want to do the job, then I wouldn't be the human being to say he should be deprived of it."

Davidson himself understands the growing din of criticism. "It's true," he sighs. "There haven't been as many highlights recently, and that is worrisome. You worry about yourself--is your timing off? But it happens to everyone. Nothing's ever been truly bad, although I've had moments of real pain and doubt."

Back in 1979, when the Taper's production of Zoot Suit was about to open in New York, veteran Broadway producer Arthur Cantor told the New York Times Magazine, "Gordon won't be in regional theater much longer. He has all the attributes of a top-notch commercial producer, except he insists on making the Taper his home base."

Typical New York arrogance and xenophobia notwithstanding, plus the fact that Zoot Suit fizzled, Davidson was expected to move permanently to any number of new homes--to Lincoln Center, perhaps, or the Kennedy Center or simply to the Great White Way.

So after a quarter of a century, the question arises: Why has he chosen to stay, and why have they let him?

Some put it down to Davidson's tenacity, a kind of sheer cussedness that says, "I'm going to keep at this until I get it right." Others say it's his loyalty to and love for this city and the audience he's built here. And still others say there's nowhere else for him to go.

And Davidson agrees with all of them. "There's nothing better anywhere in the country," he says. "You can get killed in New York--they're all real-estate operators now, the Shuberts, the Niederlanders. The freelance independent producer has shrunk to almost nothing. So I don't think I missed the train. There's no better theater job in America."

Still, as he sits down several days after the Peninsula party to look back on 25 years, there's a certain autumnal quality to the conversation. His hair is snowy now, and there's an almost imperceptible thickening around his middle. But the broken tooth still flashes in that sheepish grin. The enfant terrible may have been Ritalinized a bit, but the energy he exudes as he bounds into his office in the dull brown building opposite the Music Center still ignites those around him.

Nor has the passion waned, even though life is not as easy as it used to be. The economics of the recession are crippling theater in general. Local government subsidies are no longer automatic, and nationally, the government panders to the philistines of the New Right. Theater and the arts in general have become code words for the enemy.

What's worse, to the young, theater has become as irrelevant as books. "The audience is getting as gray as I am," says Davidson sadly. "I find there is a devaluation in society of the things that mean a lot to me, both aesthetic and cultural--including the theater. Daily Variety is no longer even covering theater. And space is getting harder to find in the L.A. Times. I'm angry at the Times. I go there for a lunch, and they're very polite, and then they go right on with what they're doing. For whatever reasons having to do with demographics and their valuation of what people want, they don't feel they have a responsibility to the art form."

Everything was all much simpler way back when. Davidson had an ace up his sleeve from the beginning, and her name was Dorothy Chandler. When, in 1967, determined to be the only theatrical game in town, she plucked a young Davidson from the UCLA Theater Group--where, on Houseman's recommendation, he had become managing director--and took him, the theater's healthy subscription list and their half-million-dollar Ford Foundation Grant downtown, she left some hard feelings behind. Houseman was furious but eventually admitted that the final outcome was felicitous.

The Taper provided Davidson with a home and shielded him from the financial pressures with which less favored artistic directors had to wrestle. And the city got itself a bright, young, envelope-pushing free spirit who with his first play, The Devils--which had run without incident at the Royal Shakespeare Company in London--alienated a large chunk of the local Catholic establishment, who watched in horror as a hunchbacked mother superior in 17th-century France explored some highly charged sexual fantasies around the body of a young priest. When not just the Reagans stormed out, Davidson might have been excused for thinking his stay in L.A. would be brief.

As it turned out, his choice of The Devils was nothing short of brilliant. It declared both his intellectual independence and that the Taper would be challenging, provocative, in-your-face theater--a theater of ideas. It lined up behind him passionate liberal support, and it marked him as a pragmatist who knew exactly when to push and when to retreat, someone who took chances but never went that one step too far.

When Zubin Mehta decamped to New York, and Davidson turned down offers to follow suit, he became, as Chandler told Mickey Ziffren, "like a son to me."

"The great thing about Mrs. Chandler and that era," Davidson says, "was I didn't have to convince her this was worthwhile and that what we were trying to do was important. Therefore, she worked as hard as I did. Now we've gone through different kinds of leadership in both the Music Center and the county."

The '70s were the halcyon years. Plays left the Taper and came home with Pulitzers and Tonys. Davidson was covering L.A. in glory, and that--as far as Dorothy Chandler was concerned--was the key to the kingdom. "She gets nasty if I say no to Gordon," the late Bill Severins, head of the Music Center Operating Company, once said.

American regional theater had arrived. New York was mired in British imports and tour-bus theater. And nowhere was more exciting than the Taper. New Theater for Now, dedicated to cutting-edge works, under Parone, pioneered a whole new kind of theater.

The Taper was in the "nursery" business. Plays, parts of plays and ideas for plays were tried out in readings or labs, and then either sank into oblivion or were prodded, encouraged and fertilized into something that could be sent elsewhere or performed on the Taper's mainstage. The globe was scoured for promising young playwrights, who would then be subjected to the Davidson powers of persuasion and enticed under the Taper's sheltering wing.

Christopher Hampton was press-ganged in London and brought Savages to the Taper. Mark Medoff's Children of a Lesser God, after being rejected by the Taper's readers, was rescued by Davidson and worked on for months before sneaking onto the mainstage as a last-minute replacement. It then went on to Broadway glory.

Davidson took on the controversy of war and played it to the hilt with The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play developed after Davidson read Daniel Berrigan's book on a transcontinental flight and cried. (Davidson later went on to direct the film version.) The happiest night of his professional life, say friends, was the opening night of Catonsville. Berrigan was on the run; FBI agents were stationed all around the building. How did they know they were FBI? "When the houselights went down and a recorded voice said, 'This is Daniel Berrigan, speaking to you from the underground,'" says Davidson, "the people who leaped up from their seats were the FBI."

Isn't that what theater is supposed to be all about? In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer took on the bomb; John Guare's Muzeeka tackled the war again, and so it went on into the late '70s.

By then, L.A. had become the new Ellis Island, and multiculturalism was the watchword of the day. The Taper hired Oxford-educated anthropologist Ken Brecher as Davidson's second-in-command, and we had plays about the genocide of Indians in Brazil and the inside poop from Conor Cruise O'Brien, a former member of the U.N., on the death of Dag Hammarskjold. After the opening performance of Savages, a Brazilian freedom fighter in a ski mask answered questions from the audience, and later a Hopi Indian chief ceremonially burned sage as a mark of respect.

And then came Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit, the story of the 1942 murder of a Chicano and the riots that followed. It was tailored and streamlined in workshops under Davidson's loving care until it was ready for the mainstage, and then it was advertised in the boxing and wrestling programs at the Olympic. Hispanic families lined up for five hours for tickets. Suddenly, there were brown faces in the box office, minorities working as ushers and child care during performances.

The play was the most successful the Taper had ever staged. (Photos of the actors were stolen from the showcases in the lobby like movie-star stills, then were replaced and stolen again--and nobody cared.) But then it went to New York, where they didn't know from Chicanos and their mythology and their pageants, and they hated it there. It was as if our whole city had been kicked in the teeth.

"It was," Davidson says, "an enormous disappointment. I knew we were setting ourselves up for that kind of thing by going in with guns blazing--announcing who and what we were and that we were a hit on the West Coast--and they closed the door."

The Shadow Box and Children of a Lesser God--the former dealing with death, the latter with the deaf--were easier stuff for the Great White Way and were honored with the Pulitzer and Tonys, respectively, though some said the reception of Zoot Suit was the beginning of Davidson's decision to stay in L.A., to turn his back on an increasingly corrupt New York theater world, to stand the famous New Yorker cartoon on its head and view America from the vantage point of Temple and Grand.

Then came the '80s and the beginning of America's long sleep. The time for social consciousness had passed, and the Taper didn't seem to know how to replace it.

"I was disappointed," recalls former theater critic Sullivan. "I thought his theater was a more radical theater than it turned out to be--I wish it had been quite a lot more independent of the Reagan '80s and the people who put together the Reagan '80s, some of whom were the people who keep the Music Center running. You can't run a radical theater in a complex like that."

"Davidson was never a radical force in theater," insists writer-director Marowitz, whose credentials include working with Peter Hall in London. "His is a '30s-bred, '60s-conditioned liberalism, diffused by a strong sense of self-survival. He recognized what side his bread was buttered on. There are certain kinds of passion he has had to subdue or abandon."

"One of the things I've had to reconcile myself to," Davidson admits, "is no matter how much we like to think we're on the cutting edge, we're on the cutting edge of mainstream."

But the '80s were scarcely a hotbed of creativity anywhere in the country. "It was harder to find material that directly connected to the American experience," Davidson recalls. "It was the Reagan era, and we were able to buy into believing that everything was okay because we had a father-figure movie star as President. I found it as frustrating as others did that people were buying into this self-absorbed Me Generation, with the manipulation of money and all that. It cooled everyone out. There was a big vacuum created that I couldn't fill with any act of imagination."

During the 1982-83 season, Davidson took a much-needed sabbatical. Some would have taken the opportunity to retreat into themselves, contemplate the past, reconstitute their visions for the future. He directed two plays off-Broadway. "What I learned," he says, "is I needed another year to learn how to have a sabbatical."

His return to L.A. was met with a revealing portrait in the Times' "Calendar" section of a former Golden Boy in mid-life crisis. But soon enough, Davidson figured out a way to recover from the slump.

In mid 1988, longtime Ahmanson majordomo Robert Fryer made it known that he had become increasingly unhappy and was planning his departure. In its early days, the Ahmanson had been highly profitable--supporting, in fact, the fledgling Taper. But Fryer was finding it more and more a big, bulky white elephant. He had been plagued by the depressingly cavernous size and lousy acoustics. (Charlton Heston used to describe acting there as standing on the white cliffs of Dover and yelling across to France.) Worse, because of the difficulties with size, major name actors were refusing to play there, and audiences were dwindling. In fact, so dysfunctional was the theater that its future was in serious jeopardy until the big and boisterous Phantom rode into town.

Anticipating his departure, two replacements for Fryer were brought in--Martin Manulis and Marshall Mason--but neither worked out. So the board went to Davidson, and in July 1989, a month after Fryer left, he was named producing director of the Doolittle, which the Ahmanson has been renting from UCLA to tide it over during the Phantom's run.

Already, Davidson has made his mark, if not as much of one as many would like. While Fryer's orientation was always Broadway warhorses like The Crucible, A Streetcar Named Desire and The Best Man, Davidson's taste runs more toward resident and, yes, multicultural theater. It's unlikely, for example, that under Robert Fryer we would have had a shot at August Wilson's The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running or Sarafina!, all of which have come under Davidson's short tutelage.

But the final coup was yet to come--and it was an unusually quiet one. As we were going to press with this issue, Davidson admitted to us that he had, "without fanfare"--and, in fact, without even notifying the Ahmanson staff--ascended to the title of "artistic director of the Center Theater Group," thus putting himself atop the Ahmanson as well. While the Phantom run leaves him duty-free there temporarily, by the end of the year he will have a third theater under his wing.

About the only obstacle he hasn't surmounted is figuring out a way to turn his one real dream--a local repertory company--into reality. As early as 1982, when large-scale Music Center plans were first discussed, he was lobbying to include a home for repertory. But the expansion ended up, after five years of red tape and county politicking, being simply a new hall for the Philharmonic--funded by a Disney inheritance--and Davidson has had to put his rep on ice.

Still, even that didn't slow him much. He has not personally directed anything at the Taper in the last two seasons (though he's done Virginia Woolf and A Little Night Music at the Doolittle and will be at the helm of Sybille Pearson's Unfinished Stories at the Taper next month), but he continues to have a capacity for work that any Baby Boomer studio exec might envy. At one time, he had 12 companies under his control, all either in rehearsal or playing in laboratory.

Most recently, he nurtured the much-lauded Kentucky Cycle from the fledgling short play Tall Tales. It was developed and expanded at the Taper New Works Lab and the Sundance Institute and was staged at Seattle's Intiman Theater before Davidson brought it home in January to the Taper's mainstage. Last month, the play won a Pulitzer--the first awarded to a drama that hadn't set foot in New York--and discussions are under way to stage it in New York, Washington, D.C., and London.

And nobody, Davidson says, regrets his solitary status at the helm of L.A. theater more than he does. "What still puzzles me about L.A.," he says, "is why there isn't more theater of some substance. There's an acting community, a talent pool. There's a lot of activity, but there's more per-capita theater in Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego. There's no entrepreneurial thing here, and I don't know why."

Davidson's disappointment with the film community is also profound--particularly in regard to his long-dreamed-of repertory company with a resident group of high-profile actors who would take stage acting seriously. As one actor said when approached, "What if I get a job?"

And when the Taper came looking for a miserable $10,000 donation, Grant Tinker told them, "You guys are minor league."

"It may turn out in this late part of my life and this part of the 20th century that the movie business and the agents have no greater regard for the theater than they ever had," says Davidson.

A Godfather's work is never done, and if the current plans of Davidson and his board come to pass, the landscape of the Music Center may look very different for everyone involved by the time the 30th anniversary comes around.

When the Phantom finally hangs up his mask, they want to close the unwieldly and non-user-friendly Ahmanson for a major remodeling, turning it into a more versatile, adjustable space capable of seating anywhere from 1,200 people up to its present 2,000.

Budgeted at $13 million, the remodeling would be funded in part in good old Music Center tradition--meaning donations from you and me--and in part by the county and the Music Center Operating Company. So far, the latter has been making sympathetic noises but appears reluctant to come up with the cash. They point to the presence in the wings of Miss Saigon and perhaps other Cameron Mackintosh-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical extravaganzas ready to move in without a brick being disturbed, when the "music of the night" finally fades.

Davidson says if the renovation is approved, he'll relinquish his duties at the Taper, presumably to concentrate on bringing to the "new" Ahmanson viable commercial plays, ones geared more to the spoken word than to huge musical spectacles. "He's more interested in the Ahmanson now than the Taper," says CTG president Larry Ramer. "He thinks he's met the challenge over there in terms of more cutting-edge theater. Now he wants to see if he can meet the challenge in a more commercial theater."

"At some point in the not-too-distant future," says Davidson, "I don't see myself running the Taper. I would like to see the leadership pass along there, because I've had it a long time. It should be a youthful theater. Not that I feel old, but if I bring in the Ahmanson, I'm going to have my hands full giving that a personality and a shape."

And Davidson, worried that anything can ever again come close to the success of Phantom, is playing hardball. "If we don't renovate it," he says, "and I'll say this to you because I mean it sincerely and not in a threatening manner, I would not be interested in the theater as is. It would present the same producing problems Bobby Fryer was facing--and in a tougher climate. It's not an interesting challenge. And I certainly wouldn't give up the Taper for just the Doolittle."

As Steve Albert, former general manager of the Taper and now at Houston's Alley Theater, notes, "One of the things that has kept Gordon where he is his ability to understand what is possible. He's never been one, when he sees something is not possible, to walk out. He'll push to the brink, but he's not going to burn a bridge. He's too smart for that."

Looking back, Davidson seems to be happy with a job well done--so far. "We came about at a unique time in this country's history, as well as in this city's, and I feel very grateful for that," he says. "But I worry now that it's always referential. It's all 'used to do' and 'what about when.' I'm still looking to the future."

And if he didn't always use the bully pulpit of the Taper, as some might have hoped, to take us as a city by the scruff of the neck and shake us into righting our wrongs, neither did he become a fat-cat establishment figure with a house in Bel-Air and a fax in his Mercedes. (In fact, he tools around town in a black Rabbit convertible.)

"He's not a visionary," observes Sullivan. "He's not a Peter Brook or even a Peter Hall, but he's responsible, capable, gregarious, talented, articulate--all those good things. And he's survived on fairly honorable terms."

Adds Ring, "It will probably take three or four or five people to fill his shoes."

But it won't be anytime soon. "I agree with Ingmar Bergman," Davidson says with a laugh, "who, when asked to choose between the theater and films, said he would choose theater, because in theater you can grow old gracefully. I plan to grow old gracefully in the theater, too."