DRAMATIC BAD BOY HITS L.A.

``I've never liked theater very much,'' Richard Foreman says matter-of-factly.

It seems an odd admission from one of America's leading avant-garde dramatists and backstage philosophers.

Understand, though, that the famously paradoxical writer/director with the perpetually sad-sack eyes isn't talking about all theater, just the overblown, heart-tugging, middlebrow kind that he usually sees whenever he makes the mistake of venturing outside his Manhattan abode.

``I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about all the other arts, but I've never found the theater a very congenial place, even though that's where I began when I was a young kid,'' says Foreman, who can sound funny, world-weary, patient and cranky all in the same sentence.

``I just don't like the theater. But I don't like going out in crowds of people. I don't like being in crowds. I like sitting at home and reading.''

Frankly, the 1995 MacArthur ``genius'' grant winner would rather watch ``General Hospital'' than sit through a Broadway show.

``I'm hooked!'' he admits with a laugh. ``I find it much less pretentious than the serious drama, which is straining for something else but seems to me very middle-class and second-rate.''

That's why Foreman, 60, has spent most of his career writing and directing his own cryptically madcap material rather than rehashing someone else's. Through Sunday, Los Angeles is getting its first live glimpse of Foreman's unique brand of existential vaudeville with the West Coast premiere of ``Pearls for Pigs'' at UCLA's Freud Playhouse.

Characteristically, ``Pearls for Pigs'' is not a conventional ``well-made'' play with two acts, a cathartic finish and time out for a plastic cup of zinfandel. It's 75 intermissionless minutes of sexy, frightening, willfully absurd words and images, and characters who are alternately menacing, poignant and nonsensically eloquent.

The lead, Maestro (Foreman regular David Patrick Kelly), is a paranoid actor who's played so many characters that he's lost his own identity. Suffice to say that his anxieties aren't allayed by the other characters, who include the Maestro's therapist and Pierrot and Colombine, two characters out of the 16th-century commedia dell'arte tradition of improvisational comedy.

(Asked what qualities make an actor right for his plays, Foreman responds with a laugh: ``A kind of manic, self-controlled energy with a lot of sort of inner-directed rage.'')

Outfitted in beards, goofy hats, fishnet stockings and plastic buttocks, the characters race around sets made of surreally mismatched junk, which Foreman also designs. Out of this mayhem, Foreman aims to create not only amusement but something like clarity.

``It is the strategy, as far as I'm concerned, of most serious 20th-century art, from James Joyce to (Ezra) Pound to Wallace Stevens, everybody,'' he elaborates. ``You know, I went to Yale Drama School, and theoretically they teach you how to make a play. And it seems to me that the great artists never really learn how to do it. They just are courageous enough to put themselves in a position where they get lost and then they find things. And to me that's the excitement.''

It's also the impulse behind his 30-year-old experimental theater company, the Ontological-Hysteric, which has performed such Foreman pieces as ``My Mind Was a Sledgehammer (1994)'' and ``I've Got the Shakes'' (1995) out of its base camp, a 76-seat theater on the second floor of an Episcopal church in Manhattan's East Village.

Though ``Pearls for Pigs'' bombed in its Hartford, Conn., debut - not unexpected in a town of insurance-company workers, Foreman observes dryly - it fared very well in Rome, Paris and Montreal.

``People say, `Well, your theater's confusing. I don't think it's confusing. And we work week after week after week in rehearsals because we rehearse a very long time just trying to clarify every moment of mystery.''

What: Richard Foreman's ``Pearls for Pigs.''

Where: UCLA's Freud Playhouse, off Sunset Boulevard at Hilgard Avenue and Wyton Drive.

When: 8 tonight through Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday.

Tickets: $25 general admission; $10 full-time UCLA students.

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Photo

Photo: Richard Foreman's ``Pearls for Pigs'' is a manic vaudeville dominated by bizarre objects, dances and scenes centered around an actor lost in the maze of roles he's played.