HAVE-IT-YOUR-WAY PLAY THERE'S PLENTY OF ROOM TO ROAM IN INTERACTIVE `ALMA'.

Byline: Evan Henerson Theater Writer

If you like to be in the action, consider ``Alma: Widow of the 4 Arts.'' The interactive play is being performed at a venerable cinema house in downtown L.A.'s historic Broadway theater district.

Actually, it won't simply be inside an auditorium. The saga of Alma Mahler-Werfel - the wife of Gustav Mahler, Franz Werfel and Walter Gropius and the lover of Oskar Kokoschka - will use every square inch of the Los Angeles Theatre. Audiences will venture from restrooms to ``crying rooms,'' from kitchens to ballrooms to fire escapes with different scenes taking place simultaneously in different areas. ``Alma'' attendees also will get a bus tour of downtown Los Angeles meant to mimic Alma and Franz Werfel's honeymoon to Palestine.

The bus tour, and a three-course meal at intermission honoring Gustav Mahler's funeral, will be the only time ``Alma'' audiences will get the opportunity to sit down. The rest of the time, they'll be following various composers, writers, servants or lovers and watching - camera like - the action unfolding before them. When a character leaves a given scene, an ``Alma'' patron can choose to follow him/her to another room, another scene, or hook up with someone else. This means that everyone's theater experience should be different.

Angelenos might remember ``Tamara,'' the scene-to-scene, long-running play performed in the 1980s at the American Legion Hall in Hollywood, or ``Tony 'N Tina's Wedding'' which transformed the audience into guests at an Italian marriage feast. ``Tamara,'' too, allowed audiences to follow different characters, taking a break only for a dinner. It was once calculated that with the number of characters, story lines and stages in ``Tamara,'' there were 479,001,600 ways to see the play. That undoubtedly contributed to its longevity.

``Alma'' promises something new, according to its creators. Its title character was a historical figure, a notorious femme fatale, and all of her famous husbands and paramours are depicted on stage as well. Producer/director Paulus Manker is attempting to remount the production in each of the world cities that figured in Alma Mahler's life: Vienna, Venice, Lisbon, Hollywood and - venue permitting - New York in 2005.

Plus there's the ``follow me'' staging - no easy balancing act particularly when you're dealing with 50 scenes.

``We don't have this concept of the fourth-wall proscenium stage,'' says Manker, who has directed every previous version of ``Alma'' and also is one of the actors. ``People can sit everywhere and anywhere they want. They can sit almost in bodily contact with the actors. If two actors are lying in a bed, they can sit on the edge of the bed.''

``Everything we do in the play, we do it for real. If we wash our hands, we wash our hands. If we fight, we slap,'' continues Manker. ``We do not sleep with each other, but the audience sometimes does. I know a couple in Vienna. They have a child who is now 6 years old, and I know exactly where that child was (conceived).''

Conducting a tour of the newly ``Alma''-fitted Los Angeles Theatre, the Vienna-born Manker moves gleefully from room to room, cueing symphonies and sound effects and pointing out props. The theater itself, a popular spot for movie premieres since opening with the premiere of ``City Lights'' in 1931, is now used for occasional film shoots. Manker talks about the treasures the venue has ``unearthed'' as the crew prepared it for the production. Boxes of props were brought over from Vienna. Historical photographs and replicas are everywhere.

Not content to stay behind the scenes, Manker plays Alma's spurned lover Kokoschka, who commissioned an anatomically correct life-size doll of Alma, which he lived with for several years - before ceremoniously dousing it with red wine, decapitating it and flinging it from a window during a masked ball.

Alma Mahler seemed to inspire that kind of passion in people, says writer Joshua Sobol, who found her to be an ideal inspiration for the brand of interactive drama he was looking to create.

``Gustav Mahler interested me for many years,'' says Sobol. ``I read his autobiography and found that Alma was telling many lies about her life. This made her very interesting to me and very active dramatically. What was she hiding? What was the skeleton in the closet? There are so many skeletons in her cupboard that it made her a very appropriate character for this kind of drama.

``I don't think she was a stunning beauty. It was not that which made her so irresistible to men. It was something else, and this was the mystery. Her chosen lovers and husbands said she gave them the feeling that they were not only exceptional, but they were God on earth. Something like this.''

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

ALMA

Where: Los Angeles Theatre, 615 S. Broadway, Los Angeles.

When: 7 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, 6 p.m. Sunday; through Dec. 5.

Tickets: $125; includes a three-course dinner, drinks and a bus tour. Call [phone].

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Photo:

(1 -- 3 -- color) Nicole Ansari-Cox, above left, Lea Mornar and Wiebke Frost are part of the roaming cast of characters in ``Alma'' at the Los Angeles Theatre, based on the life of Alma Mahler-Werfel, right. Director Paulus Manker, left, has staged the production so that audience members can move from room to room, following the players at will.