SENDING `THE GREEN BIRD' INTO FLIGHT IN LA JOLLA.

Byline: Paul Hodgins Orange County Register

Whatever you do, don't call Julie Taymor's ``The Green Bird'' children's theater.

``This production is like good Shakespeare,'' Taymor said while at the La Jolla Playhouse to oversee the West Coast premiere of her fantastical adaptation of Carlo Gozzi's 18th-century tale. ``You can bring young people because it's entertaining theater. It's got lots of scatological, raunchy imagery, which I think is perfectly appropriate for people 9 and older. `Family fare' shouldn't mean something that's boring for adults. And children won't get all the levels, but they'll understand the main story line.''

Though outlandish, wildly creative masks, puppets, costumes and special effects are Taymor's conceptual trademark, her brand of theater is hardly kid stuff. Since 1988, Taymor, 44, has earned a growing reputation as one of the most darkly imaginative directors of her generation, while accumulating a MacArthur Foundation ``genius'' grant, an Emmy, an Obie and other honors.

Her credits include the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's controversial production of ``The Flying Dutchman'' last season and a 1992 PBS production titled ``Fool's Fire.'' A lavish Broadway stage adaptation of Disney's ``The Lion King'' is in the works, as is a big-screen version of her gory production of Shakespeare's ``Titus Andronicus.'' And Sony Classical has commissioned her to do a feature film screenplay of Mozart's ``The Magic Flute.''

``The Green Bird'' - a comedy about a young couple's rites of passage as they confront temptations of greed, lust and vanity - is filled with accounts of dancing apples, animated fountains and other ``Alice in Wonderland'' phantasmagoria.

``(The effects) grow organically out of the story,'' Taymor said of her approach to the staging. ``... (`The Green Bird') is a conflict of the heart, the head and the bowels. You'll see a skeletal chest with a heart, intestines, and below them is a sink. It's comical, yes, but it's also an accurate diagram of the story's major themes. ...

``Literal theater is redundant - it's just copying what film and television already do,'' she added. ``In something like `The Green Bird,' you're allowing the audience to have a poetic perception. ... Ideally, it elevates an audience's perception.''