Once Outposts, Now Landmarks /

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Where does an established playwright take new work to see it brought to life? Once the automatic answer was New York City, on Broadway or off. Now, for Pulitzer prizewinner Beth Henley, the starting place is Costa Mesa, Calif. For Emmy winner Luis Santeiro, it is Miami. For three-time Tony nominee Graciela Daniele, it is Philadelphia. And for Donald Freed, whose Circe and Bravo was a London success, it is Denver. Three of the Broadway season's major plays -- Eastern Standard, The Heidi Chronicles and Largely New York -- originated in Seattle, while Neil Simon's Rumors and A.R. Gurney's off-Broadway smash The Cocktail Hour were launched in San Diego. These are just a few examples of the fundamental trend in American culture nowadays: democratization through decentralization. Places that used to be outposts are fast becoming landmarks.

What do the creators of these works, the majority of whom live in New York, gain by going out of town? Time to nurture a show while insulated from panic- inducing box-office pressures, and solid artistic collaboration. Increasingly, regional artistic directors have some background of commercial success, while the standards of acting and design generally measure up to those off, and indeed on, Broadway. Just as important, the ticket buyers are receptive and discerning.

The roster of current or recent offerings on stages around the U.S. is as remarkable for its diversity as for its proficiency. Santeiro's Mixed Blessings, an adaptation of Tartuffe as a loving lampoon of nouveau-riche Cuban Americans, is the sprightliest and most polished, and it proves the axiom that art has the most universal appeal when it is the most specific. The script is remarkably faithful to Moliere's original in plot and characters, yet entirely contemporary -- a duality hilariously hinted at, before the curtain rises, when the sound system tinkles out Guantanamera on a harpsichord. A Cuban emigre himself, Santeiro has a dead-on eye and ear for people, from the fiercely pretentious grandmother who wants everyone to forget she used to keep pigs to the nosy, noisy maid whose fractured syntax includes the news that an acquaintance is a patient at "Mount Cyanide." In Santeiro's shrewdest insight, the villain is not a religious humbug but a larcenous Lothario masquerading as an embodiment of the work ethic, and the cant he peddles is based on an immigrant assimilationist version of the American Dream.

South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, which has emerged as one of the foremost venues for new work, served Henley well in its straightforward production of Abundance, a skeptical re-examination of 19th century frontier mythology through the eyes of two mail-order brides. Henley's underlying theme seems to be the way people change during the course of life, often swapping roles with intimates: the exuberant pioneer gradually becomes a timid drudge, while her starry-eyed friend hardens into an adventurer. The final scenes do too much too fast and too vaguely. But the script has the makings of Henley's best work since her stunning debut in Crimes of the Heart.

Marlane Meyer's The Geography of Luck, on another stage at the same theater, is an adroitly crafted portrait of assorted drifters, losers and desert rats that starts out sourly Sam Shepardesque yet ends in an eerie and touching echo of Saroyan's affirmative The Time of Your Life. But Roberta Levitow, normally a talented director, gave every scene the same pace and texture and allowed the frequent scene changes to dissipate energy and tension. Fortunately for Meyer, a staging under different direction is planned for this summer at Los Angeles Theater Center.

L.A.T.C. has just closed the year's splashiest example of the drama of the abstruse. Minamata takes its name from a Japanese fishing village that was afflicted with industrially caused mercury poisoning, and many of the show's powerful images derived from W. Eugene Smith's documentary photographs, published in 1972 by LIFE. The text explores how modern society distances those who cause a disaster from those who suffer the effects. But it is also about -- to the extent that the hallucinatory stream of consciousness can be said to be "about" anything -- transvestism, multinational corporations, military buildups, Hostess cupcakes and rape of every variety. At times, director Reza Abdoh's 135-minute, intermissionless work, co-written with Mira- Lani Oglesby, sounds like the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic; at times, it is performance art of fever pitch and mute beauty.

Minamata is precisely the sort of piece New Yorkers expect to find only in New York. There are no plans to take it there, and that is too bad. Yet maybe the best measure of the health of the American theater is that now New Yorkers, too, have to travel to see the full range of what American creators have to offer.