Only tapering off

Talk to people who have worked closely with Gordon Davidson, and one begins to notice a recurrence of kudos in Yiddish.

“Gordon’s just a huge mensch. He’s what the word means. And he’s haimish,” sums up playwright Tony Kushner, whose “Angels in America” is the most celebrated work nurtured at the Mark Taper Forum during the 38-year Davidson era.

A mensch is a stand-up guy. Someone who’s haimish is down to earth, with a knack for making people feel comfortable and at home. Others make the same points in English: “He’s a center of warmth, inside a rehearsal hall or out,” says Sam Waterston, whom Davidson directed (along with the then similarly little-known Michael Moriarty and James Woods) on Broadway in 1971 in “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine.”

Praise is what you’d expect for Davidson right now. He’s 71 and in his victory lap. On Jan. 1, Michael Ritchie succeeds him as artistic director of Center Theatre Group, which includes the Taper, the Ahmanson and the new Kirk Douglas Theatre, the latter fulfilling Davidson’s long-deferred dream of creating a major stage for new and experimental plays.

There’s little disagreement over the broad outline of Davidson’s achievement since 1967: The Brooklyn-bred son of a kindly speech and drama professor, he established a home for thoughtful, indigenous theater in L.A., which had been little more than a stop for touring fare. He embraced, developed and promoted new works, particularly championing plays, such as the anti-Vietnam War “Catonsville Nine,” that spoke with timely immediacy to social and political issues. He groomed younger theater leaders, among them Oskar Eustis, a top aide from 1989 to 1994, who left the Taper to run the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., and was recently named artistic director of New York’s Public Theater.

Davidson has kept a $42-million-a-year enterprise running and solvent -- a job that grew much harder and more complex in 1989 when he took over the Ahmanson along with the Taper. That meant sacrificing much hands-on directing -- although he is going out with a closing kick, directing four shows in his final two seasons.

The administrative work “kept growing and growing, and I felt more and more like I was going underwater,” Davidson says. “I missed being in the [rehearsal] room.”

In the office across the street from the Taper and Ahmanson that he is about to vacate, every horizontal surface is coated with layers-deep strata of paperwork and phone message slips. The walls are filled with posters for Taper shows and other memorabilia, including an impresario’s prayer stitched into a piece of embroidery: “O Lord, Give Me a Bastard With Talent.”

At first, Davidson’s lanky but slightly stooped frame is slouched almost horizontally in a swivel chair. He seems depleted, but soon nervous energy flows through him. An animated right hand begins to dabble with his head, face and neck and paint emphases and punctuations in the air. It becomes clear that this is a man who can talk almost endlessly about the theater and his life, which he admits have been more or less congruent.

Those who have watched him direct and produce plays over the years say his creative demeanor has been amazingly consistent: Davidson stays calm and genial in rehearsals, even when confronted by thespian snits, overweening ego and idees fixes. When he isn’t getting what he wants, he’ll typically wrap an arm cozily around an actor’s shoulders and have a quiet, private-in-plain-view coaxing session.

Ken Brecher, executive director of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute and a top aide to Davidson from 1977 to 1986, is among those who marvel at his equanimity in the face of poorly behaving artistes. “He’d just wait them out. He doesn’t like people to dislike him, and he showed that it’s possible to find in a very difficult actor a quality you can admire.”

Many directors say they cherish the ideas of others and don’t like to impose their own. Davidson is widely credited with actually delivering on that ideal.

“Some people only see what they can foresee” when a play is being rehearsed. “He sees what’s happening,” says Alan Alda, who worked intermittently for six years with Davidson and writer Peter Parnell on “QED,” a 2001 play about physicist Richard Feynman that was primarily a one-man show.

Dictating to creative people makes no sense, Davidson says: “That’s death. It’s a form of creative handcuffs.” He’d rather prod actors and designers with questions. The answers, he says, sometimes turn out better than what he had in mind.

“He’s gently tough,” says Louis Gossett Jr., who appeared in four shows at the Taper during the 1970s, including two Davidson directed. “He doesn’t scream or yell, but he’s persistent and he keeps on going to the same point: ‘I still don’t see that moment, I still don’t see that moment,’ until you have to give him the moment. One of the things he said to me was, ‘You’ve got a gift, don’t settle for less.’ ”

Tyne Daly says she experienced a rare Davidson outburst during rehearsals for the 1978 premiere of “Black Angel,” Michael Cristofer’s play about a Nazi war criminal’s past catching up with him after his release from prison. She played the man’s self-centered, morally blinded wife.

“Gordon got furious at me, came at me with face all red, veins in his temples bulging, and said, ‘Will you quit judging this character and just play it?’ ”

It was, she says, a shocking departure from “the old arm-around-the-neck thing” she expected from him. “But it was one of the best instructions about acting I ever got. It was harrowing, but useful.”

Kushner remembers getting an angry earful of Davidson over the phone in 1985, when he was just starting his life as a theater professional. The Taper and the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis had offered him yearlong fellowships as a staff director; Kushner decided he’d get more experience in the smaller pond -- which riled Davidson, who thought they had a deal.

“Gordon called me up and gave me a stern talking-to. It’s the most annoyed he’s ever been. But he said something I’ve never forgotten: ‘Theater is a small community. Talent matters most, but the way you treat people is going to matter throughout your career.’ It’s become one of my watchwords.”

A few years later, an early draft of Kushner’s masterwork found its way to Davidson. “When nobody knew what ‘Angels in America’ was, he immediately loved it and supported it and maintained this incredible level of excitement and enthusiasm all the way through,” the playwright recalls. As the producer and artistic director shepherding the play to its first major production, Kushner says, Davidson gave him and director Eustis savvy input and vital breathing room. “He was involved, but not intrusive. It’s possible to be over-invested to the point where you try to control every aspect of an art form. He’s kind of the perfect combination of somebody who deeply cares, but not to a damaging degree.”

Mark Medoff says his “Children of a Lesser God” (1979), a signature Taper show, was transformed because of one of Davidson’s more pointed and emphatic directorial questions. Casting was about to begin on a version of the play that focused more on the leading man, a teacher, than the combative deaf woman he falls in love with. “He took me into a room and essentially he challenged me by saying I’d learned to write a glib, well-structured male protagonist, but here I had a chance to write a female who could be his equal, but wasn’t. And didn’t I want the challenge of doing that?” Medoff says he wrote furiously through rehearsals, cutting other characters so Sarah, the deaf woman, could come fully alive on stage.

An occasional misfire but all part of the ‘journey’

Davidson has had his share of failures. He acknowledges that he couldn’t inject an animating idea into his 1974 staging of “Hamlet,” with Stacy Keach as the prince. “A disappointing trudge,” is how The Times’ Dan Sullivan saw it.

In 1989, Davidson tried to pilot “Dutch Landscape,” the major-stage debut of Jon Robin Baitz, a young writer he believed in. The show got strafed. “A checklist of don’ts,” Sylvie Drake wrote in her Times review. “How can one explain so many wrong turns in a theater as savvy as the Mark Taper Forum?”

In retrospect, Baitz says, the play was unsalvageable because “I didn’t know the subject enough.” He later reworked the material, about an American family in apartheid-era South Africa, into the more successful “A Fair Country.”

One of Baitz’s vivid memories is Davidson walking him to the fountains on the plaza outside the Taper after the show had bombed, to commiserate and encourage. “I remember his real insistent plea that I go to work right away. It was the only advice that worked.” Far from falling from grace with Davidson because of the flop, Baitz has had four subsequent shows done at the Taper and the Douglas.

Davidson does not shrink from failure, says Brecher, the former Taper associate artistic director. “The last thing most people would do is call the playwright if a show gets terrible reviews. It’s usually, ‘God, I hope I don’t run into him.’ But that’s Gordon’s first call. He feels it is the day you most need to hear from him.”

If there’s a knock on Davidson as a stage director, it’s that he almost always has relied on his fastball -- the straightforward, realistic play that delivers personalities, ideas, emotions and moral quandaries. He never developed a decent curveball -- a way with more abstract, fantasia-like material aimed at painting vivid stage tableaux and transporting audiences to strange or even goofy realms instead of tracing life in its more easily recognizable contours.

“He wasn’t so good on the imaginative plays,” says Edward Parone, one of Davidson’s top assistants from 1967 to 1979. “His ‘Hamlet’ was ghastly, for instance. You have to have a fictive mind for it. There’s a bit of trash in the theater, where you’ve got to be entertaining and dazzle people a bit, however subtly you do it. Gordon doesn’t have enough trash in him for that.”

Fair enough, Davidson says. But while he’s into his late innings, he isn’t leaving the mound. He sees his recent staging of the Douglas’ first play, “A Perfect Wedding” by Charles L. Mee Jr., as the start of a journey -- “journey” being his favorite theatrical buzzword -- into more rollicking, free-form fare.

Mee, known for wild glosses on classic tales and themes, was delighted. Too many directors, he says, take the outlandish strands in his stories as excuses to “add extravagance on top of extravagance, and the whole thing seems completely stupid. I think Gordon felt a little anxious about doing something as crazy as my play. But the characters need to be real human beings. That’s what he brought to it, and he let the extravagance do itself.”

On to directing ... and time with the grandkids

In less than two weeks, life itself will become more free-form for Davidson, although he will continue to oversee the remaining plays in the current season while Ritchie takes over the fundraising and future planning.

Soon, there will be no more need to run anything but his own projects, and he won’t have to keep the seven-days-a-week schedule that amazed Alda: “As far as I can tell, he does theater from at the breakfast table all the way through to the midnight snack.”

Relinquishing Center Theatre Group, Brecher thinks, will buy Davidson time to concentrate his powers as a director in a way he never could before -- at least those that don’t go to his 3-year-old granddaughter. “In terms of energy, I’d say he’s in his early 50s. I think his best work is ahead of him.”