S.D. Symposium Studies Fate of Classics in Modern Theater : Stage: Scholars and practitioners are unable to agree on a role model for staging such works.

LA JOLLA —  Three things you can count on at any symposium about theater: It will not accomplish what it set out to do; it will serve as a great chance for theater people to network; it will be highly political. Things to watch for: contradictions, ad nauseam repetition and hidden agendas.

All of the above prevailed at the Price Center on the campus of UC San Diego last weekend, where about 350 theater people gathered from all points of the Southland, from across the nation and even from across the water (keynote speaker was English director Jonathan Miller) to talk about “The Classics in Contemporary Theatre.”

It should come as no surprise that there were as many points of view as there were bodies present, that most discussions wandered off the point and that it was voices from among the sea of listeners that most frequently steered the talk back in the direction where it needed to go.

Roughly speaking, participants fell into three categories: scholars and academics (most notable among them Jan Kott, author of “Shakespeare Our Contemporary,” and scholar/critic Martin Esslin); theater practitioners (from Anne Bogart of Rhode Island’s Trinity Rep to George Coates of the George Coates Performance Works in San Francisco to New York’s Classic Stage’s Carey Perloff and the La Jolla Playhouse’s Des McAnuff), and the public, consisting mostly of people belonging to the first two groups but not serving on panels.

The gauntlet was tossed early by panelist/director/critic Charles Marowitz, who, having frequently reinvented Shakespeare, spoke largely about doing that. He was perhaps abetted in this narrow view by the implicit fact that Miller is a Brit and that, out of about 26, only two panelists were non-Anglos: playwright and scholar Paul Carter Harrison, and director Rene Buch, founder of New York’s 21-year-old Reportorio Espanol. (More on this later.)

Jan Kott broadened the area of definition to include the Greeks, Romans and absurdists (namely Samuel Beckett and Bertolt Brecht), and Esslin, declaring academic thinking narrow, widened tradition further to encompass “cultural material of all types,” from Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin (as he clarified later) to film, TV and “I Love Lucy.” Culture, he argued, “is never fixed. It is changing from second to second.”

Esslin also took note of the importance of cultural context to enjoyment. “It is one thing to see ‘Hamlet,’ ” he said, “and another to see Marowitz’s 20-minute collage of ‘Hamlet.’ If you know one, you get immeasurably more from the other. Many directors think that to make a classic relevant you put ‘Hamlet’ in Alaska.

“Restaging is rewriting,” he responded to Marowitz’s notion that to contemporize a classic is to tack on “an accretion of connotations to a basic text,” citing as examples the Anouilh and Brecht “Antigones” and “The Planet of the Apes,” which he called “a rewriting of ‘The Tempest.’ ”

A panel on experimental theater and the classics got no closer to dealing with the subject than to speak of it in paradoxically broad general terms and from highly individual points of view. No one was able to define a classic or single out valid ways of doing classics in the modern theater for the simple reason that, as Esslin said, the classics elude definition and there are any number of valid (and invalid) ways of doing them.

Miller, who recently staged highly contemporized (and controversial) versions of “The Mikado” and “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” in Los Angeles, dwelt heavily in his keynote address on the inheritance of texts as artifacts, and on the popular misconception that “if something does not bear a patina from the past (including the ‘weathering and mutilation’ of a work of art), it is not authentic.” He believes fidelity is a form of forgery. A script is “a promissory note with a view to a performance. If there was a finite idea of what behavior should be, psychoanalysis would never have flourished.”

In keeping with the title of his address (“Survival of the Fittest?”), Miller questioned what is fit to survive and how we maintain custody of the works, which he said (with a remarkable and unchallenged lack of reference to his own part in the assault) have been “hijacked to realize their relevance to modern times,” adding that he has “some sort of feeling that things have gone too far. . . . Our desire to make these (classic works, still undefined) mold to our sense of urgency is a form of cultural suburbanism.”

“We must come to terms with the mentalite of (previous centuries). We are retreating from our own past at an increasingly alarming rate. It is an assault on the plenary notion of culture.”

Why . . . yes.

A panel that Miller moderated the next day with designers Robert Israel (who designed his “Mahagonny”) and John Arnone enlightened the audience on the relationship of designers with directors, physical space and texts.

There was some extrapolation on forgetting experience in order to retrieve it, but not much on whose or in what classics.

Fortunately, the simpatico Rene Buch was vociferous about widening the scope of the classics to include Hispanic and other cultures (Calderon, Lorca, Moliere, Racine) as Harrison had earlier single-handedly broadened it to include the Afro-American one.

And a number of vocal members of the listening public joined in, including UCSD Professors Jorge Huerta and Floyd Gaffney. They heatedly protested misconceptions in multiracial casting and the absence of more color among panelists, which resulted in the tendency to restrict the discussions to Anglo-European traditions.

A form of round-table discussion that closed the symposium Sunday saw more of the program’s failures of omission vented: the put-down of Americans, the lack of definition, the frustration at the focus on England and Europe, the absence of actors on panels, the lily-white complexion of things.

In the end, the weekend was as much about sociology as it was about art. And, yes, there was probably something there for everyone--if nothing more than something to rebel against.