THEATER AT MOCA : BOY GENIUS SELLARS AND ‘ZANGEZI’

Peter Sellars, boy genius, enfant terrible , recently parted (by more or less mutual consent) from the artistic directorship of something called the American National Theatre at Washington’s Kennedy Center, has finally arrived in the town invented for him: Los Angeles.

And he has zeroed within it on the right place for his exotic brand of iconoclasm: the new Museum of Contemporary Art, about to open on Bunker Hill.

At 29, Sellars is neither a boy, nor (when you meet him) terrible . The strongest image he projects is that of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus”: a playful and boyish conversationalist who dispenses prodigious knowledge in torrents of words punctuated by gusts of laughter--and who may well be a genius.

Certainly the MacArthur Foundation thought so when it gave him one of its no-strings-attached “genius” grants, the effect of which, Sellars said, is to “make you see that you have a responsibility to the profession. You’re given a net. If you don’t go up on the high wire, it’s not excusable.”

The high wire, of course, is Sellars’ favorite place. He’s been on it for the past several years, tackling such risky projects as an intergalactic version of Handel’s “Orlando,” a board-room “Mikado” and, most recently, a bloody, anti-militaristic “Ajax,” which discomfited tout Washington, but was hailed when it moved to the La Jolla Playhouse in September.

To launch MOCA’s 162-seat Ahmanson Auditorium on Thursday, Sellars is concocting a production of what might be termed an old avant-garde verse play: Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikhov’s “Zangezi,” first--and last--performed in Petrograd in 1923.

As Sellars describes it, “It’s this odd combination of Shakespeare and Joyce with a kind of Cubist approach to language thrown in. Its hero is a prophet who understands the language of birds and the powers of language in its broadest sense. Words are chopped in pieces and rearranged. The first word of one line of poetry may be the last word of the previous line spelled backwards. It is this level of linguistic game that’s being played.

“An entire scene, or plane--it’s called a supersaga in 20 planes; futurians (sic) didn’t write in scenes, they wrote in planes--a whole plane is devoted to the emergence of a single letter. Translating that from Russian to English is just insane.”

Tackling the insanity is Paul Schmidt, who, Sellars said, “is this brilliant translator who did the Harper and Row ‘Rimbaud’ and whom I’d known from Harvard. He’d written his graduate thesis on Meyerhold and when I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Meyerhold, Paul’s was one of the only things in English I could refer to.

“He sent me one of my favorite plays, ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy,’ which I’d directed in college from the Guy Daniels translation--not very good. When Paul sent me his I thought I have to do it, but here I was running something called the American National Theatre, I can only do American plays, so I said I’ll have to put it aside for a while.

“And then the Deere Foundation hired him to do the complete Khlebnikov over five years, whom nobody’s ever heard of because he’s so untranslatable.

“Maybe half of the Russian language consists of words that have French or at least Latin origins, and Khlebnikov refused to use them. He would only use Russian root words, and if a word with a Russian root didn’t exist, he’d invent one.

“There are large episodes written in what Khlebnikov called Zaum (pronounced Za-oom) which is his transrational language--that is to say, language that is taken in through means other than our rational minds. We have economists, we have other people who can deal with the rational. You hire artists to deal with the world at some other level. Khlebnikov went right for this sort of parallel world existing next to ours.

“He begins with this notion of speaking in tongues. The first two scenes of ‘Zangezi’ are totally in this transrational language and he has an episode in the middle written in ‘star language.’ Paul has been very faithful to the shifts of tone. Some things feel like formal proclamations, others like street talk, and others move on to a totally different level.”

Is it something in the order of the language in Gertrude Stein’s “Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights”?

“You get a lot of the Gertrude Stein,” said Sellars. “You see, that’s really where I grew up--directing Stein. The first plays I knew were Stein and (Samuel) Beckett: a notion of language that doesn’t add. My predilection is for poetic drama. I rarely direct prose pieces. In ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ (staged last year at the Kennedy Center) I had to insert all this Byron to get a poetic edge. That’s why one keeps coming back to Shakespeare or Chekhov (here Sellars substituted a guttural “h” for the hard “k” Americans use).

“What’s not known about Chekhov,” he said “is that his language resembles Stein and Beckett. Most translations smooth it all out, but Chekhov in the original consists of sentence fragments: a small vocabulary of words repeated in odd combinations; sentences in which the verbs and the nouns don’t agree, where the speaker loses track of his thoughts and these wild, sort of unintentional psychological rambles occur.

“At the same time, since the sentences really aren’t making sense, they are, at a much deeper level, expressing, exactly, what’s underneath the rational. The undervalued Chekhov in this country is the Chekhov who was influenced by (Maurice) Maeterlinck.”

Maeterlinck’s fantastical/allegorical world would seem like a natural for Sellars, who claims Peter Hall has been after him to do work by the Belgian playwright.

“The reason it’s so hard for me to do foreign work,” he said, “is that I have to have a new (read collaborative) translator. I won’t work from a published translation. The translator has made a whole set of assumptions that I’m not a party to. That’s intolerable to me.

“When I look at Shakespeare, I look at the language in a very precise way. I’m able to say this speech has the following images in it, they relate to each other in this way and the meter tells you the emphasis should fall on that word.

“When you’re working from a translation, you have no idea (what may have been there). My productions are based on a precise reading of certain meanings. It’s the only way I can take the risks I take.

“In fact, it’s once you get to that level of precision, usually, that you’re pushed to an extreme interpretation, because you realize the text is far more radical than the standard gloss (allows). Poetic structure demands that you set up something that has an attitude towards reality. I used to do one Shakespeare a year (he’s done eight so far). It was a goal I’d set in my last year of high school: Mozart and Shakespeare, one a year.”

In high school, Sellars did a “Tempest” with puppets. A number of his other Shakespeares were done in Denver, where he also ran a children’s theater for five summers, using puppets extensively.

“I grew up in the puppet theater,” explained Sellars, who was born and reared in Pittsburgh. His parents were teachers who were “not in the performing arts at all. My early interest was in the outdoors. Herpatology. I had a huge collection of snakes. Reptiles and amphibians. All of that.”

But he got his theatrical start at age 10 when he apprenticed with a Pittsburgh puppet company called the Loveliest Marionette Theatre.

“I was very, very lucky,” he said. “When I was 12, Margot Lovelace, who ran it, said to me, ‘Peter, you want to look at a book called “The Scenography of (Czech designer) Josef Svoboda.” ’ So at the age of 12 that’s what I thought scene design was. At the same time I was taught to do Punch and Judy from an 18th-Century manuscript. I was given these real commedia dell’arte roots and the roots of a real tradition.

“The first adult plays I saw were by the French Surrealists. Every spring, they did an adult production--De Ghelderode, (Jean) Cocteau’s ‘Wedding on the Eiffel Tower.’ It was only later that I read Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and all of that. I’ve been doing theater now for 19 years--a lot of it hands on, in shopping malls, in parks,” he said, referring to his Denver days, “with the real public.”

As for learning to read scripts precisely, “When I got to (Phillips Academy in) Andover,” he said, “I was given ‘Finnegan’s Wake,’ Martin Buber and (Peter) Handke and told, ‘See what you make of this.’ ”

After high school Sellars spent a year in Paris, “the year (Peter) Brook had arrived. I saw Giorgio Strehler’s ‘Cherry Orchard’ and the Bread and Puppet Theatre’s ‘Resurrection,’ this huge, 4 1/2-hour show they did for the American bicentennial that could only be seen in Europe. They couldn’t get any bookings in America! I saw it in Paris and went back six nights in a row. I just was stunned. They are preserving a level of purity for the rest of us.

“You go there (to Glover, Vt., where the Bread and Puppet resides) and you say, ‘Yes, this is what it meant. This is the anthropological function we were intended to serve as theater artists.’

“Then when I went to Harvard I was very fortunate to work with very high-powered people. Harvard has something called a special concentration. I was my own major, my own department. I could take any course in the university I wanted. Most of the courses I took were one-on-one with professors and I was able to get my hands on actual primary source materials.”

Sellars’ sponsor at Harvard was Yuri Streidter (“one of the foremost Slavic structuralists in the world”). He introduced Sellars to the poetics of Russian drama. “So this whole period of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov,” Sellars said, “I learned from him.

During his year in Europe, Sellars also visited Moscow. “It was a very powerful experience for me. I saw hundreds of shows and realized I wanted to concentrate on Russian things at some level--and here I am, very much working in that vineyard.”

Sellars won’t let anyone videotape his productions because he deeply believes in the ephemeral quality of theater, its instability.

“What I put into a show is the smallest part of what people see. The joy of theater is that we do this thing to provoke the widest possible range of response. What we intend to mean is not the point. What people get is the point.

“The theater is when everybody who sees it feels something a little different. When somebody says, ‘That was fantastic!’ and the next person says, ‘What happened? What was that?’ And for weeks after, not being really sure.”

Having lived with notoriety almost from the start of his still-young career, what defenses has he built up against its damages?

“One gets used to it,” he replied. “I’m relentlessly private. Nobody can reach me. I say ‘no’ to almost every job. I only work under the most precise circumstances, where I’m able to see exactly who else is in the room. It’s a completely protected environment.

“What I do is based less on how good I am than on how good the other people are. As long as I’m able to ensure that I’m working with a certain group of people, actors of the caliber of David Warrilow and Ruth Maleczech (both in “Zangezi”), as long as I have Jim Ingalls to do the lights, George Tsypin to design the set, it forms a cocoon.”

Warrilow, for his part, says of the experience with “Zangezi”: “I feel I’m in the right place at the right time with the right people doing what I’m supposed to be doing, which not many people can say. The blessings never stop. . . .”

For Maleczech, “It’s the collection of people who are creating the work that is the most important thing. It’s a wonderful chemistry--a volatile energy and a kind of sweetness.”

As for Sellars’ parting comments: “I really dislike this cult of the director that has sprung up in recent years,” he said, acknowledging that a lot of people might accuse him of partaking of it.

“It drives me crazy, because what you see on stage are rarely my ideas. I’ve had some participation in them, I’ve organized them so they make sense and line up, but (they belong to) all the people I work with.”

Including the dead playwright?

“Absolutely.”