The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 408

Robert Zentis: The Play Sets the Style BY SUSAN LA TEMPA UJ a. Jfe Donald Moffat, left, and Dana Ekar keeping their appointment in LAAT's production of "Waiting for Godot." Waking Up 'Godot' at LAAT 3 BY DAN SULLIVAN a CO "Charming evening we're having." "Unforgettable." "Andifsnotover." "Apparently not." "Its only beginning." "Waiting for Godot" reunites designer Robert Zentis with Gwen Arner, who directed LAAT's highly acclaimed "The Kitchen" in 1975. Zentis' design for "The Kitchen" resulted in his third L.A. Drama Critics Circle award. This will be the second time Zentis has designed "Godot" The first was for the West Coast Theater Company and Zentis describes the differences between the shows thus: "At LAAT it will be like a woodblock print as opposed to the West Coast show, which was like a water-color painting." At LAAT the rock called for in "Godot" is a box and the tree is a bare-branched, desiccated tree.

The moon that rises during the performance is a large cut-out suggested by one of the photos of the moon taken by the Apollo astronauts. Contrasting with this stark simplicity is the lush contemporary set that Zentis designed this winter for the Onion Company's "The Kramer." In this play, the action shifts continually from location to location sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Zentis brought director Patti Kane a flexible single unit office set A unique ceiling light fixture indicated several "offices" (actually the same space). Two theater productions in as many months would seem enough activity for one designer, but Zentis is also doing "Point of Departure" and Guys and Dolls" at the U.S. International University in San Diego and "The Hostage" at Santa Monica City College.

In addi-dion, he's designing a multimillion-dollar World's Fair-type exhibit, "The Spokane Story" for the city of Spokane. "I almost never say no to an assignment," Zentis confesses. "I enjoy the incredible range of things I do every day. There's never a chance to get bored." As a playwrighting student at Yale. Zentis learned that he "didn't have anything to say as a playwright" Instead "I was designing wonderful sets and then writing plays to go with them.

Everything I had to say could best be communicated in visual terms." Now "my motivation and value is in discovering the soul of a script its reason for being there and then allowing that to be communicated as fully as possible. "I try to figure out why the author spent the energy to write this show and even more how he actually said it Everything in a theatrical experience has to be focused toward one impression. If the words are florid, if they're full of images, if they're rich then the way the actor moves must reflect that and the things the actor wears has to have the same quality. And the environment must convey the same thing. Otherwise you're dividing the audience's brain and the impression is watered down.

"One of the reasons I've been kept so busy in the small theaters is because I automatically assume that there's no budget I've worked with no budget for a long time and I've come to realize that every penny spent has got to be seen." The first step, then, is to check storage areas for flats and furniture used on previous shows. Then he thinks about the size and shape of the theater. Low ceilings at the Onion Company, for example, called for vertical lines on the "Kramer" set Still another consideration is the tone of the play. "Green Julia" at the West Coast Theater Company centered on two college students. Zentis' cluttered dorm room was intended to make the audience comfortable with the characters before the play began.

Zentis has to know how to get along with carpenters, salesmen and engineers. He has to know about hydraulics, pneumatics and the stress of steel. He's onstage opening night carefully leaving a single cupboard door opened to lend an air of mystery and hint what's within. He sees that the newspaper being read in a 1942 play isn't yesterday's Times. Is there a Zentis trademark? "I hope not I think the most important thing about a design is that it strengthens the text of the play.

Actually I might design many different productions of the same show and each would be completely different and each would have a validity." La Tempa is a local free-lance writer. In a sense "Godot" is the longest music-hall routine ever written, a play for a great comedy team rather than mere actors. It was considered daring back in the '50s to hire Bert Lahr to star in the first American production, but the producers should have gone further than that they should have hired Bobby Clark too. The Lunts would have known what to do with Beckett's play and so would Laurel and Hardy. Failing them, Elcar and Moffat are practically perfect Elcar as Vladimir (Didi to his intimates) is a soft, bandy-legged chap who believes in not making waves and hoping for the best Moffat as Estragon (Gogo, at home) is a skinny longfaced chap who is always ready for the worst and always gets it They are chalk and cheese, Mr.

Inside and Mr. Outside, Jack Sprat and his lady, every great team who ever stuck together out of sheer polar attraction. And they have polished their routine to the point where it's like one half of a mind talking with the other half. Kept it fresh, too. "Godot" isn't commonly thought of as a positive play, but at LAAT it seems an affirmation of the importance of putting on a class act even if you're not sure anybody's out there.

It has always been Beckett's rationale for writing rather than being silent If all we're doing here is waiting, we might at least wait with style. ELCAR: (reasonably) It passes the time. MOFFAT: (the grouch) It would have passed in any case. ELCAR: But not so quickly. Friends? Not always.

But partners. It's a healthier relationship than the master-slave thing between Ralph Waite's Pozzo and' Bruce French's Lucky. Here again our actors play the lines and the situation without going for big meanings. Waite especially takes care not to be too heavy. He suggests a circus ringmaster (Liza Stewart's togs help) rather than a Simon Legree.

But it's clear that Pozzo and Lucky are in a more painful place than Didi and Gogo, that the rope claims them both. French is obviously in a bad way (his manic aria on philosophy suggests a learned man becoming some kind of horrible talking dog) but Waite's irrational outbursts show that he is too. Beckett's hell if this is hell has levels. If Didi and Gogo are wandering around the top level lost, Pozzo and Lucky seem to have been churned up from the bottom. But maybe it isn't hell.

Waite consults his watch when he wants to remember how many years ago something happened and we think of "Alice in Wonderland," another story about strange people in an unidentifiable landscape. Where we know we are at all times, is a theater. Robert Zentis' setting and lights tell us that Please Turn to Page 55 "Its awfvl." "Worse than the pantomime." "The circus." "The music haU." "The circus." That's a passage from "Waiting for Godot," one of the great texts of the modern theater but not always an easy play to sit through, particularly when it is being performed as one of the great texts of the modern theater. We have all endured "Godots" where flat voices, monotonous mise en scene and an inability to set the timing on passages like the above were presented as aesthetic virtues. Beckett (we were advised) was supposed to be boring.

Gwen Arner's production of "Waiting for Godot" at the Los Angeles Actor's Theater gives the lie to that Ms. Arner and her five players have done the simple and revolutionary thing of approaching "Godot" as a play that will not only work, but amuse, if you pay strict attention to its rhythms and to the inner lives of its characters, leaving its larger implications to the audience. Twenty years ago when the play was new, everybody was trying to figure out what it meant Not even its characters understood it "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful." It all had to be a symbol of something else. At LAAT the question of "meaning" never comes up. Like any good story it means itself.

Once upon a time, there were two tramps named Didi and Gogo who had an appointment to meet a man named Godot While they were waiting they had many small adventures, such as trying to pull off Gogo's shoes (very much an adventure when your feet have swollen up like balloons) and meeting a genuine slave driver pulling a poor devil around on a rope. Finally the moon came out and it was time to meet Godot. The tramps at LAAT (Donald Moffat and Dana El-car) may stand for all mankind, but first they're tramps. Godot may stand for God, but first he's the man they have the appointment with. Where is it all happening? Why, here.

And just as we suddenly find it a clear play, simple in the way that many of the great myths are simple, so we find it a lively one. "Nothing happens?" Nonsense. With actors like these something is happening every minute. "Return the ball for once, Gogo, can't you?" But in fact the ball is in constant motion..