CSUF Theater Production Is Star at Collegiate Festival : Arts: AIDS-themed musical takes top national honors. Another Cal Fullerton play is also honored.

James R. Taulli expects to arrive sometime today at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington at the end of a coast-to-coast drive from Cal State Fullerton.

His won’t be the most glamorous entrance a stage director ever devised for himself: He will be pulling up to the loading dock in a yellow rental truck to deliver the set of “All That He Was,” the top prize-winner in next week’s 25th annual American College Theater Festival.

But Taulli wouldn’t have it any other way.

For nearly a year the 34-year-old graduate student has shepherded the AIDS-themed musical on an extraordinary journey, both literal and artistic.

Under his guidance the production has gone from a bare-bones revue with a few songs and monologues to a spare but affecting full-scale show suggestive of a pop opera. And in the process it has reaped a devoted following along with some glittering collegiate prizes.

“What we’ve discovered as more and more people see the show,” he said recently, “is that it’s a tremendously healing piece. All kinds of people have strong positive reactions to it--people who’ve had experience with AIDS and people who haven’t. And that’s why it should be seen in the nation’s capital, not just because of the prizes.”

“The prizes are nice, though,” he added.

Nice is an understatement.

In an unprecedented feat, according to Kennedy Center officials, Cal State Fullerton has landed not one but two shows among the six best college productions chosen for the festival, which opens Sunday at the center’s Terrace Theater and runs through April 27. The other is “The Manager,” an offbeat comedy about short-circuited relationships.

Both were selected from a total of 820 productions judged on college campuses nationwide and in regional competitions held earlier this year.

Moreover, the pair of CSUF shows have taken the festival’s top honors for original works.

“No college has ever had two productions chosen in the same year,” said Susan Shaffer, the Kennedy Center official who administers the $3-million festival. “What is perhaps more impressive is they’re both originals. Most shows that get picked are revivals.”

The authors of “All That He Was”--Larry Johnson (who wrote the book and lyrics) and Cindy O’Connor (who wrote the score)--were recently named winners of the 1993 National Student Playwriting Award.

They will collect $2,500 in prize money along with offers of representation by the William Morris Agency, membership in the Dramatists Guild and publication by Samuel French Inc., a major licenser of theatrical properties.

Additionally, “All That He Was” is the winner of the Kennedy Center Musical Theater Award, which carries an honorarium of $3,000 for the authors and $1,000 for Cal State Fullerton.

Darrin Shaughnessy, who wrote “The Manager,” was picked to receive the festival’s National Short Play Award.

He will get $1,000 and the same offers of agency representation, guild membership and publication as Johnson and O’Connor.

Festival sponsors will pay the expenses of cast, crew and creators of “All That He Was” and “The Manager”--more than two dozen people--on their trip to Washington, Shaffer said.

But that isn’t all.

Jim Gray, the graduate student who plays the lead in both CSUF productions, is up for the national Irene Ryan Award for best college actor, the festival’s equivalent of the Heisman Trophy.

The winner of the acting prize, which carries a $2,500 scholarship, will be decided Sunday night from a field of 16 nominees, all previously selected as regional winners.

Gray will compete with a monologue from Robin Swados’ “A Quiet End” and an excerpt from Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” in which he plays a murderer who has come to kill Clarence.

For Johnson, who says he had “a certain hesitation” about his skills as a dramatist, the playwriting award comes as a welcome but complete surprise.

“I had no expectation of winning it,” he said recently. “To be perfectly honest, it floored me. I thought we might win for musical theater. The writing award I hadn’t even considered. It is generally given to a non-musical piece.”

Johnson, who is 27, was born and raised in San Diego. A Broadway buff from childhood, he will get his master of arts in theater from Cal State Fullerton in June. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1988 from UCLA, where he first teamed up with O’Connor.

“Without trying to sound cocky, I’ve always known I could turn a good lyric,” he said. “But I thought I was going to end up writing lyrics for other people’s work. I was willing to do that, even though it upset me a little because it meant I would always be filling in the details of somebody else’s creative vision.”

“This award,” he added, “has helped my self-esteem.”

Johnson says the idea of doing a musical about a young man who has died of AIDS was prompted by the death of two friends cut down by the disease just as they were beginning to receive recognition for their own creative efforts.

The friends, Bill Sawyer and Bryan Shucker, died during rehearsals of “Babes,” a show the two wrote that went on to win a 1988 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for outstanding musical production.

“I had this extreme sense of loss,” said Johnson, a soft-spoken, slightly built artist-activist who is openly gay.

“I felt devastated not only because they were my friends,” he said, “but because they were artists who weren’t allowed to fulfill their potential. It made me realize that after you die your life is what you’ve left behind--it is all the people you knew, and that you continue living through them.”

Thus, Johnson says, the dramatic structure of “All That He Was” is shaped not so much by the central figure--though he is the unwavering focus of attention--as by the conflicts, passions and memories he stirs in the characters who surround him from beginning to end.

O’Connor, also 27, describes the score for the show as “melodic but rhythmically erratic.” She traces her taste in musical theater to Stephen Sondheim, early Andrew Lloyd Webber (“with an emphasis on early “) and, above all, to Richard Maltby Jr. and David Shire (“my favorite melody writer in the world”).

“Some of the songs in ‘All That He Was’ are more rock and some are more operatic,” she said. “I didn’t consciously write them in different styles, but there’s no question they came out that way. I guess a few of the guys get to fulfill their rock-tenor fantasies in this show.”

A pianist since age 5, O’Connor took up music composition as a teen-ager. She was born in Santa Fe, N.M., and moved to the San Fernando Valley early on, growing up in Canoga Park in the San Fernando Valley. She says she dropped the notion of a concert career during high school, when she became interested in acting and singing.

O’Connor and Johnson initially teamed up at UCLA, where she received a bachelor’s degree in theater in 1989. At UCLA they collaborated on “Real World,” a one-act spoof of the golden age of Broadway musicals. More than aanything else, however, it was a trial run to see if they could work together, he said.

The pair began working in earnest on Johnson’s idea for “All That He Was” during the summer of 1992. O’Connor registered as an extension student at Cal State Fullerton in the fall. And in November the CSUF theater department staged the show’s first production on campus at the Arena Theatre.

“When I got the script in the summer, it was a half-hour long,” recalled Taulli, who grew up in Huntington Beach and took his bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona. “It had seven songs with some monologues that needed to be fleshed out. But the mainstream appeal was obvious.”

“For me, personally, it also became a very cathartic piece,” he said. “It was the reason I did it in the first place. My best friend was dying of AIDS. I buried him in January.”

Taulli helped enlarge the show with suggestions for scenes as well as monologues and used “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s classic piece of Americana, to some degree as a model for its semi-realistic format, stripped-down design and presentational style of performance.

Indeed, with its storytelling flashbacks and a central figure who is both narrator of and participant in the drama--to say nothing of its heartfelt simplicity--”All That He Was” might be described as a musical “Our Town” for the ‘90s.

It is a description both Taulli and Johnson feel comfortable with.

“If you want to know something else I stole from, it’s ‘Working,’ ” Johnson noted, referring to the musical revue based on a 1974 book of the same name by Studs Terkel. “I think any artist who tells you he hasn’t stolen from anyone else is lying.”

But most of all, Johnson credits “the two Jims”--Taulli and Gray--with having “a more substantial impact on the work than anyone” other than O’Connor.

“The heart of the play had to be Jim Gray’s character,” he explained. “The audience needs to know him intimately. He was totally undeveloped in the original script. Jim’s reading of the role changed that. His performance defined it.”

In the meantime, still left for this production as a whole to define is whether its impact at Kennedy Center will be large or small.

The theater festival opens as hundreds of thousands of people are expected to flood into the nation’s capital for a week of demonstrations leading up to the gay-rights march on Washington on April 25.

With “All That He Was” scheduled Monday as the theater festival’s first production, the coincidence in timing is not lost on Johnson.

“I’m planning to stay for the whole week,” he said. “Having our show on just before the march couldn’t come at a better moment. It’s incredible.”