Tenure ends, legacy endures

Gordon Davidson watched his career flash before his eyes Monday evening as the Center Theatre Group celebrated his 38 years as the artistic director-producer of downtown Los Angeles’ premiere showcase for new and traveling productions. Nearly all of the rumpled director’s world has literally been a stage, and highlights of it were relived in a bittersweet, star-filled tribute at the Ahmanson Theatre.

From a box seat in the theater, Davidson and his family gazed down as friends and colleagues warmly recalled and re-enacted some of the artistic triumphs that were born at the Music Center and moved on to Broadway and national acclaim.

Sidney Poitier, Jane Kaczmarek, John Lithgow, Carol Burnett and others praised Davidson for producing theater with a social conscience and nourishing diverse voices, including that of his notable collaborator August Wilson, who developed most of his plays about black life at CTG. Edward James Olmos boogied in a selection from “Zoot Suit” by Luis Valdez and told the crowd how the musical nurtured by Davidson remains one of the only Latino-themed show to make it to Broadway.

A high note was struck by Tony Kushner, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Angels in America” was developed at the Mark Taper Forum and whose civil rights-era musical “Caroline, or Change” is currently playing at the Ahmanson. In a breathless encomium, which drew a standing ovation, the playwright lashed out at the Bush administration’s National Endowment for the Arts for “placating homophobic, sexist, racist theocrats in Congress.” And he applauded Davidson for being a foremost member of the generation of “theater shapers who rescued American theater from the prison house of commerce.”

“Some debts are unpayable,” Kushner said. “I owe you one such debt and so does the American theater.”

The gala evening, which raised more than $1 million for the new Gordon Davidson Endowment Fund for Artistic Excellence, marked the changing of the guard at CTG, the umbrella organization that also includes the new Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City. In January, Davidson will be succeeded by Michael Ritchie, who headed the Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Davidson, 71, will oversee the rest of the season as founding director, and the two-time Tony winner will continue to direct plays. “I’d be less than honest if I said I didn’t have mixed emotions about handing my baby on to someone else,” he said in an interview. “And yet I know it’s necessary and I really believe I’m ready for it. I don’t call it retirement. I call it moving on.”