Lee Breuer

Calendar's choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it's because creative abilities come in many forms. As a result, our group's pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series "American Playhouse," to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N' Roses.

Bob Dylan--playwright? Well, not exactly. Some time in the early '60s, a publisher contacted the musician/composer and asked if he wrote anything besides songs. "Sure," Dylan replied. "I write all kinds of (stuff)." A book deal was quickly arranged; the result is "Tarantula," a rambling, evocative, extremely untraditional prose work. Now, 20-plus years and many drafts later, actor Darrell Larson has adapted the piece for the stage. It opens Friday, under his direction, at the Powerhouse.

Well, the waiting is over. Color the first three shows that will kick off the inaugural season of the Doolittle Theatre (formerly the Huntington Hartford) eclectic. Martha Clarke's exotic "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which launches the renovated house Oct. 9-27, is the only real surprise. It will be followed by the previously scheduled pair of Stratford Theatre Festival productions from Canada ("King Lear" and "Twelfth Night," to be brought in Nov.

It was another one of those evenings. Formal. Rowdy. Joyful. Inconsistent. Cliquish. Fair. Unfair. Sweet. Sour. Odd. It's something you can bank on with awards, and the 17th annual Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards presentation, which took place Monday evening in the Blossom Room of the renovated Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, had its assortment of highlights, embarrassments, enthusiasms and plain entertainment.

"What's your play about?" Robert Locke (whose "The Dolly" is at the Burbage Theatre) gets asked that all the time, and he's invariably stumped. "People want easy answers," said the playwright, "so you tell them that it's about child molestation. Of course, then they think that it's a social-issue play--and it's not. "The story begins when a 7-year-old girl tells her mother that her (paternal) grandfather is molesting her, and follows what happens from there.

Susan Simpson carries a theater in her suitcase. Between its frayed tan sides rest the players in her imagination's tragedies and comedies. These actors move through real time and space but can be as abstract as any cartoon. The suitcase cast consists of puppets whose portable performances adapt to any age group or venue. But it's not easy to convince Americans weaned on "Sesame Street" that puppets are more than kid stuff.

A good play has a spine: an organizing idea that makes its scenes all run in the same direction. A theater year tends to be less coherent, but 1985 might be defined as the year Los Angeles theater realized that if it was going to make it, it would have to make on its own. In 1985, the local theater community was still nursing a hangover from the previous summer's Olympic Arts Festival.

Two major Los Angeles theater partnerships have broken up. Civic Light Opera won't be presenting shows at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion after next season. Center Theatre Group won't be co-running the James A. Doolittle Theatre with UCLA after this summer. Each parting is painful. Civic Light Opera --which, from 1981, has meant the Nederlander Organization--feels as if it has been squeezed out at the Music Center in favor of yet more performing-arts groups that can't pay their way.