Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 01:11:00

The farthest seat is sixteen yards from the stage - a fact that shaped fifty years of American drama. The Mark Taper Forum, the drum-shaped theatre rising from a reflecting pool at 135 North Grand Avenue on the LA Music Center plaza, was dedicated on 9 April 1967 and became the West Coast's defining home for new plays. The building is Welton Becket's jewel: a 140-foot circular pavilion clad in dark split-face granite, its cantilevered upper band decorated with a frieze of 50,800 abalone shell tiles, standing between the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Ahmanson Theatre in the complex Dorothy Chandler willed into existence as LA's answer to Lincoln Center. The interior is the thesis: 739 seats bank steeply in a semicircle around a thrust stage with no proscenium and no curtain - fourteen rows, nobody distant - a geometry that founding artistic director Gordon Davidson weaponised for intimate, argumentative new work, starting with an opening production of The Devils controversial enough to scandalise the dedication crowd that included Governor Reagan. The premiere list is American theatre history: Zoot Suit, Children of a Lesser God and Angels in America all developed here under Center Theatre Group - Tony Kushner's epic winning its Pulitzer after its Taper run - and the theatre itself collected the 1977 special Tony for regional excellence, cementing a national pipeline from this stage to Broadway. The 2008 renovation modernised without betrayal: a 30-million-dollar rebuild by Rios Clementi Hale upgraded backstage, seating and accessibility inside the protected 1967 shell, keeping the room's essential closeness while the Music Center added Grand Park and Disney Hall to the surrounding civic acropolis. Practical notes: the Civic Center/Grand Park Metro station puts the plaza a short escalator ride up Bunker Hill; every seat is genuinely close but the center sections face the thrust squarely, the reflecting pool plaza at dusk is the arrival moment, and pairing a Taper play with a pre-show walk through Disney Hall's gardens makes the definitive Music Center evening.