Art Will Perform Two Pluys At Los Angeles June Olympics

The Harvard affiliated American Rapertory Theatro (ART) has been chosen to perform at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles next June, an Olympics official announced yesterday.

Six American groups will participate in the 10-week international celebration of the arts, which will overlap with the 1984 Olympic Games. Scheduled to begin June 1, the festival is budgeted at $10 million and will feature London's Royal Opera, West Germany's Pina Bausch and Wuppertal Tanz Theater, film festivals, and art works from the Louvre.

The ART will present two productions in Los Angeles, a revival of Richard Brinkley Sheridan's the School for Scandal, directed by Jonathan Miller, and Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author which will be directed by Andrei Serban, Scandal was the last presentation of the 1982-83 season, while Six Characters will be performed this May.

"The two plays show two sides of our classical work staged by two of our most exciting directors," Robert Brustein, artistic director of the ART said yesterday, adding that the performances at the Olympics would "enhance the prestige of the ART.

"Part of our policy is to tour and bring our work to as many places as we can," he said.

"We picked six American compactness outside of Los Angeles on the being for even excellence," Bill Hackman, a spokesman for the Olympic Organizing Committee, said yesterday, adding, "We tried to keep a variety of regional theatres in mind."

The Times-Mirror Company, the official sponsor of the festival, will pay the ART for its services. Income from ticket sales will go to the Olympic Organizing Committee, according to Jedediah Wheeler, booking agent for the ART's tours.

"This tour will show most of the world that our dear Cambridge-based company is of international significance," Wheeler said.

Wheeler said that a nationwide tour for the ART is currently slated to begin next fall. This fall, the ART toured New England, and last year the company toured several European nations, a venture Wheeler deemed "a smashing success."

Other American theatres selected to participate in the festival include the Goodman Theatre of Chicago, the Negro Ensemble Company, and the National Theatre of the Deaf. International groups include the French Theatre du Soleil and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano.