London's Barbican Center takes an unusual, year-long look at the provocative pleasures of cultural life in the U.S.

By EMILY MITCHELL /LONDON

hen John Mahoney rolled on stage at London's Barbican Center in a wheelchair last week, it was a flamboyant entrance and one that had been long delayed. Best known in Europe for his work in films and on TV--currently as the crusty Dad in Frasier--Mahoney was born in Britain and started acting at 11, playing Polonius in a Manchester children's theater. In his late teens he moved to the U.S. where, after a period editing a medical journal, he took to acting again in his late 30s. But in a career spanning more than two decades, he had yet to appear before a London audience until the opening night of the 1939 hit The Man Who Came to Dinner, starring as the acerbic, egomaniacal critic Sheridan Whiteside. "I can't tell you how much I have wanted to do this," Mahoney says. "It is amazingly exciting and fulfilling for me."

For audiences too, though perhaps not exactly in the way they might have expected. The comedy is about a self-centered celebrity--he's friends with everyone from H.G. Wells to Mahatma Gandhi--who tyrannizes an Ohio household when he is confined to the premises by an injured hip, and its director is hitmaker James Burrows, of TV's Cheers and Frasier. The production is part of the Barbican's $5.2 million celebration of U.S. culture and is an import from Chicago's in-your-face Steppenwolf Theater Company. For a troupe famed for its risk-taking, incendiary style, the 59-year-old Broadway classic is an unusual choice. "Every once in a while we feel guilty about what we put our audiences through," says Mahoney. "So as a treat we give them something like The Man Who Came to Dinner."

Treating audiences to the unexpected may just be the purpose of the entire, year-long enterprise at the Barbican. One goal of the varied program is to challenge the thinking of people who consider that Made-in-America means bland taste, if not outright bad taste. Overall, the festival's creators are determined to demonstrate the dynamic, provocative side of American cultural life and highlight its diversity, honoring both the mainstays of the mainstream as well as the rule-breakers and iconoclasts on the fringe.

The Barbican's look across the water at the arts of Britain's former colonial outpost is now past its halfway point, and visitors to the center's concert halls, theaters, galleries, cinemas and foyers have already been treated to an almost dizzying array of readings, films, music, drama, dance and exhibits. A multi-media collaboration by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson had a libretto based on poetry of an ancient Persian mystic; American choreographer Trisha Brown directed her first opera, Monteverdi's Orfeo; Jazz legend Max Roach played with a 16-piece gospel choir, and customized Harley-Davidson motorcycles shared exhibit space with spare, serene Shaker furniture. One major disappointment was Cindy Sherman's last-minute withdrawal of a show of 150 works from her photographic series. By the time the festival closes its doors in December the Barbican will have presented 12 stage productions, 18 visual arts exhibits, 90 concerts and more than 150 movie screenings.

The festival's overall title--Inventing America--has a double meaning. On one side, explains Barbican arts director Graham Sheffield, "is the Barbican inventing its own version of America. The other way to take it is the notion of America as a society that is constantly re-inventing itself and developing in strange, unusual and provocative ways." A few critics have failed to discover any unifying concept, and labeled the program a hodgepodge. The Guardian's Richard Gott dismissed it as "an overly hyped ragbag." Sheffield counters that others have seen the loose, but unifying, line through the festival's diversity. "I'm pleased that audience reaction has been strong," he notes. "Some of it is controversial, but most of it is favorable." More than half of those who have so far ventured to the architecturally brutal Barbican complex are there for the first time, which indicates that the program is attracting a new audience.

That was precisely the hope Sheffield had when he joined the Barbican in late 1995. The Royal Shakespeare Company was moving out, and there was space and time to fill. Some of that space is currently filled with the paintings, screen prints, photographs, room constructions and video and film installations of Andy Warhol. Four decades of his work, focusing on his fascination with celebrity, glamour and style and on the intersections between art and popular culture, are on view until mid-August.

Still to arrive at the Barbican is an all-encompassing exploration of music in a program from Oct. 23 to Dec. 1 called "American Pioneers." Works by Elliott Carter and John Cage will be showcased, and the other-world instruments dreamed up by cult legend Harry Partch will be played in Britain for the first time. Twyla Tharp and 11 members of her company are bringing six works by the choreographer, including the British premiere of the critically praised Roy's Joys, set to music by jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Another work is Tharp's "66", a tribute to the U.S. highway that winds from Chicago to L.A. Choreographer Merce Cunningham is returning to Britain with his company after an absence of three years.

Warhol, Tharp, and Cunningham are innovators whose work has long since joined the broad current of 20th century mainstream American culture. Much further out beyond the edge are theater pieces by Roger Guenveur Smith and Lisa Kron. Smith's award-winning one-man performance, A Huey P. Newton Story, arrives in October and is a tragic portrait of the African-American activist who co-founded the Black Panthers.

This week Kron, a Michigan-born lesbian who got her start in New York's East Village performance art scene, is presenting a solo work titled 2.5 Minute Ride. In it, she weaves together three stories: a trip with her father, a Holocaust survivor, to Germany and Poland; the wedding of her brother to a woman he met via the Internet; and the annual family outing to an Ohio amusement park, where the high point is a 2.5-minute roller coaster ride. Says Kron: "My work is accessible, it's funny and it takes people places they might not have felt comfortable going. I speak to gay people, Jewish people, people in their 30s with aging parents and children of Holocaust survivors, but what ties it together is that my point of view is that of an outsider looking in." The tragedy of being outside is a theme of David Feldshuh's Miss Evers' Boys, which opens in September. The play is based on the horrific but real events in the American South of the 1930s, when black men were used as human guinea pigs in tests for possible syphilis cures.

No longer opera's outlaw, but still controversial, radical director Peter Sellars and U.S.-based Chinese composer Tan Dun have fashioned a shortened adaptation of the 400-year-old masterpiece Peony Pavilion that opens in September. A classic of epic drama, it is by Tang Xianzu, a contemporary of Shakespeare. Another, full-length version was to have been the glittering set piece of New York City's Lincoln Center Festival earlier this month, but a Shanghai cultural official refused permission for it to travel. In Sellars' hands, the work has a cast of Chinese-Americans and stars Hua Wenyi, who was trained in the Kunqu style in China and has since emigrated to the U.S.

The Chinese-born actress rooted in an ancient tradition and the British-born actor as part of a rock-em, sock'em ensemble from Chicago, appearing together in a frothy farce are from opposite sides of the cultural world, but have one thing in common. As Inventing America demonstrates, they share in the wide embrace of an ever-changing and diverse cultural life.