Leave it to Bill Rauch to talk me down from my Rodney Dangerfield shtick.

I wanted to ask Rauch, the Cornerstone Theater co-founder and longtime artistic director who now runs Oregon Shakespeare Festival, about his impressions of L.A. theater, now that he’s largely removed from it. But as I was doing a little research, I found a telling reminder of why L.A. theater people often feel as if they’re doing a Dangerfield routine.

The L.A. theater scene gets no respect, no respect, I grumbled to myself, in my best Dangerfield impression.

Bill Rauch. Photo by Jenny Graham

Last year, the New York Times ran an article about Rauch’s initiatives at the Oregon festival since he became the company’s artistic director in 2006. Somehow, however, the article failed to mention that Rauch spent 15 years in L.A. at the helm of Cornerstone — surely the most important chunk of the credentials that got him the Oregon job.

Yes, it mentioned that he had co-founded Cornerstone and cited a couple examples of Cornerstone’s work from its itinerant, pre-L.A. days. But it included nothing about how Cornerstone matured in 1992 by settling in L.A., where its home base remains.

The online version of the article also includes an appended correction, which more or less explained how Rauch’s L.A’s years had been completely erased from it. Apparently a Times editor, noticing that L.A. wasn’t mentioned and smartly associating Cornerstone with L.A., foolishly assumed that the company had been founded in L.A. and inserted an incorrect reference along those lines in the first published version. Then, when someone pointed out that Cornerstone actually was born in McLean, Va., the one reference to “Los Angeles” was replaced by “McLean, Va.” — and no one thought to add anything else about L.A.’s important role in the rise of Rauch.

This summer, the same Times ran yet another article about Oregon Shakespeare by the same writer, who this time focused on the festival’s new cycle of plays based on American history — which began production this summer with Richard Montoya’s American Night. This new article not only failed to mention L.A. in connection with Rauch (again) but also neglected to point out that Rauch got to know Montoya in L.A. Montoya’s Culture Clash pre-dated Cornerstone in choosing to move to L.A.

Oh well — this time, at least, the L.A. Times stepped into the breach. In what looked like a reaction to the New York Times coverage, the L.A. Times ran its own story about American Night, which acknowledged the L.A. roots the other Times ignored and disclosed that Montoya hopes to bring the play to Culture Clash’s proposed new L.A. home. Meanwhile, the Times’ Culture Monster blog also ran an article about some of the many Angelenos whom Rauch has lured to Ashland — the small-town home of Oregon Shakespeare. And LA Stage Blog ran its own article about Montoya’s project.

Still, as I made a brief stop in Ashland last week, I wanted to hear Rauch’s own reflections on the experience of running a relatively small theater in a huge city, compared to that of running a huge theater in a small town. When I sat down with him in his Ashland office, I asked what he missed and what he didn’t miss about L.A. theater.

“I miss the sheer amount of productions, the energy,” Rauch replied. “Here [in Ashland] there are a couple of smaller local theaters, but nothing approaches the vibrancy of the L.A. scene. If I read about something happening at another theater, I probably can’t go see it.”

Well, that’s not always true. Rauch says he travels to L.A. “a couple times a year, which is not often enough.” He directed Culture Clash in Peace at the Getty Villa last year, in his only directorial job outside Ashland since he started there. He came down to see the Geffen Playhouse productions of Equivocation and By the Waters of Babylon — plays that premiered at Ashland.

Rauch tries to keep up with Cornerstone “because so many of my friends are there and it’s so dear to my heart.” But he has “missed a lot of Cornerstone shows. My relationship to it is now historical” — although he hopes to see the group’s upcoming West Hollywood musical.

Of course he also keeps connected with L.A. artists by bringing them to Ashland. The Oregon festival’s casting directors Joy Dickson and Nicole Arbusto are based in L.A. “Given that I spent 15 years in L.A.,” says Rauch, “so many of my artistic relationships are L.A.-based. L.A.’s extraordinary theater scene is not known by the rest of the country” — but he says Dickson and Arbusto see a healthy share of L.A. theater.

What doesn’t he miss about L.A. theater? “The fact that a lot of the theater in L.A. doesn’t pay a living wage is a big challenge,” Rauch says.

Also, in L.A., many theaters “have to scrounge for an audience.” By contrast, in Ashland, he doesn’t have to worry much about “the size and passion and loyalty of the audience. People who come to Ashland come to see theater, and a healthy number of them come back more than once each season.”

Rauch can do some material in Ashland that he wouldn’t be able to do at Cornerstone. This summer he staged The Merchant of Venice. He had “toyed with” the idea of doing a version of this dark, difficult play at Cornerstone. One of the company’s stalwarts, Shishir Kurup, wrote an adaptation called The Merchant on Venice, which shifted the play to contemporary L.A. and shifted the conflict from Christians and Jews to Hindus and Muslims. Although Cornerstone didn’t do it, Merchant on Venice went on to success at Silk Road Theatre Project in Chicago in 2007 (maybe some other L.A. company would like to finally bring it to the city where it’s set?).

Cornerstone, however, is all about building bridges between different communities. The Merchant of Venice, says Rauch, “is a play about the limitations of people’s ability to cross those gulfs.” Cornerstone sometimes used tragedies as source material, but while tragedies like Romeo and Juliet can leave the audience with a feeling of reconciliation, no such feeling is apparent at the end of Merchant. Rauch says the closest Cornerstone came to such a play in his years there was AKA, a Shem Bitterman adaptation of a Wedekind text that was set in Beverly Hills and “leaves you with a sour feeling, without the catharsis of tragedy or comedy.”

Yet for a company named after Shakespeare, not doing Merchant would be a dereliction of artistic responsibility. It was one of the first two plays that the Oregon festival staged, in 1935, and it seemed appropriate to bring both of them back for the 75th anniversary (the other is Twelfth Night). Rauch, who seems a sunny and literally embracing man in person as well as in his previous work at Cornerstone, decided to explore the darker side of the street. “The characters are so hateful, it demands such ugliness, but it’s exhilarating to dig into those hidden corners,” Rauch says.

In a play that often seems to reek of anti-Semitism, Rauch cast longtime company member Anthony Heald as Shylock. Heald is not only a convert to Judaism but actually went through the conversion process at an Ashland synagogue. At a company meeting, he initially argued against doing the play, but he ultimately became the first Jewish actor to play the role in Ashland’s history.

Rauch acknowledges that in Ashland, his job is still collaborative but also more hierarchical than it was at Cornerstone. “Part of my journey here is learning to be an artistic leader.”

Also, he points out, Cornerstone “is something that [co-founder] Alison [Carey] and I started from scratch. Here I have a responsibility to legacy and history. I’m much more aware of my role as a temporary steward.”

TITUS REDUX and NEIGHBORS: And now a couple comments on two recent openings that bounce off my previous discussion of summer Shakespeare and the two dueling Topdogs/Underdogs:

Jack Stehlin and John F. Bocca. Photo by Ed Krieger

Titus Redux, now at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is an even more radical re-mix of a Shakespearean text than A Wither’s Tale, at the Falcon Theatre. Unfortunately, it isn’t nearly as cohesive. Nor is it on a par with director John Farmanesh-Bocca’s similar reworking of Shakespeare’s Pericles at the Douglas last summer.

Titus (Jack Stehlin) is now an American officer who has returned from years of duty in Iraq/Afghanistan bearing the ashes of a son who also was killed in the same conflicts, much to the seething resentment of his wife Tamora (Brenda Strong).

If this narrative were to correlate with the original, Tamora wouldn’t have been his wife. She would have been the wife of a defeated Iraqi or Afghan rival. Fortunately for America’s geopolitical reputation but unfortunately for Farmanesh-Bocca’s concept, U.S. military officers don’t bring home the wives of defeated war lords, so Farmanesh-Bocca pretends that Tamora is just one more unhappy American wife and that her remaining sons and Titus’ daughter are blood-related siblings. When the young men rape and mutilate their “sister,” the original’s political rationale for this bloodthirsty episode is, well, missing in action.

Once Titus Redux skids off those particular marks, it loses its way to the point where parts of it are virtually incoherent, although highly kinetic.

This is a co-production between Not Man Apart (Farmanesh-Bocca’s group) and the hitherto 99-Seat-Plan-using Circus Theatricals (Stehlin’s). Titus Redux never could have been produced in the smaller spaces that Circus Theatricals has used.

I hope that Circus continues to look for ways to move up to the bigger leagues. They’re presenting additional evidence — on top of what I discussed here — that companies that do so don’t necessarily lose whatever cutting-edge interests and reputation they have previously cultivated,  just because their potential audiences are larger.

Meanwhile, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ play Neighbors, at the Matrix, provides a fascinating counterpoint to Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog.

Parks created a parched economic landscape in Topdog/Underdog. One African American brother is trying to master three-card monte and the other is trying to move one inch up the ladder of respectability by clinging to a job as a whiteface Lincoln impersonator at a seaside arcade. Temporarily, they share a desolate flat.

Julia Campbell and Derek Webster in Neighbors. Photo by I.C. Rapoport.

In Neighbors, a black university professor lives with his white wife and their biracial daughter in a suburban home on one side of the stage, while a family of itinerant black minstrels — wearing blackface — move into the adjacent house, on the other side of the stage. The former family is presented fairly realistically, while the latter family is presented as a surreal cartoon. The playwright’s primary concern is to demonstrate the differing reactions of the members of the would-be Obama-lite family to the vulgar black stereotypes who live next door.

The question of how these wandering minstrels (the Crows) can afford a suburban home — or anything else, considering the dismal commercial prospects of their grotesque artistic choices — is never seriously addressed, because most of the Crows are nothing more than clanging Symbols. In an interview, director Nataki Garrett indicated that maybe the Crows aren’t really supposed to be minstrels but are simply working-class blacks who are perceived as minstrels by the insecure professor. But this possible point of view isn’t readily apparent in the theater.

The play wallows in the stereotypes that it’s also (apparently) decrying. In the last couple scenes, the playwright doesn’t seem to know how to end his rather long script, so he decides to make the ending purposefully incomplete. I’d like to re-visit The Colored Museum and the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s I Ain’t ‘Yo Uncle, to see why those dissections of black stereotypes worked better than this one does.

Still, Nataki Garrett’s staging certainly creates sparks with its fully charged performances. And the producer, Joe Stern — with his last production Stick Fly as well as Neighbors — is making a startling change of emphasis that may well re-invigorate his aging Matrix Theatre Company.

Titus Redux, Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City. Tues-Sat, 8 pm; Sun 7 pm. Closes Sunday. 877-369-9112. www.CircusTheatricals.com or www.NotManApart.com.

Neighbors, Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Thurs-Sat, 8 pm; Sun 2:30 pm.  Closes Oct. 24. 323-960-7774. www.plays411.com/neighbors.