MUSIC : Aria Ready for This? : After 16 years in L.A. as a songwriter and actor on stages big and small, Philip Littell is writing a libretto for the San Francisco Opera

SAN FRANCISCO —  Philip Littell sits in a trendy Italian cafe around the corner from the War Memorial Opera House, downing an espresso as he pokes distractedly at a tiramisu . A recent transplant from Los Angeles, he says his phone still isn’t working and he’s got a bit of the flu.

But these are minor annoyances for the personable and urbane songwriter who’s been a fixture of L.A.’s artsy bohemia for years. Littell has moved north, thanks to a commission from the San Francisco Opera that he calls “a total turning-point gig.” A Renaissance man who has moved easily among the worlds of cabaret, performance art, theater and opera, Littell says he’s now in the right medium at the right time.

“The way ‘The Ghosts of Versailles’ was received in New York says that opera is a wide-open game now,” he says of the recent, much-praised Metropolitan Opera production by librettist William Hoffman and composer John Corigliano. “All I’ve encountered so far is fearlessness.”

Working with composer Conrad Susa, Littell has just been commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” The project, scheduled to be performed in September, 1994, will not be announced officially by the opera for a few months yet, although Littell and Susa are already hard at work and casting negotiations are well under way with some of the biggest stars in the business. (This is the first of what the San Francisco Opera hopes will be three new works commissioned in the next 10 years.)

Littell interprets the commission as a sign of health in the opera world. “Because they’re in such a successful place, (opera companies) realize it’s time to take new risks,” he says. “People go because opera is fabulous risk-taking, a monumental undertaking. The human being likes seeing himself portrayed on that scale.”

This vitality is in marked contrast to the general state of affairs in the arts. “Now, in show business in general, it’s a time of the dying dinosaurs,” Littell says. “These huge, slow, creaking creatures are less and less efficient--institutions as well as people.”

The ways in which you mitigate against such ossification, however, are basically the same in any of the mediums in which Littell works. “I don’t think opera is different from the little shows that I do,” he says. “If I’m playing at Beebop Records to 10 people in folding chairs, they must be made to forget that they’re sitting in folding chairs just as much as these ladies and gentlemen must be made to forget that they’re sitting in a box at the opera.”

Context, Littell says, is everything. “Hopefully you do this in places that are socially exciting,” he says. “I don’t think it happens in what passes for theater these days, where people subscribe and sit on their hands and don’t expect to see anything exciting.”

Littell, born and raised in New York City, trained as an actor at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I thought I was going to become an alcoholic,” he recalls of his short tenure acting and teaching in repertory theater. “The actor’s life is too grim.”

Eventually, he took what ended up being a permanent trip to Los Angeles. Littell found plenty of stage work at such venues as Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, the now-defunct LaMama Hollywood, the Powerhouse Theatre and the Court Theatre, although he never clicked as an actor with the film and TV industry. “Mine was never a career where someone said, ‘You must come and do this TV show,’ ” he says. “I was always wrong for this and wrong for that.”

Enter the avant-garde. Littell started “sneaking into performance art circles,” where he met director David Schweizer, with whom he has since collaborated on a number of projects.

“Philip was one of my first colleagues in L.A., and collaborations with him became a seminal part of my life here,” says Schweizer, who first directed Littell in a 1980 Taper Lab staging of Len Jenkins’ “Kid Twist.” “There’s such an intensity around him, a glorious self-consciousness. He lives to perform, but his is a total creative sensibility--conceptualizing the whole stage. His impact on a piece is enormous, no matter how he’s enlisted.”

In 1984, after the success of a Schweizer-Littell collaboration called “The Weba Show,” Littell had what he describes as his first breakdown. He beat a hasty retreat from the West Coast and found himself running a hip-hop club in New York’s South Bronx. Soon, though, he returned to L.A.

Among the few theater pieces still legend in local avant-garde circles is the 1986 Littell-Schweizer-Jerry Frankel version of “Plato’s Symposium.” A modern interpretation of the ancient Greek text in which nine philosophers meet in a salon and discuss the meanings and permutations of love, the staging made use of slides and an original score by Frankel, who has since died of complications from AIDS.

The success of the project gave Littell a new lease on creative life. Frankel’s illness also helped him to re-evaluate his goals.

“I went into high gear and thought, ‘What do you really want to do?’ ” Littell says. “The answer, surprisingly, was to be a singer of my own songs.”

In 1987 he formed a band of six men and one woman called Society Boys, specializing in a literate brand of highly theatrical song and dance the lyricist called “Cabarock.”

Writing in The Times about Littell’s 1989 appearance at Cafe Largo, the late Craig Lee described Littell’s songs as “cabaret-on-the-couch, transactional-analysis pop” and the performer himself as “a strangely discomfiting mix of Pee-wee Herman and Noel Coward.”

Littell’s musical and acting talents have been used in a number of plays. In 1988, the Society Boys appeared in and provided the music for Schweizer’s “The Ballad of the Sleepy Heart” at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. That same year, Littell appeared in the Schweizer-directed production of Marlene Meyer’s “Kingfish” at the late Los Angeles Theatre Center. Later, Littell appeared in another Schweizer-directed LATC production called “The Joni Mitchell Project.”

Although the Society Boys no longer exist, Littell recently joined musical forces with guitarist Eric Cunningham and has continued making “half-band, half-theater” performances--including the recent “No Miracle: A Consolation” and “The Illuminated Calendar” (with Noreen Hennessy) at the Celebration Theatre--right up until his departure for San Francisco at the end of last month.

“That’s the area for me: musical theater,” Littell says of having found his niche in the past couple of years. “The problem is it doesn’t look like musical theater as it’s being practiced today.”

Although he comes from a family with several opera teachers and conductors, Littell’s first connections in the opera world were with director Christopher Alden and the Long Beach Opera, where he has worked as both an actor and a writer. Unfortunately, that was also the site of an imbroglio Littell would rather forget.

After “being put through 11 rewrites in a month” on the 1989 Long Beach production of an adaptation of Beaumarchais’ play “The Guilty Mother,” Littell recalls, he removed his name from the credits, saying he was unhappy with changes in his text made by the director.

“The only person who writes is the person setting words on paper,” says Littell, who, despite his request that no one--including himself--be credited with the adaptation, was nonetheless credited in a program insert distributed to reviewers. “My contract was work for hire, so I had no rights.”

This time out, however, Littell says that he is being well compensated and, more important, he has input. “They listened when I said I don’t want a director on board until it’s written,” he says. “When there’s nothing to direct, they’ll start directing in thin air.

“I’m a director, and I’ve always had to be sending myself out of the room when I’m writing,” says the often-laconic Littell. “I lean over my shoulder and go, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if suddenly 17 chandeliers descended and the doors opened and drifts of snow covered the floor?’ ”

Although he says he “couldn’t tell anybody how I got this opera gig,” it was Littell’s fans in opera circles--especially his former roommate, conductor Randall Behr--that helped bring the potential librettist to composer Susa and the San Francisco Opera’s attention.

“What impressed me most with the lyrics for ‘No Miracle’ (was that the) songs’ texts were poetic, terse, economical and very good with imagery,” says Kip Cranna, musical administrator for the San Francisco Opera, who made the first contact with Littell. “I also liked that his background involved both acting and lyric writing, and that he is adept in French, because we’re going back to the original novel.”

Littell flew to San Francisco to meet with composer Susa and they hit it off. “That’s when the marriage happened,” he says. “We spoke easily and I thought, ‘(Here is) a divine playmate.’ ”

Susa is a San Francisco-based opera, theater and choral music composer known for such recent operas as “Transformations,” based on Anne Sexton’s poems, and “The Love of Don Perlimplin,” based on a Garcia Lorca scenario. Both were San Francisco Opera productions mounted in smaller theaters.

The tight schedule, though--which leaves Littell a scant two months to crank out an entire libretto--necessitated the move.

“The way Conrad and I worked when I was up here on a visit meant that it would be crazy for me to live anywhere else during this period,” he says. “It was another short step to (asking myself), ‘Why am I living in L.A.?’ ”

It was, Littell says, a move whose time had come--for him as an artist and as a person: “I have huge separation anxieties, but basically I’ve really run into the wall in L.A. I get support but I’m not getting any further.”

However, Littell acknowledges that he wouldn’t have spent 16 years in Los Angeles if he hadn’t been “a big L.A. booster.”

“L.A. was my muse,” he says. “I always resisted San Francisco. I deeply distrusted the lifestyle choice. But I’m 41 and I’m ready.”

And of course there is also the overweening presence of the film and TV industry to escape.

“L.A. is full of people who don’t trust their own judgment because they feel they should be playing Hollywood’s game,” says Littell, who has been wooed and then treated rudely more than once. “There are a lot of nasty young guys in suits telling people who know better why things won’t work. The atmosphere of the business is cynical and mean.”

By making this change of venue to San Francisco, Littell is fleeing more than the vicissitudes of the entertainment industry. He’s also putting distance between himself and what he sees as the crippled state of the stage these days.

“I am an escapee from the theater,” he says of the form, in which actors long ago relinquished the kind of creative control Littell craves. “The history of theater is the history of the actor-manager, and that broke down this century,” he says. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the writing became so dull and bad. When actors were trained to run their own business, make their own choices, direct and produce themselves, they also demanded great writing.

“Now they are trained to obey,” Littell continues. “I don’t think it’s any accident at all now why the theater is so deadly boring and why actors are a byword for empty-headed, fatuous human beings.”

The musical stage also suffers from debilitating problems, he says: “One of the tragedies of American musical comedy is that the rights are held by companies that are devoted to preserving the work as it was when it was first done. So none of these shows are allowed to be living, breathing works of art.

“You couldn’t turn David Schweizer loose on ‘Camelot’ because they’d pull the rights. Everyone thinks there’s a formula, because certain things have worked.”

Still, Littell is upbeat about the arts in the ‘90s.

“Maybe this is a great time for the arts,” he offers. “Harold Clurman brought the Group Theater to life at the very beginning of the Depression when there was no money and no hope of money. The opportunity at a time of financial distress is that people have less and the values of selfishness are shaken. People feel that they can make common cause with each other.”