Contemporary plays comprise most of the schedule put together by the Mark Taper Forum for its 2000-01 season. Among the writers represented are August Wilson, Patrick Marber, Warren Leight and Peter Parnell.

The Taper's new season will kick off Sept. 14 with Wilson's latest play, King Hedley II, which is set in the same Pittsburgh neighborhood where his first play Jitney took place. Jitney was recently revived at the Taper.

Marber, one of the new wave of British playwrights, will be represented Nov. 9 with Closer, which won the 1998 Olivier Award for best London play and copped an equivalent prize from the New York Drama Critics Circle.

Leight, the author of Side Man, has followed up that hit show with Glimmer, Glimmer and Shine, which is set in the jazz world and deals with the conflict between two brothers. It will open at the Taper on Jan. 25, 2001.

Parnell, who adapted The Cider House Rules for the stage, has dramatized another novel this time around, Tuva or Bust, by Ralph Leighton. It will open March 22, 2001, at the Taper, starring Alan Alda as the physicist Richard Feynman.Two one-person shows will fill the final slot (July 21-Sept. 16, 2001): In Real Life, another autobiographical work by Charlayne Woodard, and Another American: Asking and Telling by Marc Wolf, which deals with the issue of gays in the military.

As an extra added attraction, the Taper has invited Cornerstone Theatre to present Alison Carey's For Here or to Go as a Dec. 15 Christmas show.

Also on the list is John Belluso, acting director of the Taper's Other Voices Project, which promotes work by and about the disabled. Belluso's drama is called The Body of Bourne and it was developed in the Taper's New Works festival. It deals with the life of hunch-backed Randolph Bourne, an essayist and political activist who died in 1918 at the age of 32.

-- By Willard Manus
Southern California Correspondent