Mark Taper Forum The auditorium was renamed the Amelia Taper Auditorium after a $2 million gift from the S. Mark Taper Foundation. The Taper has presented innovative plays since its 1967-opening of "The Devils" from playwright John Whiting about the sexual fantasies of a 17th-century priest and a sexually repressed nun. The play received a great deal of protest from local religious leaders and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, although the production continued. The production of such plays as "Murderous Angels", "The Dream on Monkey Mountain", "Children of a Lesser God", "Savages", "The Shadow Box", "The Kentucky Cycle" and "Angels in
Vanessa Redgrave which forbade sending books to prisoners. She and fellow actor Samuel West, playwright David Hare and Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy took turns reading poetry and making speeches. Redgrave stated that the ban was "vicious and deplorable...Literature is something that stirs us beyond our immediate problems, it can help us to learn better our own problems, our own faults or to have a goal to live for, an aspiration." The ban was overturned by the Ministry of Justice the following December. In 2017 Redgrave made her directorial debut with the movie "Sea Sorrow", a documentary about the European migrant crisis