American Theater's Failure of Nerve

Donald Margulies based his play Shipwrecked! The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself) — An Entertainmenton a turn-of-the-century controversy surrounding a Swiss storyteller who chronicled his three-decade travel adventures in a British periodical. His saga, which took him to the Australian outback, included being marooned on a Pacific island and marrying an Aborigine, with vivid descriptions of his riding on the backs of sea turtles and of "flying wombats." Such details aroused suspicions at the Royal Geographical Society and led to his saga being discredited as a hoax.

The play was originally commissioned as a children's story, but after it was first submitted, the theater decided that because of its sophistication, it shouldn't be so boxed in. Originally written for 12 actors, it was presented with nine in an earlier workshop. For the current festival, it was carved down to three. Two weeks earlier, director Bart DeLorenzo had told me that the plan was to read it with two actors, but in the intervening days, that strategy obviously proved unworkable.

Were these changes made for the integrity of the play, or for the expedience of making the play economically viable to stage in multiple markets?

Glore said it was about the play's integrity: "Louis [the central character] was dominating, and none of the other actors was being utilized. We sent Donald off thinking about those things."

The three remaining characters are Louis, read with unimpeachable charm by Gregory Itzin, a Stage Manager (the delightful Charlayne Woodard), and a sound-effects man listed as Ensemble, beautifully performed by Michael Daniel Cassady.

The play is a wondrous exercise in storytelling, about storytelling, the ownership of one's story and its relationship to "truth." These concerns are reiterations of themes from Margulies' 1996 play, Collected Stories(also premiered by SCR).Here, however, he gives the fact-versus-fiction conundrum short shrift by demonizing Louis' scientific detractors as petty minds devoid of eye-opening imagination. But what about the eye-closing imagination that ignored the warnings of eco-scientists, at the peril of our future? What about the embellished facts that justify endless wars? Sometimes the truth is empirical, and sometimes that's the truth that sets us free. Herein lies the so-far-unexamined paradox at the heart of Margulies' lovely play.

There was also a reading of José Rivera's new realistic, domestic drama, Boleros for the Disenchanted, which starts with his own parents and their wacky courtship in the morally strict confines of 1950s Puerto Rico. Act 2 picks up 39 years later with the aging couple and their harrowing isolation near a U.S. Army base in Georgia. The wheelchair-bound husband (Gary Perez) calls for last rites based on the appearance in his dream of an angel announcing his imminent death, but nobody takes him seriously.

Some patrons believed that a TV series could be constructed from the intervening years between acts, a motive supported by the conspicuous absence of any Spanish lingo in the play. The beauty of the colossal jump in time between acts, however, is the glaring flash-forward to a vision of the ambitions that we saw so clearly in Act 1 now crushed by time and destiny.

Rivera is a master craftsman who has a revolving commission with South Coast Repertory, which means that when he's completed one commission, he's automatically granted a new one, though he says he only has time to pen one play every three or four years because of his career writing for film and TV.

Why, then, does Rivera need such a commission?

"We want to keep him in the theater," says Glore, which raises the question of who, exactly, is keeping Rivera outof the theater. Wouldn't these resources be more appreciated, and more bravely dispersed, going to established, provocative but less heralded writers from, say, Padua Playwrights or Dog Ear Collective?

This festival underscores how the American theater in general employs a small circle of writers endorsed by "the network," writers who are well entrenched in the national pipeline. This applies even to SCR's "new generation," such as Julie Marie Myatt and David Wiener. Myatt's and Wiener's plays each received full productions as part of the festival. Myatt's My Wandering Boyconcerns the disappearance of a young man and its effect on the people he left behind. Since the eponymous subject never appears, and the play's culminating event occurs before the curtain rises, the play's mystery depends entirely on the power of its monologues and interviews, which are strikingly prosaic (compared with Margulies' tour-de-force soliloquies in Shipwrecked!). Director Bill Rauch tries to compensate for the absence of drama with Christopher Acebo's Hockneyesque set, which places couches and lamps against a looming desert backdrop, and with the ingratiating accompaniment of a Dobro guitar, which suffocates the stage in "atmosphere."

I'm reluctant to condemn the clichés in Wiener's saga of moral bankruptcy in Hollywood, System Wonderland, since I was tipped off (and not by the author) that the play was completely rewritten before it reached the stage. Suffice it to say that Wiener's linguistic and theatrical skills are in full bloom, even if his play isn't.