PLAYWRIGHT IN THEORY, PRACTICE

How important is it to really know the people one’s writing about?

The question was recently put to Adele Edling Shank, whose “Tumbleweed” (1986 winner of the Dramatists Guild/CBS New Plays Program) premieres Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

“It’s a good question,” said the Minnesota-born playwright. “I know most of the characters in this play--I mean, I know people like that. But it’s always a matter of degree. I’m not a man. I’ve never been a teen-age boy, which I think must be a great deal different from being a teen-age girl. I’ve never been a son or a father. All these things are fundamental differences.

“On another level, I went to high school in a largely Chicano area outside Sacramento. I had a lot of Chicano friends. One of them was a heroin addict. I know how some of them earned their living. I know it wasn’t legal. So it’s really a matter of taking what you know, extending out of that--and then checking it with people who do know.”

Shank’s interest in exploring such specific social dynamics has been the basis of a group of plays entitled “The California Series”: “Winterplay,” “Sunset/Sunrise,” “Stuck,” “Sand Castles,” “The Grass House” and “Tumbleweed.”

“The first two deal primarily with upper-middle-class Americans who have all the material things they could possibly need and still find life unsatisfying,” she noted. “The later ones deal with other economic conditions, so that by the time we get to the last play, we’re into deprivation.

“But they all deal with the American attitude of moving on: If things aren’t good here, they’ll be better in Kansas. If they’re not good there, I’ve heard that Colorado is pretty good. From Colorado, we end up in California. And now (faced with the cutoff of the Pacific Ocean) there’s nowhere else to go.”

The drifters here are young Paul and Anemone (who made their debut in an earlier Shank play)--”the new poor” waging war with “the traditional poor, the Chicanos, who’ve lived in the area a long time but haven’t taken part in the community’s economic success.”

That social climate is paramount: “I always start with the idea of a setting--I know where a play is set before anything else. When I have that, I begin to have a feel for who might be living there. I usually carry those ideas in my head for a year before I actually start writing.”

In “Tumbleweed,” the resulting portrait is clearly one of doom for the Chicano residents. Shank offers no apologies for the pessimistic outlook: “If people want to be comfortable and not think, they should stay home and watch ‘Cheers.’ I’m not knocking television. What I am saying is that theater needs to do something that television can’t do--otherwise there’s no point in having it.”

And Shank teaches what she preaches: She heads the playwriting department at UC San Diego (commuting from her home base in San Francisco).

“You can’t teach anyone to be a great playwright,” she emphasized, “but you can teach certain techniques: like structure, like shaping material. You can teach them how to develop the character into greater depth than they thought they could. What you can’t teach them to do is make a creative leap out of those techniques.”

She claims no preference between beginners and advanced pupils: “I really enjoy doing both. I would not just be teaching graduate students. There’s something very exciting about taking somebody through the process the first time.”

Given Shank’s enthusiasm for her work, it’s interesting to note that she entered college (at UC Davis) as a biology major.

“I was convinced that the endocrine system had all kinds of secrets to tell us about the human body,” she grinned. “But about the third week, I was looking at this shark I was dissecting in lab, trying to trace its blood vessels, and I noticed that somebody else had traced them before--the shark had been cut up several times.

“I suddenly realized that for the next nine years I was going to be doing things other people had already done. It’d take at least that long before I could do any genuinely original research. Well, I’m much too impatient for that. I left the lab and changed my major.”

After graduate school, however, she married (Theodore Shank, who’s directing “Tumbleweed”) and gradually the writing fell off: “Partly I had other things to do--like getting to know two stepchildren--but more importantly, I was not satisfied with the kind of writing I’d been doing. It no longer felt important, I wasn’t able to do on the stage what I thought should be done to change the world.”

After a time, however, Shank resumed her work--and added a new label: hyperrealism.

“I’d started looking at the hyperreal paintings--very polished and glossy, like a brochure. It’s also called photorealism, meaning you don’t go empathetically into the work, you don’t feel as if you’re sitting by that stream, that tree. You don’t wonder why the Mona Lisa smiles that way. You examine the surface: What is there is what is.

“I wanted a style to reflect that, plays that could act as a mirror for the audiences to see themselves.”

And nowadays? Shank made it clear that there is very little evidence of that earlier format in “Tumbleweed”: “With each play, you try something different. You change, the style changes--and you go on to something new.”