COMIC LOOK AT THE DARK SIDE

“I just find my generation to be despicable,” Murphy Guyer said cheerfully. “Not the individuals, but that kind of grandiose ‘Big Chill’ mob psychology, the self-congratulation they’ve been capable of--simply because there were so many of them. I was always appalled by that.”

The New York-based playwright, 33, takes his generation to task in “American Century” (the first of two one-acts, under the umbrella title of “American Satire”), opening Friday at Theatre West.

Set in 1945, the story opens on a sentimental reunion between a soldier and his wife, “then it jumps into an absurd place.” A stranger arrives and is revealed to be their son, returned from the future “because his analyst has suggested he’s suffering from fertilization trauma. So he’s come back to see his conception. And he begins to reveal what the future holds, that reality--reflected against all the hopes they’d been talking about.

“Finally, the son, making a pitch for his generation, says, ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to grow up with The Bomb?’ And the father says, ‘Yeah.’ And the son says, ‘But could you possibly know what it’s like to live under the shadow of a madman, who could bring civilization to the brink of destruction?’ And the father says, ‘Yeah.’ The point is that there’s nothing this generation prides itself on having suffered that other generations haven’t suffered equally, if not more.”

Taking on his own peers--and convention as a whole--is nothing new for Guyer, who spent much of his childhood (on the “semi-Southern, semi-rural, semi-literate” Eastern Shore of Maryland) “rebelling against my (Army veteran) father, personally and mythically. I had a great criminal mind as a kid--and I was a terrific liar. If I hadn’t found theater, I don’t know what would’ve happened to me.”

First as an actor/director, now as a writer, Guyer has been able to vent that rebellion--and establish a theatrical forum for his feelings.

“Look at this country: It advertises itself in such happy terms, representing fantasies and dreams. And the Reagan Administration is the one controlling information, controlling perceptions. (Reagan) controls the way you look at an issue. When you meet the homeless on the streets of New York, the abstractions are just swept away. But as long as people are able to keep things on an abstract level, they can make terrible choices. Nazism was able to accomplish what it did because it was done on an abstract, technocratic level. Everything was numbers--problem-solving.”

It’s a theme that figures in another Guyer play, “The World of Mirth” (which opened last weekend at the Denver Center), examining the rage that overtakes a carnival clown when his buddy--an attraction in the freak show--is let go and commits suicide.

Stylistically, “It shows how language gets abused, how euphemisms become the way people talk to each other--when words have the power to make murder something other than murder. It’s a very heartless, soulless thing. ‘Mirth’ is about how human nature justifies behavior which is not justifiable, the way we delude ourselves into saying, ‘If we look at it this way, we can live with it.’ I find it terribly disturbing.”

Yet the product of that anger is most often couched in comedy.

“If you look at comedy in the most superficial way--making people laugh--then Chekhov isn’t comedy. But of course, he is. It’s comedy from a philosophical level. Tragedy says that man is a noble beast who is cursed by fate. Comedy says that what nature does to man is nothing compared to what man does to man--that he is a cursed beast, vain and self-serving. I lean toward that thought: ‘Life is wonderful, but the world stinks.’ ”

Guyer offers both sides of the coin in “The True Satirist” (the second half of the “American Satire” bill), which features two characters: “one a satirist, the other a 43-year-old Harvard graduate who is healthy, wealthy and complacent, happy with himself and the world. Of course, nothing annoys a satirist as much as someone who’s happy. So it’s a little study in human psychology: the tension between the contents and malcontents, between those who think life is good and getting better and those who think it’s bad and getting worse.”

His own position? “The latter.”