‘Made in Bangkok’ Made to Be Explicit

Anthony Minghella wonders just how tough American audiences will be.

“I expect to shock, but I don’t welcome it,” said the British playwright, whose exploitation-themed “Made in Bangkok” opens tonight at the Mark Taper Forum as part of the UK/LA Festival.

“I would love people to love my work. At the same time, I was very conscious of what I was doing when I wrote this--and I’m entirely culpable for the experience.”

“Bangkok,” which won the London Theatre Critics Award for best new play in 1986, focuses on a group of British visitors in Bangkok--a city famed for its sexual tourism. “It’s not just about the relationship between East and West, but between a husband and wife,” Minghella explained. “And it’s very explicit. There is the sense that this is a very fragile place. When the rain gets in, the fabric unravels, the characters are revealed and it gets darker and darker. . . .”

In researching the play, Minghella visited Thailand, determined to “experience everything.” He arrived in 103-degree weather: “It was intolerable: rainy, dirty, ugly and very fast.”

Between the airport and his hotel, he was propositioned four times. (“After all, that’s what most single men are there for.”)

“I thought about it a lot,” Minghella, 34, said intently, sipping Evian at the elegant Beverly Hills home of producer Roland Joffe, where he’s a house guest. “When I was growing up (on the Isle of Wight), there was a lot of talk about letting go. We were an inhibited, constrained society. So Bangkok was sort of an annex for our sexual fantasies, an opportunity for people to travel thousands of miles and explore whatever was in their interiors. It’s deeply unattractive and aggressive--but it’s what men seem to want to do.”

Yet for him, Thailand was strictly look-but-don’t-touch. “A lot of people have said to me, ‘I saw your play. You were a bad boy .’ ” Minghella looked horrified. “I don’t present myself as an angel, but it would be heinous to have written a play about the exploitation of women, having exploited them. I felt dislocated from the men I saw there; I did not feel good about their behavior. Yet at the same time, it would be ridiculous to pretend that I didn’t belong to that gender.”

The former University of Hull professor sighed deeply. Although anger does not come easily to him (“I’m slightly equivocal, woolly”), “Bangkok” pulls no punches in its moral accusations.

“It is a very critical, hostile play,” he admitted, “about much more than sexual exploitation. We buy shirts with ‘Made in . . . ‘ on the label. We don’t know how the shirt was made, how much someone was paid for doing it. We don’t choose to know because our interest is in getting a good price. So the play’s title is not just about women (being “made”). A poor country is held hostage in many ways, and the indictment points at me as representative. No matter how much I try to distance myself from that behavior, I can’t escape the fact that I buy cheap shirts, cheap jeans, the cheapest computer I can find.”

Minghella (whose plays include “Whale Music,” “A Little Like Drowning” and “Love Bites”) is convinced that the British excel in this particular game of conscience cover-up. He hopes that Americans will be more willing to see themselves in this portrait of Western exploitation.

Yet the reactions of a first-night preview crowd have left the playwright (whose choreographer wife and 2 1/2-year-old son, Max, remain in London) a bit less confident.

“I perceived a resistance to the material,” he noted. “They really didn’t want to hear too much information about the characters’ sexual behavior. If each audience member is a bulb, I felt some of those bulbs extinguishing during the play--because of the noise, the sounds, those words . I hope people will be able to work through that. I could have given myself an easier time, written in a more entertaining, anodyne way. I tried not to. I think you have to be the writer for the material. In the end, the responsibility is not to each person’s sensibilities, but to the subject.”

Although those subjects are often inspired by real life, Minghella points out that imagination often takes up where experience ends.

Of his “What If It’s Raining?” (about the breakup of a marriage), he says, “We’ve all had relationships go wrong. We’ve all been betrayed, we’ve all betrayed other people. We’ve all loved, we’ve all been loved. We’ve been generous, we’ve been mean. Sometimes we regret, sometimes we celebrate. In a very short space of our lives, I think we experience most of life’s impulses; we have a whole jukebox of knowledge and feelings. Sometimes the record plays again and again. As a playwright, you get up each morning and write from that refrigerator of knowledge.”

Even that is largely an empirical process. “You don’t have to work at being a playwright,” he smiled, “go around with a loudspeaker or a magnifying glass to observe in a professional way.” Yet the discovery is not always joyful. “Sometimes it comes with terror,” he nodded. “At the same time, I want to ask these questions. I want to write plays for a living. I don’t know how to do anything else. But sometimes I don’t like it at all. Sometimes, when 800 people are watching my play, I feel naked. And I wish I had a better body.”