The Beginning of ‘About to Begin’ : Playwright Can Thank His Parents, Their Mysterious House Guest and an Unusual Setting

Anyone interested in discovering how playwrights dream up their characters and locales would have been fascinated by the NewSCRipt reading of Jerome Kilty’s “About to Begin” on Monday night at South Coast Repertory.

The play unfolds on a Pala Indian Reservation in San Diego County during the late spring of 1926 and has, among other characters, a Bavarian Nazi who arrives from Los Angeles--by cab no less--with a letter of introduction from a Catholic priest and the galleys of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” tucked in his belongings.

The first act opens in the adobe living room of Indian agent Harold Duggan. His wife has just returned with their 3-month-old son from Baltimore, where she had fled 6 months earlier because she couldn’t stand living in the middle of the desert. The conflict between them is apparent from the moment she walks in the door.

Harold is a liberal salt of the earth. Irene is a reactionary snob. He makes do. She doesn’t know how. They are both Catholics, but of vastly different persuasions. He is Irish-American, she German-American. He has humor. She has pride. Then there is the matter of the Indians. He treats them with respect. She is a bigot, besieged by inferiors.

Into this domestic stew comes a pompous charmer by the name of Kurt Georg Ludecke (read magnificently by Kristoffer Tabori). The “devout Kraut,” as Harold calls him, claims to be on a spiritual retreat. He will meditate and, he insists, will fast on nothing but oranges.

In fact, Ludecke is hiding out. A Nazi associate of Hitler, he participated in the unsuccessful beer-hall Putsch of 1923. When Hitler was sentenced to prison, where he wrote “Mein Kampf,” Ludecke fled. Now he is busily translating the Fuhrer’s words into English.

Setting down this peculiar historical figure in the midst of a troubled family on an isolated Indian reservation--where he soon begins spouting Aryan racial theories--would seem to be the stroke of a too-fertile imagination. Who would believe it? It couldn’t happen in a million years.

But, as Kilty related during the post-reading discussion of his play, it not only happened, it happened to his family. The 66-year-old playwright said he grew up on the Pala Indian Reservation. The Indian agent and his wife were his parents. And Ludecke did indeed arrive out of the blue one day under the mysterious protection of the Catholic Church.

A key question that concerned Kilty, however, was whether Ludecke worked as a dramatic character who catalyzes the relationship between the Duggans or whether he simply unbalanced the play. The audience seemed to believe that he had not, although some viewers questioned the play’s abrupt, soap opera-ish ending.

Although “About to Begin” is pregnant with history and replete with references to actual events, such as Ku Klux Klan meetings in Southern California, Kilty said his main objective is an old-fashioned family drama.

Kilty, a noted classical actor, said he flew in for the reading from Boston, where he was rehearsing a role in Chekov’s “Platonov.” He said the NewSCRipt reading is the first time he has heard his play aloud.

As a playwright, Kilty is best known for “Dear Liar,” which he created from the 40-year correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. He has also written a score of other plays, among them “Look Away,” “Dear Love,” “The Little Black Book” and “The Laffing Man.” In 1979, Kilty appeared at SCR in “The Learned Ladies.”