Kurtti Hits Home on Racism in ‘Three Ways’

For Casey Kurtti, a play about racism in America had its roots in a visit to South Africa.

“It reminded me so much of our country,” said the New York-based playwright, 33, whose “Three Ways Home” opens Friday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. “It was amazing--because they had malls. They had Carvels. They had Woolworths. And yet (a majority of the population) was excluded from society; the separation was unbelievable. It really made me start to think about the racial issues here.”

“Three Ways Home” draws on both Kurtti’s feelings at that time and an earlier two-year period, when she dropped out of theater and became a volunteer in a New York counseling program for women accused of abusing their children. The play is set in that experience, exploring the “unlikely friendship” that develops between black welfare mother Dawn and the reluctant, WASP-y volunteer Sharon.

“One reason I wrote this play (was to say), ‘Oh, you think you know these people? Well, you don’t.’ ” She sighed. “As white people, I don’t think we really have an understanding of what it’s like to be black. No matter how far I get with this play, something always comes up that I didn’t know.”

Such as? “Well, the welfare application itself is six pages long, front and back,” she said grimly. “That’s a lot to fill out if you haven’t had a high school education. And you can’t make any mistakes. If you travel from one department to another, you have to have a Social Security card and birth certificate for every one of your kids. It’s a real paper chase. I mean, I had trouble filling out my applications for student loans.”

At the time of her volunteer work, Kurtti (who’s now married and the mother of a son, 2 1/2-year-old Malachy) had no intention of re-examining that world on stage.

“I’d become disheartened with the theater,” said the writer, whose parochial school upbringing was the springboard for her hit play “Catholic School Girls.” “It had to do with a variety of things. I was going through a spiritual crisis, a real conflict about what I should be doing with my life. It just seemed there was so much to be done in the world, and I thought ‘With everything that’s going down--ultimately--who cares about theater?’ ”

Lately, she’s more optimistic. When “Three Ways” ran in New York, it was a hit not only with the critics, but local--largely black--audiences, many of whom were seeing a play for the first time. For Kurtti, the work also serves “to get a point across, open people’s lives”--and in this case, to give a voice to a usually-silent segment of society: poor black women.

“I’m also interested in acts of heroism,” she said. “They can be so minor. One of my plays was about a Vietnam vet’s mother who goes to a parade and holds up a sign, saying, ‘My son is in need. Please call me. . . .’ I remember seeing a photo of a woman doing that--an older, middle-class woman--and I thought, ‘My God, what did it take for her to show up there?’ ”

Kurtti saw a similar heroism in the mothers she was involved with.

“If I had been in their situations, I or my kid would’ve been dead,” she said. “I truly believe God only gives you what you can handle. And after spending time with them, I realized these women were true survivors. I’d had no idea what they had to go through just to live a day-to-day existence--with no water, no heat, and kids they had no idea how to raise. People think of these women as total slobs, shiftless. But it’s just not so.”

The experience also forced the playwright to confront her own prejudices. To Kurtti, who grew up as the eldest of seven children in a middle-class setting, “ ‘Poor’ was never an alien world,” she noted. “But I’d never be the kind of person who says, ‘Oh, there’s not a racist bone in my body.’ There are many racist bones in my body--little ones, I hope. But those were things I had to confront and deal with.”

And purge? “Guilt is not a great motivator,” she said. “Sure, these things are personal, because I understand them. You know, being a writer is a wonderful sort of calling. I mean, it’s a disgusting job in a lot of other ways,” she laughed, “but it gives you a lot of free time to really investigate situations and get into them. I also felt I could see both points of view--and understand what people wanted to know about, what they had a problem with.”

Nowadays, the challenge is to transmit those stage realities to film, as she embarks on a screenplay of “Three Ways” for director Alan J. Pakula and Columbia Pictures. “They bought this for what it is,” Kurtti said firmly. “They don’t want a happy ending. They’re not saying, ‘How can we make this more commercial?’ So we’ll see how far that goes. For me, the interest in making this into a film is that it reaches new people. Period.”