San Diego Repertory’s Space Odyssey Looks to Albania for Musical Inspiration

When movie makers decorate their outer-space fantasies with music, they tend to choose eerie electronic sounds or the brassy, orchestral bombast of Richard Strauss. Mac Wellman’s new play, “Albanian Softshoe,” takes place on Saturn, but Wellman and composer Michael Roth have ignored such musical convention. For Wellman’s extraterrestrial adventure, they have dredged up obscure Albanian folk music to punctuate the play.

“This play populates Saturn with a bunch of Albanians,” Roth explained, “because that country is another place in the world that nobody really knows anything about. So we’re on Saturn, but the music we’re hearing is this odd Albanian music.”

The San Diego Repertory Theatre will stage the world premiere of Wellman’s “Albanian Softshoe” at the Lyceum on Sept. 20, with previews beginning tomorrow night.

Although Wellman’s name has not become the household word that fellow playwrights David Mamet and Christopher Durang have, Roth is his unabashed apologist. He has written music or prepared the sound design for seven of Wellman’s other plays, and he urged the Rep to undertake “Albanian Softshoe,” which had previously only been given an informal reading in a university theater workshop.

“I kept giving this play to directors,” said Roth, “and they kept saying they didn’t know what to do with it.”

Doug Jacobs, the Rep’s artistic director, took up the challenge the other directors evaded. But Jacobs drafted Roth to co-direct “Albanian Softshoe” with him, another act of bravery, since Roth had not directed professionally before.

Roth, a voluble 35-year-old composer who calls New York City his home, has been the La Jolla Playhouse’s resident composer since 1983. While this is his first formal association with the downtown company, he allowed that he was brought in to teach a song to the cast in the Rep’s “Blue Window” production a couple of seasons back.

Finding a suitable category for the Wellman opus has puzzled even those who have read the script.

“Why not say it’s a new comedy and leave it at that,” said Roth. “At one time, the Rep’s publicity people called it a futuristic fantasy, but it takes place now. You could say it’s science fiction in the best sense of the word: a speculative fiction, not cinematic.”

In “Albanian Softshoe,” Wellman explained that he used Albanians and their music as a symbol for everything that appears to be remote from 20th-Century American culture.

“It’s not so much Albania,” said Wellman, “but our relationship to an alien place. It is a nation of bandits who have never been conquered. They don’t want tourists there, and they don’t allow Americans to visit their country.”

Wellman acknowledged that one of his unusual passions has been the study of the Byzantine Empire.

“I have been fascinated with the problem of maintaining morale in a declining empire, where values have worn away. And Albania is the most peculiar of these Balkan countries. There may be some parallels between our culture and theirs. Someone like Richard Nixon would fit right into the Byzantine Empire of the 10th or 12th Century.”

Unexpected juxtaposition is a hallmark of Wellman’s style. In one of his earlier plays, “Cleveland,” he situated a woman from Miranda--one of the five moons of Uranus--in the Ohio city for which the play is named. (Wellman is a native of Cleveland, although the 44-year-old playwright now lives in Brooklyn.) In Melissa Shifflet’s opera “Without Colors,” librettist Wellman adapted an Italo Calvino short story about a pair of lovers stranded on a prehistoric landscape without atmosphere.

When Wellman went to look for sources of folk music for the show, he encountered Albanian isolation and xenophobia first hand. Even the authoritative, multivolume New Grove’s music encyclopedia laments the paucity of research available on Albanian music.

“I phoned the Albanian mission to the United Nations for assistance, but no one spoke English there. Eventually I found some records at a shop in Brooklyn--there were only three records, so of course I bought them all. It is a really exotic folk music, a little like the music of the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus, but not as arty.”

At one point in the play, according to Roth, the entire cast sings a hero’s lament in Albanian. In another place, a tape captures the song of two Albanian men singing from one mountain to the next, which is a type of primitive communication in that remote, rocky terrain. But not all of the music for “Albanian Softshoe” will be ethnic music.

“Some of the stuff will sound just like me,” said Roth, although his own musical style to this point has been eclectic.

“His music ranges from rock ‘n’ roll to (Anton) Webern and Elliot Carter,” said Wellman. With such possibilities, of course, the score could be many things.

“Some of the score will be on tape, and some of it will be live,” Roth explained, “and there will be some live sequencing and sampling. I don’t want this to be a high-tech extravaganza. I won’t be quoting John Williams (composer of the ‘Star Wars’ score), but I might quote Gustav Holst (who wrote ‘The Planets’). I’ve been listening to him recently.”