STAGE REVIEW : ‘Vision’ of Unripe Shepard, Wise Baraka

It would be interesting to hear what Sam Shepard has to say today about his 1966 play, “Red Cross,” assuming one could one could get him to say anything. Playwrights can be difficult that way. They don’t like to explain. The play is there, they tell us. It’s for us to experience, not them to explain.

Don’t let it give you an inferiority complex. When the experience is thin, it doesn’t always mean that it is we who have missed something. It’s impossible to walk away from “Red Cross,” a play written when Shepard was 22, feeling that this play is all that enriching.

Paired with “Dutchman” by LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka) in the Mark Taper Forum’s ongoing “50/60 Vision,” a festival of 13 short plays from the ‘50s and ‘60s, “Red Cross” is the early work of a young writer feeling his oats.

If the action that takes place in a cabin in the woods somewhere isn’t particularly easy to assemble into a coherent whole--though not hard to follow event by event--it may be because there was never very much there to assemble.

The free association and garrulous speeches in “Red Cross,” as well as its somewhat arbitrary images, feel like young blood coursing through the veins of a new playwright intoxicated with visions and language. And Shepard has stated in print that some of his early plays were just that--experiments that now drift back to him mostly as “flimsy ghosts.”

The action involves Carol (Megan Butler) and Jim (Ron Campbell) who share the cabin, and a maid (Karmin Murcelo) who comes in to make up the beds.

Carol complains of an exploding head; Jim admits to having his own physical problem--crabs--but only to the maid, after Carol has left. He and the maid go through various ritualistic routines that are wide open to interpretation, but never absorbing. When Carol returns (although she and Jim had agreed earlier to meet somewhere at 6 and that’s all but forgotten), they switch complaints in an ending that merely feels contrived.

So far, the plays we have seen in this festival have been heftier than this. Shepard insists that everything in “Red Cross” be white (sets, costumes, etc.), which is the closest link to the play’s title--though the characters’ various ailments could be another, and there is no doubt room for larger metaphors if one cares to find them.

It may be not be worth the trouble. Shepard grew from there to write some of the most compelling plays in recent dramatic literature. “Red Cross” is not one of them. Director Peter C. Brosius hasn’t tried to make it more. To his credit. The actors valiantly deliver, but the material does not greatly reward them. Or us.

“Dutchman” is quite another matter. Powerfully staged by Ethan Silverman, the work is that of a much more mature, much angrier writer. Its concealed menace, overtly fraught with racial ballast, openly invoking violence, is iconographic of its period. It is dramatically disciplined, prepossessing, and the roles are fully formed.

Clay (Jihmi Kennedy) and Lula (Butler again, but this time in a blistering performance), are riders on a subway to perdition. Lula who is white and sexy, taunts Clay who is black and middle-class. What they perform is a ritual dance of death as the train careens to nowhere through the bowels of the city. This is a play that cries out to be experienced.

Consequently, we won’t say much more about it, but a word of caution: Although “Dutchman” was the unwitting precursor to a lot of real subway violence, its meaning must not be taken narrowly. This is a play about class and racial struggle on a far larger and less literal canvas. As dramatic expression it explodes boundaries, trespasses free, merciless and uncensored on emotional and behavioral taboos--and is some kind of eloquent in the process.

It makes one seriously regret the absence of much recent writing for the stage from such a potent and magnificent rebel. Without belaboring the point or trying to play seer, that in itself may constitute the sharpest political comment on the state of art in society today.

At the Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., April 4, 10, 21, May 4, 10 at 8 p.m.; April 1 at 7:30 p.m. Matinees April 15, 28 at 2:30 p.m. Marathon Weekend (all 13 plays in “50/60 Vision”): April 7-8, 2-5:30 p.m. and 7-10:30 p.m. Ends May 10. $22-$28. (213) 972-7373, (213) 410-1062, (714) 634-1300, TDD (213) 680-4017).