Island Son : Stage: A poet-playwright uses satire to explore love and fate amid the plight of his native St. Lucia. His play, ‘Viva Detroit,’ will open at LATC.

In our hectic society, whether change occurs because of fate or progress is usually considered after the fact. But the distinction is vital in places where the answer can still affect change.

In Derek Walcott’s new play, “Viva Detroit” (which has its world premiere Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center), a local tourist hustler in the West Indian island of St. Lucia named Sonny thinks a one-way ticket to Detroit will deliver him to the promised land. A successful but unhappy white commercial photographer named Pat leaves America for St. Lucia, which represents her island of tranquility. At the intersection of their dream, Walcott locates a love story.

Walcott, who in addition to being a playwright is one of the most prominent poets in the English-speaking world, was born and raised in St. Lucia. The atmosphere of the play is prefigured by any one of a number of his poems, such as:

. . . for once . . . you wanted no career

but this sheer light, this clear,

infinite, boring, paradisal sea,

but hoped it would mean something to declare

today, I am your poet, yours,

all this you knew,

but never guessed you’d come

to know there are homecomings without home.

From “Homecoming: Anse La Raye”

If Walcott’s poems radiate with a Homeric sea-glitter, he’s still acutely mindful of modern dislocation. The West Indian’s arterial subterranean link with black Africa rises to meet the imperial power of the English language. The native island figure labors in an urbanized, racially divided consciousness. All of it lends Walcott a kind of double vision that observes unusual shadows in what most of the rest of us take for granted, or don’t see the same way.

“Viva Detroit” is a comedy, and at this point--or at least during this interview--Walcott didn’t know what to make of it.

“Watching rehearsals, I found the play extremely strange,” he said. “I’d intended it to be almost a farce, but I didn’t realize when writing it that the players coming through were less comedic.

“The first thing I want to create is laughter--comedy always has a moral intention. By creating racial stereotypes, you create a tension in this country that’s instant and visible. Sonny is the kind of person you see a lot of in the Caribbean, a character who begins as a beach boy to meet tourists. He puts on an American accent. The more he talks American, the more he loses himself.

“You could say he’s a metaphor for the whole Carribbean, which is being taken over by the hotel industry and the developers. The two most active volcanic peaks in the world are on St. Lucia. The government and the developers are planning a funicular railroad and a hotel which would be both eyesores and a desecration. That’s Sonny’s future. To create another Miami, that’s the island’s future for as long as it continues to hustle itself in the name of progress.

“Pat, the woman, is also caught in the trap of selling herself through the gift of her photography, though the idea of selling out is less dramatic and no longer as confrontational as it once was. You have to wonder why she’s falling in love with him. Is it the island, as though you could live life under a glass bell? You do see this sort of thing happen a lot and I’m baffled about what expresses it more, comedy or pathos?”

At 60, Walcott is beyond the need to ingratiate himself if he doesn’t feel like it, and in fact has the hard edge of someone who’s been around the demimonde, like a fight manager, say, or a jazz musician--someone who’s brushed with evil. He began publishing in 1948, and divides his time among St. Lucia, Trinidad and teaching at Boston University (he’s a 1981 recipient of a John D. and Catherine MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant of $250,000). His head has kept the handsome shape of what could’ve been a rakish youth, and the uneven magnification of his eyeglasses slighty enlarges one pale eye, which peers out in owlish scrutiny. He has the chain smoker’s heavy early-morning voice; his speech rhythm is rapid, easy and clipped--quite unlike the meditative calm of his poems.

“My father died when I was 1. I have a twin brother. My mother was a schoolteacher. She did a lot of recitation as a teacher and an amateur actress. She was a Methodist in a very bigoted French Catholic community.” The bigotry didn’t sour his feel for the island. “St. Lucia has a great feeling of spirituality. The island exerts a natural force that’s tactile, rare.”

His mother died recently, and he described the burial plot he found for her close to a beach. “It’s near the airport, but so what? When I flew out of the island I felt confident that I had found the spot for her perfect repose, by the sea.”

The subject put him in a contemplative state of mind. “It isn’t death that’s unreal or weird,” he said. “It’s life. Why are the dead silent? Why are they sworn to secrecy? It’s not enough for us to think of ourselves as plants. There’s got to be a force within the process. When Dante refers to the ‘Love that moves the sun and the stars,’ that’s what I think he’s talking about. It’s not just love in man and woman. It’s overwhelming.”

The image of his mother’s grave returned his mind’s eye to St. Lucia. “I’m past the age of embarrassment,” he said. “I’ve lived abroad and in America. ‘Exile’ is a word I used to use easily. But real exile is when you can never go back. Spiritual exile is the worst kind. I’m anchored in St. Lucia. Wherever I go is an extension of the rope.”

That the island offers itself as a mirror of unassuagable longing to the characters in “Viva Detroit” is one thing, but to switch back metaphors, nothing threatens to fray the rope more than progress. “What lies ahead for the Caribbean is economic tragedy,” Walcott said. “If Sonny’s idea of Detroit is something not of the real America, Pat feels she’s beyond the cliche of the island. But is she?” In other words, is the dream rooted in the physicality of place?

That question echoes through a great deal of Walcott’s work. “I’ve felt like doing a Casals and saying I’d never go back to the island again for as long as the government was in collusion with the developers. But it’s a hell of a threat.”

He looked pensive, as though, considering all the ways the island has nourished him, the reality of the threat were too terrible to contemplate. In the meantime, he has the theater in which to think things through, the momentarily perfect venue for the sentiment he repeated several times in conversation: “Life is unreal.”