‘Struggling Truths’ in Tibet

Things get cerebral this week at the Odyssey Theatre, where Ron Sossi is staging the premiere of Peter Mellencamp’s “Struggling Truths,” opening Saturday.

“It is a think piece,” admitted the theater’s artistic director. The setting is Tibet, spanning the 1930s to 1950s. In a succession of 40 scenes, a “reincarnated, enlightened” lama narrates the stories of a brother and sister who end up on opposing factions--he wants to be a lama, she joins the Chinese communists--and of the Dalai Lama taking the throne as a teen-ager.

As a historical evocation, Sossi allowed, “It has certain information--but since the man and woman are totally fictitious, it’s really a condensation of what happened.”

The basic premise, he continued, “is the clash between the ideas of Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Communism. That’s the political level. But on the metaphysical level, there’s the whole idea of duality: that we live our lives under the illusion that everything breaks down into opposites--things are good or bad, black or white. In the philosophical sense, it’s about how we’re caught, always choosing between those opposites. Therein lies our state of suffering, the Buddhists say.”

Although Sossi stressed that the playwright does not side with either the Buddhist or Communist point of view, the piece is nevertheless provocative; one Asian actor turned down a role because, he said, he didn’t like the play’s politics. Which leads to another issue: the director has heard rumors of discontent about the relatively small number of Asian actors (three out of 14) cast in the piece.

“It was never intended by the writer to be all-Asian,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s a parable, not a historical document. I definitely wanted to do it cross-culturally; that’s how we advertised. We wanted to use as many Asians as possible, and we went out of our way to look for them. The long and short of it is, the Asian community of actors is not that large, so our choices were very small. Some of the Asian actors we cast later withdrew. Others we found didn’t even come in to audition.”

THEATER BUZZ: Speaking of the Odyssey, we were wondering what was going on with that “one- year” lease signed with the city last August. The theater doesn’t show any signs of picking up and moving on any time soon. “Originally they told us, ‘We can only give you a one-year lease, but the way the city operates, it’ll probably be two or three years--at least,’ ” said Sossi. “At the same time, (Councilman Zev) Yaroslavsky said, ‘Don’t hold your breath; anything can happen.’ So that’s where we are.”