Seeking the Sources of Hatred : ‘God’s Country’ at Odyssey Theatre Looks at the Lure of Neo-Nazism

The scariest thing about Steven Dietz’s docudrama on the mid-’80s rise and fall of a pack of neo-Nazis in the Pacific Northwest is that the subject hasn’t dated a bit. That’s because “God’s Country” isn’t just about the massive crime spree carried out by the group known as the Order, but the sources of racial hatred itself.

“I don’t think institutionalized racism is an issue that can get talked about enough,” said the 34-year-old playwright, who was in Los Angeles checking on rehearsals of his drama, which will have its L.A. premiere Saturday at the Odyssey Theatre. “I don’t know if it will add to what’s already going on here, but if looking at my information about ’84 and ’85 can prompt discussion following the riots in ‘92, that’s the most I can ask.”

“God’s Country,” originally commissioned by Seattle’s A Contemporary Theater, is set in the Seattle federal courthouse in which the Order’s trial took place and is based on actual court records. The action, which advances in unconventional ways in a collage featuring 41 characters, centers on the year in which the Order’s founder, Robert Jay Mathews, tried to establish an Aryan republic based on an “identity doctrine” that claimed non-Jewish whites were God’s chosen people.

The play also details the largest crime spree in U.S. history, carried out across various states. Mathews led his acolytes in numerous armed robberies and bombings, as well as the 1984 murder of Jewish talk-show host Alan Berg in Denver, before he himself was gunned down in a standoff with the FBI that same year.

Dietz, who grew up in Denver listening to Berg on the radio, began by writing about a specific set of events, but soon found his play had wider-ranging relevance. Two years after its 1988 premiere, “God’s Country” enjoyed a marked popularity, with various U.S. productions, as well as stagings as far away as Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa.

And it’s still popular. As preparations were under way for the L.A. production this past month, for instance, “God’s Country” was also closing an off-Broadway New York run at the respected La Mama theater.

Clearly, the subject has outlived its headlines. “With the deterioration of the economy over the past decade, the propensity for this kind of movement is rife,” says Frank Condon, the Odyssey’s staging director, who suggested Dietz’s play for production long before L.A.’s recent violence. “Tight economic straits mean these kinds of movements are proliferating.”

These organizations may not be as out in the open now--nor as successfully criminal as was Mathews’--but both Condon and Dietz maintain the threat is far from gone.

“Even though another group like the Order hasn’t manifested itself, what happened is the political climate began to allow for a lot of institutionalized racism,” says Dietz, whose work is familiar to L.A. audiences from the late Los Angeles Theatre Center’s productions of “Foolin’ Around With Infinity” in 1987 and “Ten November” in 1989. “L.A. is ripe with examples of that.”

Moreover, the local climate is just symptomatic of a national politics of divide and conquer, according to the playwright. “In the Reagan and Bush administrations, racism was used as a weapon to gain votes,” Dietz says. “It doesn’t take too big a leap from there for groups like the Order and the radical racist right in general to manufacture blame for all of their ills and place that blame at the feet of the Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, lesbians and gays and whomever. It’s rooted in fear and it manifests itself in blame.”

It is a kind of fear, Dietz argues, that’s fueled by hard times. “Few of the men and women who joined this movement joined because Robert Mathews walked up to them and asked, ‘Would you like to be a racist warrior?’ The fact is the majority of us are about three decisions away from desperation at any time: Your boss says you’re out of a job, your landlord says you don’t have a place to live and your loved one says, ‘I’m leaving you.’ One of the ways that desperation manifests itself is in people joining these movements.”

The greatest warning that comes of the Order is the extent to which it was able to succeed. “Even though (“God’s Country”) is about a specific time, the reason that a group like the Order is worth studying is that they were able to carry out so many of their aims--amassing a huge cache of weapons and basically building a small army,” Dietz says.

“They made a breakthrough that was the opposite of a group like the Klan. The Klan’s idea was, ‘Let’s get 100,000 members and march.’ The Order was operated on the premise of, ‘Let’s get 25 trained warriors and carry out the revolution.’ The FBI couldn’t find them. That’s very sobering on the level of what we don’t know about.”

That “God’s Country” is a documentary makes it all the more sobering. “There’s a deeper level in theater-of-fact because everything is true, not some figment of the playwright’s imagination,” notes Condon. “When (the events of the play) happened, people weren’t as aware of the racist far right. I would hope they’d be more interested now--it’s important that we pay attention to history.”

Despite its factual base, however, “God’s Country” has been criticized for being what the playwright describes “a difficult play for audiences.” “The most controversial thing about the play is not the group that’s portrayed, it’s that there’s not a character who stands up and says, ‘I think racism is bad,’ ” Dietz says. “I’ve caught hell for that, but that’s the point. It’s not an answer play.

“The goal was to take the actual words of the men and women in this movement and use the form of the theater to put those words in front of an audience and let those words spark a debate within the community.”

His unwillingness to tailor his material to make a happy ending stems from Dietz’s conviction that the theater is still a viable place for debate. “The theater has to attempt to reflect what it sees in the world,” he insists.

“You can see a city looking for a forum and finding it in rap music and dance--things that aren’t the theater--and the theater is this elephant trying to keep up. We have to debunk the notion that one good political play a year is plenty. Plays about issues should be the norm.”