STAGE REVIEW : Dietz’s ‘God’s Country’: Big Sets, Big Ideas

Halfway into Steven Dietz’s “God’s Country,” at the Odyssey Theatre, an earnest college student is interviewing two crusty white racists about their belief in a cosmology of conspiracies. It’s an instantly absurd collision of American cultural types: the squeaky-clean youth (Angela Perry) in search of the facts, the dirt-poor codgers reeling off Byzantine scenarios far vaster than their world--or any world--can contain.

Dietz has said that he amassed boxes of information for his play on the U.S. white supremacist movement and its violent apotheosis in a small cadre called the Order. He may be parodying the fact-finder in him in this scene, which is partly why it’s one of “God’s Country’s” funniest passages.

For the listener, though, struggling to absorb the play’s massive gobs of information, it’s a scene of piercing truth that has nothing to do with fact.

“God’s Country,” first produced in 1988 at Seattle’s A Contemporary Theatre and finally arriving in Los Angeles after several stagings around the world (including South Africa), has gained a reputation as a paradigmatic contemporary nonfiction play. (Dietz, in an interview, cited playwright Emily Mann’s term theater of testimony .) The testimony here, especially in the re-created trial of Order members, is aplenty. But it’s the occasional forays into fiction that sound the most resonant and troubling chords.

That “God’s Country” should scare our pants off, and doesn’t, is no fault of director Frank Condon’s fluid staging. Condon’s jobs are to find the right actors with real range (an ensemble of 11 covers 41 roles) and to orchestrate things so that Dietz’s collage-like structure of scenes move past us like flicking channels on the tube. As a director with keen instincts for both nonfiction and courtroom drama (“The Chicago Conspiracy Trial,” “McCarthy”), Condon makes this material breathe, and his actors--notably Darrell Larson and Tom Lillard--sometimes breathe fire. Veteran Condon collaborators (Don Llewellyn’s set, Doc Ballard’s and Lynne Peryon’s lights and Diane E. Shapiro’s costumes) vitally stoke the fire.

Condon cannot, however, make the play something it resists becoming: a terrifying examination into America’s dark soul. He also probably could not have saved Dietz’s previous nonfiction work, “Ten November,” also testimonial-driven, also ultimately inert. In both projects, Dietz’s intent to present social issues as a document runs head-on into the playwright’s need to turn raw data into raw drama.

He isn’t interested in marathon clashes of characters, but in how information and people come at us from unexpected places. His canvas is too big for just one central figure; instead, he has three: Larson’s icy Robert Jay Mathews, founder of the Order; Thom McCleister’s beefy, vulnerable Denver Parmenter, former Order member-turned-star-witness for the prosecution; and Robert Lesser’s bitterly acerbic Alan Berg, a Denver radio talk-show host assassinated by the Order in 1984.

Things shift between Mathews’ amazing successes (a string of lucrative bank robberies to fund revolutionary warfare), Parmenter’s testimony and Berg’s famous clashes with right-wing racists. It’s a roundelay of polemicists, with big set pieces (the theater walls are uncovered to surround us with supremacist banners) and big ideas (especially opposite notions of liberty).

But the really interesting parts of “God’s Country” are the interludes between the big pictures: the aforementioned student scene, or a creepy monologue by an Order wife about confusing Lee Oswald, the assassin, with Lee Oswald, her Sunday school teacher. What it means, exactly, we can’t say, but it gets under our skin in a way no amount of candlelight rites with white babies and heated court scenes can.

Dietz’s deeper concerns hit their target when he doesn’t indicate, but suggests. Eric Bogosian used this tactic in his own play--and later, film--based on Berg, “Talk Radio.” As voices on the other end of the phone, Bogosian’s supremacists became all the more powerful and fearful by being once removed. Dietz’s Order followers never break out of the wax figure molds in which he’s cast them--despite Lillard’s hard looks, McCleister’s enigmatic gazes, Larson’s outbursts. When real people become this unreal, something’s not wrong with the agenda, but with the methods.

* “God’s Country,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Wednesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 7 p.m.; Aug. 2 and 16, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 16. $17.50-$21.50; (310) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.