Giving Voice to a City’s Tensions

For a man who has traveled the world, Kambon Obayani is going very local for his new one-act plays now at the Burbage Theatre.

How local? The umbrella title for the pair of dramas is “L.A. Stories,” and in both works--”Next Time Fire” and “Believer”--Obayani is seeking to uncover the tensions that surfaced in the April, 1992, riots “not just in terms of ethnicity, but in terms of class,” he says.

As Obayani, an English and mass communications professor at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, sits in his faculty office, he modestly denies that he has some final word on Los Angeles’ maladies.

But isn’t there something to the notion that a writer with a larger world view can bring greater insight to what can often be viewed as terminally local issues?

“Well, I’ll say that I looked at this city in a completely different way when I returned,” he said. “I left here in 1978, and, except for a one-month visit, didn’t return until 1991. The place felt like Disneyland. I sensed a real vacuum, because people here had no idea what was going on in the rest of the world. You could see it in ways of lifestyle. In other countries, people will sit down in their home and have actual conversations. Here, they sit around and watch videos.”

“L.A. Stories” director Steve Long said Obayani’s travels have “made him sensitive to people. He’s a humanist, because he has been a part of a larger world, and that experience has lent his characters real complexity.”

Obayani, 40, born in Venice, said his eyes and ears perceived, after all these years, a changed Los Angeles. (He refers to his mixed black and Latino heritage as “Afro-tino.” He adopted his African name, meaning the people’s warm king , after an involved, personal search for his family’s roots.)

“ ‘Next Time Fire,’ of course, emerged out of the aftermath of the riots, or the uprising, or whatever you want to call it,” Obayani notes. “You see, the identity of South-Central is much more complicated than people realize. The middle-class African-American family in the play comes from a very stable, nice old house on a well-manicured block in South-Central. But they’re divided in their perceptions of the reaction to the verdict on the Rodney King beating by where they live and work now.”

Any playwright knows that the secret of translating a large event or idea to the stage is to find a moment, an action, that distills it. Obayani believes he found that moment when viewing riot footage that showed three girls stopping traffic and dancing in a form mimicking the beating of King by Los Angeles police. Call it “The Rodney King Dance.”

“How my family characters react to that act says everything about them,” he said. Obayani’s “Believer” observes the even more complicated landscape of “the American Dream”--a subject the playwright feels some objectivity about after his years away from America.

“The dream isn’t exactly lost in ‘Believer,’ but it is tainted. The central character, Bob, comes up with good ideas for improving operations in the company he works for, but they’re too many for his own good. His superiors feel very threatened. As a Latino man, Bob has gone along with the rules for getting ahead, and he truly believes and cherishes the dream of success. But he doesn’t realize the price paid with too much success, too soon.”

When he was abroad, Obayani received a real taste of the rules of the American Dream a few years ago when his older brother wrote him about life back home. “I was wearing long dreadlocks and a beard then, and he wrote me some instructions about wearing the right ‘uniform for success.’ And that meant, among other things, getting rid of the beard and dreads, and trimming my hair.”

A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, he had written a musical, “Mama Do Blue,” with George Houston Bass, for New York’s Lincoln Center in 1976, “but, after that, I had to make a career choice that took me away from the theater.” And away from America, as Obayani took a variety of teaching posts: at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan; with the ministry of education in Yemen, and with the ministry of mines and engineering in his father’s native Colombia.

In every place, he was drawn to local musicians. Music, he said, is “a passionate sideline. . . . There’s nothing I love more right now than the work I call ‘Soundscapes,’ which I’m writing for performance works by Keith Antar Mason’s Hittite Empire.”

Like his playwriting, Obayani’s “Soundscapes” are character-driven. “A lot of performance isn’t interested in developing characters, but that is where I always begin. I like to frame debates on stage, so in that way, I am somewhat influenced by George Bernard Shaw and his debate plays.

“But he used his characters as mouthpieces. I let the muse in, so to speak, and let my characters come out of nowhere and talk back to me. Out of this comes the dialogue--and, I hope, a dialogue for the larger community.”

“L.A. Stories” plays at 7:30 p.m. Sundays through March 21 at the Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets: $15. Call (310) 478-0897.