THEATER / JAN HERMAN : ‘Twenty-One’ Questions : ‘Night and Her Stars,’ Premiering Tonight at SCR, Uses ‘50s Game-Show Scandal to Examine Society’s Obsession With Winners and Losers

Walt Whitman heard America singing. Dan Enright hears America wanting. The time is the late ‘50s. The place is network television. The mood is prophetic.

America craves “the cash, the fridge, the camper, the car.” But those are just appetizers. What America really hungers for is a main dish to envy and adore.

As the producer of “Twenty-One,” NBC’s answer to “The $64,000 Question” and “The $64,000 Challenge” on CBS, Enright is only too happy to appease the nation’s hunger and the insistent demands of his sponsors.

He will supply that dishiest of dishes, a winning contestant who is “tall, graceful, brilliant, virile” and, perhaps most important, “deserving.”

So begins Richard Greenberg’s latest play, “Night and Her Stars,” about the secretly rigged quiz shows that enthralled the public with get-rich fantasies during TV’s cynical adolescence. It opens tonight, a world premiere on the South Coast Repertory Mainstage in Costa Mesa.

Greenberg, 35, is too young to remember the shows themselves or the scandal that burst their bubble. But his play sets out the essential facts, making use of real-life figures and raising serious questions about a society that feeds on the titillation of winners and losers cast as heroes and villains.

“I became interested in the subject because of the way people were enlisted to act out a pre-existing scenario,” Greenberg recalled during a recent interview at the theater. “Instead of being part of a game, in which anybody could win based on skill, they had to enact a drama with predetermined roles.”

The two most celebrated Enright recruits were Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel, both plucked from obscurity and pitted against each other on “Twenty-One” in a bogus but dazzling showdown. Each was coached to make it look like a victory of the good guy over the bad guy.

Stempel, the show’s reigning champ, was a short, stocky former GI who dreamed of becoming an actor and was working his way through graduate school at New York’s City College. But for all his winnings, viewers were not smitten by him. He looked uncomfortable in clothes that didn’t fit. He had a bad haircut. Far from inspiring confidence in the common man with a seemingly infinite fund of knowledge, he offered the unappealing image of a bundle of nerves.

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Enright decided Stempel would serve the show better as a loser. Van Doren was brought on to defeat the unlikable champ.

Tall, handsome and modest, Van Doren looked elegant and sounded self-deprecating--everything you’d want in an Ivy League college instructor, especially one who came from a distinguished intellectual family. Not surprisingly, Van Doren was an overnight sensation. He spent 15 consecutive weeks on “Twenty-One,” became a cultural icon and made the cover of Time magazine.

But as the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding saga so recently has reminded us, a national obsession with symbolic heroes and villains can have unexpected consequences. Stempel, who resented his inglorious treatment, became Van Doren’s nemesis in reality. He went to the authorities and told what he knew, not so much to exonerate himself as to tarnish Van Doren.

“People didn’t really care about Herb Stempel,” Greenberg said. “He was seen as this terrible little man who envied Charles Van Doren and got angry that he didn’t make as much money. So he created a lot of trouble.”

When people found out the quiz shows were rigged, even down to such details as telling contestants when to hesitate or mop their brows, they were deeply shocked. Yet Van Doren maintained such an aura of innocence that his heroic status seemed untouched by the revelations.

Oddly, the playwright never had any particular interest in the quiz shows or the scandal that set off a congressional investigation. He only discovered the subject by accident a few years ago.

“I was watching TV and saw the last 15 minutes of this documentary about what had happened. I was just killing time. I still haven’t seen any more than that snippet. But I thought, ‘These are my characters!’ Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel had the sort of antimony I’m always writing about.”

Odder still, Greenberg believed at first that the subject would make great material for a musical. He and William Finn, the Tony Award-winning composer, were looking to do one together “and we needed a topic,” Greenberg explained. “This was big. It had color, size.” But they couldn’t come to a meeting of minds.

“Bill always wanted to do stuff I wasn’t interested in. I always wanted to do stuff he wasn’t interested in. He would suggest frothy, high-class farces. I would think, ‘Please, never again as long as I live.’ I would say things like, ‘Why don’t we do “Goodbye, Columbus?” And he would say, ‘I’ve written it already. It’s called “Falsettos.” ’

“So I wrote a few pages of this. Bill even set them (to music). Time passed. Then he said, ‘There’s no love story.’ I was grateful, because by then I’d become so interested I wanted to be responsible for the whole thing.”

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Once Greenberg began looking into the subject, he decided to do what he calls “ambient research.” He drenched himself in the Zeitgeist of the ‘50s. Rather than load up on videos of the quiz shows or documentaries about them, he read reams of literature from the period. He took a special interest in the writings of the poet and critic Mark Van Doren, Charles’ father.

But one thing that especially set Greenberg off was Charles Van Doren’s own view of the quiz shows. A somewhat reclusive figure who to this day has never said much about them in public, Van Doren wrote an article for Life magazine some six months after his starring role on “Twenty-One,” well before the scandal hit.

“You see him distancing himself from the quiz shows,” Greenberg said. “He says the information on the shows doesn’t count as real knowledge. He says real knowledge is more baffling and complex. It’s curious, because he talks about the experience of the quiz show contestant abstractly, but it feels strangely confessional.

“He says, ‘To the quiz show contestant, all is certainty. No questions are asked except those that have answers. And those answers are held on the cards in the emcee’s hand.’ You can’t help thinking, ‘If you hadn’t been fixed, Charles, would it have been so certain to you?’ ”

Van Doren went so far as to suggest an outlandish theory of brain function that enabled the contestants to store encyclopedic amounts of data. In essence, he theorized that they created space in their brains for new data by erasing old data.

“It seems so sadly, hideously ironic,” Greenberg said. “Here was this man who was supposed to be promulgating a love of knowledge. That was one of his rationalizations. And he had submitted to this completely instrumental use of knowledge, this vulgarization of it, even using it as his defense.

“That’s why an investigator says to him, ‘Do you ever miss what you’ve forgotten?’ It shocks Van Doren for a moment into an awareness of what he has become.”

And what of Stempel?

He never became an actor. But part of his Hollywood dream did come true. Nearly four decades after his appearance on “Twenty-One,” he served as a consultant on the new movie “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford and due in September from Disney.

* “Night and Her Stars” opens tonight at 8 and continues through April 3 at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $25-$35. (714) 957-4033.