Lucky for Us

With “An American Romance,” Mark Lee has created that rare thing: a national play for a national audience. Its world premiere at the Road Theatre is not only a coup for this small Los Angeles venue, which has nabbed a major work, but is also the surest sign yet that the once young and stumbling company has matured into an outstanding home for gifted playwrights.

Make no mistake: Lee, author of the terrific “Pirates” (which was staged brilliantly at South Coast Repertory and then at the Road), is gifted. In this first installment of his “Summer Play Trilogy”--about the alternately intense and amusing interaction between America’s radical thinkers and its everyday citizens in the 1840s--he has helped build the foundation for a most promising project: a canon of history plays about the United States.

The breathtaking, opera-style space designed by Wes McBride with artist Preston Craig suggests the play to come: enormous, yet light; expansive, yet elemental. The walls are a field of blue sky and cottony clouds, and the characters who champion transcendentalism, such as the feisty, brilliant Margaret Fuller (Ann Gillespie), are thus amusingly in the clouds.

There’s also a giant mound of dung (actually soil) the characters deal with as they build their utopian community of Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Lee’s drama-comedy is about people with one eye in the sky and one foot in the dung, unsure where to go next.

His subtle running joke is that these utopians--Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne (John Rafter Lee), poet Charles King Newcomb (David Holcomb), and farm founders Sophia and George Ripley (Taylor Gilbert and James K. Ward)--want to change the nation’s values and purpose, while remaining utterly confused about their own lives. Much funnier and smarter than all those dreary plays about mixed-up ‘60s idealists, “An American Romance” coyly loves these romantics and embraces them, flaws and all.

As in that anti-utopian masterpiece “Brave New World” (a phrase quoted here by foppish Charles), utopia is upset by outsiders: Boston-Irish laborers Kathleen (Marci Hill) and the lover she’s fleeing, Michael (Rich Willis). The play goes far beyond the expected bonding between Fuller and eager Kathleen to reveal in unexpected ways its pulsing erotic heart.

Just as Newcomb happily quotes Shakespeare, playwright Lee cleverly borrows from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s” tryst in the Arden forest to send the great thinkers into a collective tizzy of love. Act II of “An American Romance” is one juicy frolic of ideas and hormones, which director John Lawler stages with a magician’s grace.

John Rafter Lee and Gillespie not only physically resemble their genius characters--Hawthorne and Fuller--but they also express how male and female American idealists run up against old Puritan instincts.

Gilbert powerfully shifts from being the farm’s stalwart hostess to a woman caught up in passion. Ward, as her husband, is the perfect, perfectly silly Gentleman Farmer. Holcomb shows range beyond being a cad as Newcomb, and Hill and Willis are revelatory in their richly layered working-class roles.

After the dust has settled, Hawthorne gets in the final word about an America where “anything is possible.” But does it seem possible that a great American play about American identity got away from the nation’s leading regional theaters? The impossible has become the Road’s great fortune, and ours.

BE THERE

“An American Romance,” Road Theatre Company, 5108 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends Aug. 17. $15. (818) 761-8838.