A Collective Adventure

Playwright Mark Lee lived in a commune for a few years in the 1970s, in what he calls “one of my exploratory phases.” Yes, there was the idealism, the ethic of community that united Lee’s fellow commune dwellers.

“But the real issue that defined where people stood was deciding who washed the dishes,” Lee said, almost with a laugh. “Sometimes, all the progressive ideals would suddenly get wiped out if a guy didn’t want to do kitchen duty. It was like the women were back at the sinks again.”

This heady mix of the everyday, the ideal and the literary courses through Lee’s superb play, “An American Romance,” enjoying a sold-out run at the Road Theatre Company in North Hollywood. The run is tentatively scheduled to end Nov. 16.

“Romance,” the first section of his in-progress “Summer Play Trilogy,” wryly dramatizes America’s first great commune, Brook Farm, a fertile ground zero for novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, feminist Margaret Fuller and other leaders of the transcendentalist movement. (Chief transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who refused to join Brook Farm, is an offstage character.)

Lee’s trilogy will trace the collective adventure and decline of Hawthorne, Fuller and company over 20 years: “Each part is set in the summer, which becomes more and more of a bittersweet thing as tragedy envelops the characters.” “Romance,” though, is a brilliantly sunny and ironic opener.

“These people were happily and genuinely coming together to discover what our national purpose was, what our national literature was, and put Europe aside,” Lee said over a recent lunch. “It’s that idealism that’s so exciting--and their human flaws getting in the way of their ideals that makes them funny. The notion that we can remake the world still fuels Americans, making us what we are.”

Yet, despite the success of “Romance,” its value as a meaningful dramatic lens on America and the witty joyfulness of its characters and language, the play was rejected by every major theater. This is especially strange because Lee’s past plays--”California Dog Fight,” “A House in the Country,” “Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad” and “Pirates”--have premiered at such major venues as South Coast Repertory, Manhattan Theatre Club and New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre.

Why the rejections? And how did the Road company luck out?

“Theaters with subscription seasons have slots to fill,” said Lee. “There’s the comedy, the drama, the classic, and so on. This is a hard play to categorize, because it’s a new play about our history, depicting figures we consider part of our classic literature, and it’s part drama and part comedy.

“Theaters are always wanting the smallest casts for new plays, to cut costs and risks. ‘American Romance’ has seven characters, and they had a real problem with that.”

He can’t help mentioning that his latest play, “Criminal Law,” has only two characters, and “It’s getting lots of readings and interest.

“And now, since the Road has had such a hit with audiences and critics with ‘Romance,’ a lot of theaters that passed on it the first time want to look at it again.”

According to Road board member and cast member Marci Hill, this was a play that “everyone here wanted to do from the first time we did a reading of it in 1994, around the time we did the L.A. (area) premiere of Mark’s ‘Pirates.’ But we figured that a big, well-endowed theater would grab it up, considering the play and Mark’s track record. We were really surprised others hadn’t picked it up.”

Lee insists he was able to assemble “my ideal cast and director, and do it all without the big bureaucracy of the larger regional theaters.”

The women in the cast--including Hill as Kathleen Boyle, Road artistic director Taylor Gilbert as Sophia Ripley and Ann Gillespie as Fuller--are all Road members. The men, led by John Rafter Lee as Hawthorne, are all from outside the company.

“Total coincidence,” said Hill.

And after years of attempting to collaborate, Lee snared Seattle-based John Lawler, a friend from the days the two were in the UCLA theater graduate program, as his director.

Founder of Seattle’s Annex Theatre, resident artist at both Hartford Stage and the New York Theatre Workshop as well as an opera director at the English National Opera and the Bayerische Staatsoper, Lawler brought his sense of elegant, operatic spectacle to the Road’s small upstairs space at the Lankershim Arts Center.

“My designer Wes McBride and I did a production of Tony Kushner’s version of ‘The Illusion’ at UCLA, where we put in a drop of cloud into the set,” said Lawler. “We were amazed at how effective it could be. So here we decided to wrap the whole stage in sky and puffy clouds, to suggest the play’s theme of endless possibilities. It shows that what matters isn’t the stage size, but what the imagination does with it.”

Which is why Lee, who studied with poet-novelist Robert Penn Warren at Yale, considers the imaginative Hawthorne, if anybody, the hero of his play.

“He embodied these American contradictions,” Lee said. “Here was a guy who walked into his room, closed the door and decided to write novels that would, as he said, invent American literature.

“We’re still struggling with these contradictions. I think what is defined as ‘American’ now isn’t what we make, but a way of thinking--democratic, expansive. And it comes through, still, in our novels.”

Lee himself has written a novel, “The Lost Tribe,” which will be out next year and is being adapted as a screenplay for veteran tough-guy filmmaker Walter Hill. As far as Lee is concerned, the supposedly dead “great American novel” is still being written, and he cites both Thomas Pynchon’s “Mason and Dixon” and Don DeLillo’s new “Underground” as this year’s crowning examples.

“And they’re both about our history.”

BE THERE

“An American Romance” plays Friday-Saturday at 8 p.m.; Sunday at 7 p.m. through Nov. 16. $15. (818) 761-8838.