‘Freedomland’: Not the Happiest Place on Earth

The season--any season--can use a smart, spunky dramatist.

Made to order, San Francisco playwright Amy Freed gets her Southern California debut with the opening Friday of her latest black comedy, “Freedomland,” in a world premiere on the South Coast Repertory main stage.

“She has a biting sense of satirical language that I have not come across in any American writer,” says Howard Shalwitz, artistic director of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Co. in Washington, where her previous black comedy “The Psychic Life of Savages” premiered in 1995.

“Savages” brightened Woolly Mammoth’s season. The Washington Post called it “exultantly mean” as well as “painfully affecting,” and it won the New York Arts Club’s nationally prestigious $10,000 Joseph Kesselring Award. Adds Shalwitz, whose satirical expertise was honed on the Nicky Silver black comedy “Fat Men in Skirts” that he also directed in its premiere: “You see emotional conflict pushed to its comic limit in her writing. And there’s a precocious brilliance that comes from a real grounding in the world of ideas.”

The slight, blond object of all this heavy intellectual breathing sat demurely at SCR the other day in a silk shirt and corduroy pants, accommodating a photographer who took her picture with the latest draft of the “Freedomland” script open on her lap. Her jottings dotted the pages. In 30 minutes she would be back to rehearsal and rewrites.

“This is happening amazingly fast,” Freed said. “When South Coast put up the reading in June, I’d only been working on the play for six months. Plus, I’d written it faster than anything I’d written in my life.”

In fact, up to the night of the reading, part of a script-development series called NewSCRipts, the theater had no intention of giving “Freedomland” a full production so soon. But the striking response of more than 300 listeners that night, an unfilled slot in the schedule and sheer chutzpah convinced SCR producing artistic director David Emmes, who is directing, to take a shot at mounting it.

The play, which SCR commissioned, gets its title from the name of a dimly remembered Wild West theme park called Freedomland in the Bronx, where Freed was born. “My father used to bring me there,” she recalled. “It was torn down to make way for Co-op City”--one of the largest high-rise housing developments of the 1960s--”and it’s intimately connected with a time in my childhood when there was nothing more thrilling than going to a theme park.

“As an adult,” she added, “I find it almost impossible to recapture the pure unadulterated ecstasy of a world built for children. In the case of Freedomland, it is my good-and-evil, shoot-’em-up gunslinger fantasy. It represents a primordial, unquestioning order for me--a place of safety. When David asked me what ‘Freedomland’ meant, I said I thought of it as a wistful, not a prescriptive, title.”

Wistfulness, however, scarcely seems to apply. A distraught family at the center of the play “exists in a constant state of crazed anarchy,” to quote SCR’s press release, which puts it mildly. The father is a patriarchal misfit abandoned by his first wife; his new wife is a free-love refugee from Club Med; his grown daughters--an avant-garde artist who paints clowns and a lost soul who thinks Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are fun--hate each other; his paranoid son fumes like a mad bomber.

The operative word seems more like “nuts” or “eccentric.” But Freed demurred: “I’d say they’re extreme characters rather than quirky. I think they’re all passionately driven people rather than adorable kooks.”

Although “Freedomland” is close to her, she said, “it’s not very autobiographical. I conflated a couple of story elements, so it’s a hybrid of my family and others. There’s a lost mother theme, which is not my story. And the unhappy Daddy is not autobiographical either. That’s more generational.”

Freed, who is 39, said she feels that she has grown up “among a generation of lost fathers profoundly affected by the early 1970s, when families were dropping like flies. They were hit by the raised consciousness of the ‘60s, the Vietnam War, drugs, the quest for complete self-gratification.

“The lightning that strikes this family has to do with a cultural shift. They haven’t found a language for their belief and self-definition. That’s why they’re damaged, not because of Freudian family issues. They’re trying to live in an age of unbelief, when they’re all really believers by nature.”

A former actor who says she turned to writing because her acting career wasn’t going anywhere, Freed, who is married to a San Francisco journalist, has had a handful of plays produced since 1991.

They include “Still Warm,” loosely based on the life of NBC newswoman Jessica Savitch; “Claustrophilia,” which depicts the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and his 13-year-old bride; “The Ghoul of Amherst,” a glimpse of Emily Dickinson and her fear of death; and “Poetomachia,” revised with Shalwitz’s help as “The Psychic Life of Savages,” which sends up the likes of poets Sylvia Plath, Ted Morgan, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell.

Why the focus on poets? “It was an absolutely selfish way for me to teach myself to write,” Freed said. “I knew about stage stuff. But I had to learn the language. The whole art of theater is to suggest concentration, and the language of poetry is incredibly economical. Theater is an economic form, like poetry. It comes right from the marrow.”

In “Savages,” which she calls “a scandalous but totally fictional” account of Plath and Morgan (who were married) and Sexton and Lowell (who were not), Freed manages to spoof the characters while also taking them seriously.

“She makes fun of them but she is able to give them their due in terms of their ideas, their substance, their depth and their struggles,” said Shalwitz, speaking from A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, where he is directing a play.

“She does brilliant parodies of their poetry, and yet they also work dramatically. And you see the same qualities in ‘Freedomland.’ Her writing is never realistic. It’s always at a high-pitched edge. What keeps it afloat is that her characters are always very needy. She’s able to write individuals who become icons with a true interior life.”

Freed took Plath, and to a lesser extent, Sexton, who both committed suicide, as potent symbols for several generations of women and used them as post-feminist points of departure in “Savages,” which also won the Washington Theatre Society’s 1995 Charles McArthur Award for outstanding new play. “Plath was a particularly powerful figure for women,” Freed said. “The Bell Jar,” a novel Plath published in 1962, a year before killing herself at 31, “has whole Web pages devoted to it,” Freed said.

“The book is written in the classic sicko voice of disenfranchised girls who don’t know how to be women and who are celebrating their antisocialness. Plath called the book a potboiler, but she did a lot of what [performance artist] Karen Finley did later. It’s a completely spontaneous outcry.”

While “Freedomland” has echoes of her earlier work, Freed hopes her rewrites have lent more plot and “structural assurance” to the play than it had in the reading. She also wonders whether “black comedy” is an accurate description.

“The term implies a little more of a fun fest than it is,” she said. “This play has got less vinegar than my others. People who’ve never seen a play of mine wouldn’t know that. But for me, ‘Freedomland’ almost borders on the sentimental. Maybe I’m losing my grip.” *

“FREEDOMLAND,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Dates: Opens Friday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Nov. 16. Prices: $28-$43. Phone: (714) 708-5555.