Taking On a Not-So-Quiet Killer

Director Marshall W. Mason and writer William M. Hoffman hover at the foot of the stage while a pair of actors rehearse an emotional scene from Hoffman’s new play, “Riga.” They’ve worked through a portion of dialogue several times, but Mason isn’t happy with the way it crescendos to a staccato give-and-take, then hangs in the air, its rhythm unresolved.

Mason turns to Hoffman. It needs one more beat, to cap it, he says. Hoffman agrees and, on the spot, supplies a new line.

“One of the strengths of our collaborative experience is that we both have a sense of theater as music,” Mason says after the actors have been released for lunch. Hoffman agrees, adding that Mason is the only director who would have known that the exchange needed another line.

The pair have worked together, on and off, for 35 years. Most famously, they collaborated on “As Is,” one of the first plays about AIDS, in 1985. Presented off-Broadway by Mason’s Circle Repertory Company and then on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre, the show earned a number of awards, including an Obie for distinguished playwriting, a Drama Desk prize for outstanding new play and Tony nominations for Mason and for the play.

Their new collaboration addresses a different sort of plague: hatred.

“Riga” is a love story about two men--one Jewish, one African American--who are assailed by racism and homophobia. The world premiere opens this weekend, presented by the fledgling Venture West Theatre Company at the 87-seat [Inside] the Ford theater in Hollywood.

“Riga” will, no doubt, unsettle some viewers with its sexually charged depiction of the couple, as well as its exploration of the forces pulling them apart. The latter includes a reenactment of an anti-gay protest, some graphic descriptions of Holocaust murders and--in a fantasy sequence--a riff on the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic tract.

“I’m trying to detoxify our culture,” Hoffman says. “This play, I hope, becomes a mirror” in which people see themselves and the hatred that surrounds them.

“In the face of evil, you must take action,” he adds. “Get off your asses and do something about these bad people, ‘cause they ain’t goin’ away.”

Hoffman, 59, looks professorial in his suit jacket, while Mason, 58, is rumpled in his casual wear. Hoffman tends to speak frankly, his emotions surfacing suddenly and forcefully, while Mason is breezy.

They come to “Riga” with long lists of credits.

Hoffman wrote for the daytime soap “One Life to Live,” earning an Emmy nomination, and he wrote the libretto for the opera “The Ghosts of Versailles,” with music by John Corigliano. He lives in SoHo and teaches at the State University of New York in Purchase, where he is creating a department of dramatic writing.

Mason, the founding artistic director of the renowned (and now defunct) Circle Rep, also served as guest artistic director of Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre in 1988. He is a five-time Tony Award nominee, having received nods for “As Is” and Jules Feiffer’s “Knock Knock,” as well as several of his well-known collaborations with playwright Lanford Wilson: “Talley’s Folly,” “Fifth of July” and “Angels Fall.” He splits his time between New York and Mesa, Ariz., where he teaches acting and directing at nearby Arizona State University in Tempe.

Drew Snyder, Venture West’s artistic director and producer, drops by during the lunch break, and while Mason and Hoffman are otherwise occupied, he explains that he’s been “mesmerized by the musicality, the sense of language and the social significance” of “Riga” since he first read it.

The characters are dealing with “who they are, what they are--in the sense of where they came from. One wants not to deal with that; the other is obsessed with it.”

They are “forced to confront themselves on some level,” Snyder adds, “and therefore their hearts open up enough to get a little closer to love. Not perfect love, but the possibility of it.” And “love is one of the few--probably the only--real counterbalance for hatred and prejudice. It’s an underpinning for tolerance.”

“Riga” is only Venture West’s third fully staged production (after 1997’s “Reunification Hotel” and 1998’s “A Piece of My Heart”), and Snyder says he’s thrilled to have the show’s renowned creators working with his company.

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Mason and Hoffman met in the early ‘60s as fellow participants in that playfully anarchic theater movement known as off-off-Broadway. Their connection was a mutual friend: a writer named Lance Wilson--soon to become known as Lanford Wilson.

Mason, who had been raised Baptist in Bible Belt Texas, had just graduated from Northwestern University and was beginning to direct off-off-Broadway. Hoffman had grown up in New York City, the first-generation son of Jewish immigrants who had left Europe shortly before the Holocaust. He was editing a play series, as well as writing poetry and short stories.

In 1964, when Mason was readying Robert Patrick’s “The Haunted Host” for its premiere at the pioneering off-off-Broadway venue Caffe Cino, he needed “a young, good-looking hunk” for one of the roles. He chose Hoffman.

In 1968, Mason chose one of Hoffman’s scripts, “Spring Play,” to launch his American Theater Project. After that group became Circle Repertory Company, Mason directed Hoffman’s “Goodnight, I Love You” there.

In the early ‘80s, they gravitated toward one another once again as Hoffman developed a play about the mysterious syndrome that was beginning to kill his gay friends. The resulting drama, “As Is,” emerged shortly after Robert Chesley’s “Night Sweat” and just before Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart.” Together, these plays helped to shatter the silence surrounding the then-little-understood killer, AIDS. “We helped make it possible just to talk about it,” Hoffman says.

Hoffman and Mason say that “Riga” is their attempt to shatter another silence: the one shrouding America’s hatred of minorities. The pair hope to show that, when left to fester unacknowledged, this animosity can explode into violence toward minorities--sometimes, even among minorities.

As gay men, Hoffman and Mason are well acquainted with these forces. For Hoffman, who lost much of his extended family to the Holocaust, the issue is still more profound.

“Most of my family, on both sides, had been murdered” in Latvia and Poland, he says. “I grew up without grandparents and the normal thing. We came from a huge family that had disappeared.”

He was only 7 or 8 when he realized that something bad was happening to his mother’s family in Latvia. News was passed along by a Christian woman from that country, who spoke in her native language. Though young Hoffman didn’t understand her, he deduced from her reactions--as well as his mother’s--that something “horrendously traumatic” had happened. In later years, he asked his closelipped parents for details, and he traveled to Latvia to investigate. Gradually, he pieced together that a militiaman had snatched a baby from its mother’s arms and smashed its head against a wall.

“My mother was unhinged by that, and never recovered,” Hoffman says. “I don’t think I’ve ever recovered.”

The story makes its way into the play, and the city of Riga, Latvia’s capital, takes on freighted importance.

Riga became a chilling footnote to history, Hoffman explains, when a Nazi experiment in mass-killing failed there. The response was to build Auschwitz and other camps, where death was mechanized.

For his part, Mason says he’s glad “Riga” is receiving its premiere in Southern California, “the hotbed of contemporary fascism.”

“Check out the Internet; you’ll see,” he says, and Hoffman jumps in to add: “Type up ‘white power’ and see what Yahoo! [an online search navigator] brings you. A lot of the sites are here.”

The play “upsets people,” Hoffman admits. “Some people have gotten nightmares” from previous readings and workshops. “I’ve had some people walk out. I lost one friendship.” But, he adds: “I don’t think people forget it.”

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“RIGA,” [Inside] the Ford, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd., East, Hollywood. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 27. Price: $20. Phone: (323) 660-8587.