Oedipus at Large in the Old South

Simon Levy and Ben Bradley have just pulled off an unlikely, if terrifying, theatrical coup.

Outflanking much larger and far richer regional houses, the Fountain Theatre’s producing director-dramaturge and its director of audience development have landed the California premiere of “The Darker Face of the Earth,” an imaginatively conceived, if controversial, tragedy in verse by U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rita Dove.

And now, sitting amid the folksy jumble of the theater’s conference room, they pause to reflect on the exhilarating and slightly mad step they have made on behalf of their celebrated little theater.

“We didn’t think that we would get the rights,” Levy says. “We are a small, 99-seat theater, and we are up against the Taper, the Geffen, La Jolla and South Coast Rep. Why a major theater company somewhere in Southern California did not pick this play up and do it is strange to us. But we’re thrilled that we are the ones who have the opportunity to present it.”

They have reason to be thrilled. Dove’s play re-imagines Sophocles’ 2,400-year-old Oedipus tragedy as an American family saga set amid the racial and sexual obscenities of the antebellum South. By appropriating the Greek master’s transcendent plot lines and ironies, Dove exposes the trivialities of race beneath the daunting profundities of blood, freedom, hubris and love. The play received its world premiere in 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, followed by productions at the Kennedy Center, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Crossroads Theatre in New Jersey and the Royal National Theatre in London.

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But Dove’s use of high-minded poetics and antique American idioms to dress up the blunt atrocities of slavery are not without detractors and their own inherent dangers. Bradley speculates that one reason more companies haven’t taken on the play is because the issues of slavery, miscegenation and racial injustice “are still loaded.” Adds Levy, “And the more loaded the issue, the more we wanted to do it.”

Levy first attempted to mount the play two years ago but realized “Darker Face” required facilities and capital resources far beyond those then available at the Fountain. He searched for a theater that could accommodate Dove’s set requirements and sprawling cast of 19, while retaining the Fountain’s tradition of intimacy. He settled on the American Renegade Theatre, a handsome two-story venue at the northern terminus of L.A.’s new Metro Rail line in the burgeoning NoHo arts district.

Next, they looked for help. “We knew that we couldn’t do the show alone, and that to do it we needed to be deeply involved with the artistic part of the African American community,” Levy says. The Fountain had already established a reputation for outreach into the African American and other ethnic and underserved communities in Los Angeles. In 1996, the theater was home to “I Am a Man,” a period play about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, which culminated in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

That project, coincidentally, introduced local audiences to Stanford-educated actor-director Anthony Haney. “Tony and I go way back,” Levy says. “Years ago I directed him in ‘The Elephant Man’ back in my hometown of San Francisco. So when we were doing ‘I Am a Man’ and were looking for a director, I suggested Tony.” Haney’s staging of the play garnered strong critical acclaim, both for himself and the Fountain.

Levy called Haney, who had since become managing artistic director of Black Artists Network Development Inc., a collective of black theatrical producers, artists and technicians, founded by Adleane Hunter in 1995. The group was searching for works to present, as well as a home to establish its own L.A.-based African American theater company. Levy sent Haney a copy of Dove’s play.

“[Haney] looked at it and said, ‘This is gigantic. Are you out of your mind?’ ” Levy says, chuckling. “And we said, ‘Yes. We are out of our minds. But we can do this.’ ”

A year and a half later, across town at the Renegade, Haney finds himself immersed in the details of a furious production schedule in advance of Friday’s premiere.

Sitting like a man in a trance, Haney ponders the maze of perspectives, characters and settings, arrayed like a world of its own just beneath him. He suddenly rises from his seat high in the rear of the Renegade and strides swiftly down through the murmuring din of technicians and actors dressed in bluejeans and T-shirts, milling about the edge of the stage with their scripts.

“Hey, LaTonya, can you go up to the chair and give me a chorus of ‘O Mary’?” he asks a cast member on the looming upper tier of the set, still under construction. Singer-actress LaTonya Welch moves beside an embroidered chair set back from the sweeping curvilinear edge of the set and belts out the plaintive lines of the spiritual. Haney studies her pensively.

“Rita’s script deals with some interesting issues of what happens when we know the truth but resist it,” Haney says. “It deals with issues like, ‘I know the system is wrong but I’m not willing to take the risk to do better.’ [Thomas] Jefferson said that blacks and whites will never be able to live in this country together because blacks will never be able to forgive whites for the atrocities they’ve committed. We don’t know if he’s right yet; it’s still playing out.”

Haney then slides a finger along his arm and quips, “[Color] is just a camouflage to keep us from getting to who we really are. This play is not about slavery. It is a play about issues that are still unresolved in our psyche. And we are in this tremendous denial and fear of looking at it. And yet we wonder why we’re still in pain.”

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The idea of tackling the sexually and racially loaded subject of slavery wasn’t necessarily appealing to Dove when she first started working on the play. “I didn’t want to go there,” says the poet, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for “Thomas and Beulah.” “No one wants to go with pain, and enter pain. And no one wants to have to live with it for a while and admit that evil has many different sides and that no one is completely free of guilt.”

Dove’s inspiration for the play, she says, was both mysterious and fortuitous. “I can’t even tell you where it came from. It was one of those blessed moments that occurs,” she says in a telephone interview from her home near Charlottesville, Va. “I had been rereading ‘Oedipus Rex’ and suddenly I thought, ‘Is this even possible today? I mean, anywhere in our recorded history?’ And then when I thought of slavery--I just knew I had to write it.”

Dove adds her voice to a long list of writers ranging from Voltaire to Eugene O’Neill who have used Sophocles as a template to cut through the complexities of modern life. Moreover, this is not the first time Dove has used this device.

In her collection of poems “Mother Love,” she used the myth of Persephone and Demeter to explore the bond between mothers and daughters. Yet in her hands, one encounters these lofty personages at street level, in modern voice and grappling with the complexities of 21st century life. Her reasons for doing this, she says, are obvious.

“Well, first of all, people are essentially the same. There may have been different conflicts and pressures on people of the 4th century BC, but some of the same things existed then as they do now, including slavery.

“I think the Greek myths were created out of a need to understand the world,” she continues. “They arose as a way of explaining not only a phenomenon like the rising and setting of the sun--and the chariot going back and forth across the sky--[but] even a way of explaining and giving templates for how one handles oneself in extreme situations. What do you do if you lose a daughter or a child? How do you cope with it? How much grief is permissible? When is pride going to bring you down? They become parables, like in the Bible, because they come out of very human situations.

“And so I just feel that if you take away the trappings and take away the togas and the Greek chariots and stuff like that, they are just people.”

“Darker Face,” which stars Jason Winston George in the Oedipus-inspired lead role, and Jacqueline Schultz in the role of Amalia, the plantation owner tragically linked to him by blood, fate and love. This production will field a distinguished troupe of actors, technicians and production personnel, many of them African American.

“What is new about this play,” George says, “is it deals with a sense of disconnection in a way that goes beyond the issue of race. Race becomes subordinated to the issue of hubris, for me. My character, Augustus, has an anger that he cannot let go of. Rita’s play tells us that if your anger consumes you, you will destroy that which you seek. If audiences get that, all of the other subtle nuances will fill in.”

Co-producers Bradley and Levy are still raising the funds needed to finance the production, which is far and away the largest and most ambitious in the Fountain’s 10-year history. The script, says Levy, “calls for a cast of 19, and to do it properly, you need an ethnomusicologist, a choreographer, a musical director, and a fight director to make this theater come alive.”

Typically, Fountain productions seldom exceed a budget of $30,000, Bradley says. But the “Darker Face” budget is already nearly double that--$55,000 and counting.

“Right now we are projecting in the neighborhood of a $30,000-plus loss on ‘Darker Face,’ ” Levy admits. When Bradley suggested sending out a request for funds to their subscribers, Levy balked. “It felt weird--like we were begging. We’ve never done that,” he recalls. Bradley saw the situation differently. “Simon referred to it as begging, but I looked at it as asking people to make an investment in the arts and in the community. To me, it’s all part of purchasing a subscription, like: ‘OK, you’ve bought your ticket; that’s one way of saying thank-you. Now you can thank us another way.’ ”

Bradley proved to be right. The Fountain has raised an additional $7,000 to offset production costs from the donations of its subscribers. “And that’s just folks,” Levy says, still amazed. “Not any foundations, not any corporations--it’s all individuals. We’ve been shocked, thrilled and amazed that people would support the arts in this way. And especially a play as important as this one.”

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“THE DARKER FACE OF THE EARTH,” Fountain Theatre and Black Artists Network Development, American Renegade Theatre, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Dates: Opens Friday Runs Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Also Aug. 27 and Sept. 10, 3 p.m. Ends Sept. 17. Prices: $18 to $22. Phone: (323) 663-1525.