A Greatly Exaggerated Demise

How apt that Samuel Langhorne Clemens adopted “Mark Twain” as his pseudonym. A 19th century river man’s term for deep waters that were tricky to navigate, the moniker has proven just right for a writer whose works are often of great depth and, particularly in the age of political correctness, somewhat treacherous to explore.

Indeed, the American humorist and author may be revered, but he is also much debated. “Tom Sawyer,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” are staples of the American literature curriculum. But other novels and stories receive less attention--in part because they’re now seen as more controversial.

One such work is “Pudd’nhead Wilson,” an 1894 fable set in the antebellum South. Interweaving themes of race, privilege and social responsibility, the piece tells the story of a fair-skinned mixed-race slave who switches her child with that of her white master. Adapted and directed for the stage by Meryl Friedman, it opens at the Falcon Theatre on Wednesday.

“The book has been criticized for its racial politics,” explains the soft-spoken Friedman, 40, a longtime theater artist who has served as executive producer at the Burbank venue since relocating to L.A. from Chicago a little more than a year ago. “Twain is always on the cusp, these days, of being considered a racist or not. But that’s not what Twain was getting at [in this work]. It was about his environment, how he was treated, and it was about class. It was not only about race.”

Consequently, Friedman has devised a strategy to bring out the various strands of meaning in the piece. She casts the story--which calls for black, white and mixed-race characters--with an exclusively African American ensemble and complements it with an original a cappella score (also by Friedman) inspired by black spirituals, work songs and chants.

“I didn’t bring it to the table without knowing that I wanted to do it with an all-African American cast,” she says. “Politically, it didn’t really add anything to our understanding of the situation to do it in a racially specific way, the way that it was actually written.

“I thought this was a way to get beyond the racial politics and really see it for what it was,” she says. “I wanted to arrive at a way to do it so that the racial situation was evened out, so that you could concentrate on the story. And I thought that the only way to do that is if they were all black.”

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Friedman, a New York-born graduate of Northwestern University, served as producing director of Chicago’s Lifeline Theater for 16 years before coming to the Falcon. That company, which she co-founded, was devoted exclusively to adaptations. And it was while searching for possible works for her company that she first came across the Twain novel.

“I had read ‘Pudd’nhead’ as hopefully something that might be done at Lifeline, and for whatever reason it didn’t work out,” she says. “But I had always remembered it as being something that I was attracted to.”

The appeal was both literary and, potentially, theatrical. “I liked the old-fashioned ‘storytelling-ness’ of it,” Friedman says. “I liked that it had this little twist about who was who. It was a mystery that, of course, you knew the outcome to, but you didn’t quite know how the people in the story were going to resolve it. I’m a sucker for a good plot line.”

What’s more, it seemed to Friedman that the points the piece raises are as germane today as they were in the late 19th century. “I was interested in the issues that he brought up concerning what you look like, the ridiculousness of the whole racial situation in that time and how people were defined as black and white, and how--in Chicago in the ‘80s, when I first read it--not too much was really different.”

Consequently, when Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater approached Friedman to come up with a project for its community outreach program, she suggested “Pudd’nhead.” “I knew that the majority of this audience with Steppenwolf was going to be Chicago public high schools, so I wanted to pick something that was both relevant for the curriculum and relevant for their lives,” she says. “Twain was an interesting choice, because from an administrative point of view, it’s something that is studied. But ‘Pudd’nhead’ was not a necessarily conventional choice.”

Steppenwolf agreed, and Friedman was commissioned to adapt the novel in 1994, marking the work’s centenary. The adaptation went on to enjoy so much success with its student audiences that it was brought back for a main-stage run at the respected theater.

When Friedman came to the Falcon in late 1998, the subject of “Pudd’nhead” came up once again.

“Meryl had told me about various pieces that were a success for her in Chicago, and she had mentioned this, which was an interesting idea, having African Americans play white parts,” says Falcon Theatre founder Garry Marshall, the film director responsible for numerous box-office hits, including last year’s “Runaway Bride,” who is a playwright and stage director as well.

“Usually what we see is white people playing black, Asian, Spanish--and everybody writes a letter. Casting it with all African Americans, I thought, fit the piece so well. You watch it with a different perspective, and it becomes fresh and new, which is important. So let’s see how many letters we get on this.”

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It’s a change of pace from the Falcon’s last main-stage production, Marshall’s own staging of “Crimes of the Heart,” featuring Crystal Bernard, Faith Ford, Stephanie Niznik and Morgan Fairchild. But variety is part of the plan. “In this day, the theater has to try to give the audience something they haven’t seen,” says Marshall, seated in his office adjacent to the theater he built in 1997 and where he has since presented such notable productions as “Death of a Salesman,” starring Jack Klugman.

“For the Falcon, this is kind of a risky thing to do. A lot of times we do commercial work with people you’ve heard of, but we follow it with work you haven’t heard of with people you don’t know,” he says. “I’m interested to see the reaction.”

And reaction there is likely to be, given Friedman’s approach. Yet from her point of view, there was no other viable way to get at the true themes lingering beneath the surface of the Twain work. “I toyed with the idea of doing it with ‘colorblind’ casting, but I don’t believe there is such a thing,” she says. “It’s never really colorblind. You notice a person’s color right from the beginning. And as a director, you make specific choices about what color is in what role, and how that impacts the script.

“I just didn’t want it to be about white racial politics. And I think that by having it be an all-African American cast, it becomes their point of view. I didn’t want a white point of view in there. I didn’t think that it added anything to what I wanted to do. I suppose you could go further and say, as a white person who adapted and directed it, it already has a white point of view. And that is true. I can’t get around that.”

While “Pudd’nhead Wilson” is inevitably about racial politics, it isn’t only about that. “For me, one of the interesting things in the piece was how people assume roles, and what that assumption of roles does to other people’s perception of you,” Friedman says. “I wanted the layers of having an all-African American cast assume both white and black roles, and assume roles that cross economic lines as well. The piece asks you to consider how people assume roles and how they are perceived when they do so. For me that’s really at the heart of it.”

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“PUDD’NHEAD WILSON,” Falcon Theatre, 4252 Riverside Drive, Burbank. Dates: Thursdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3:30 p.m. Ends April 2. Prices: $22 to $30. Phone: (818) 955-8101.