Detour Through America

If there’s a single work most often cited in discussions of the American experiment, it is probably Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 “Democracy in America.” De Tocqueville’s philosophical and historical meditation on a young country and its people has stood the test of time largely because of its uncanny prescience and insight. Yet “Democracy in America” also looms large because it captures this country in the first half of the 19th century, at a moment when much was still up for grabs. There were frontiers yet unconquered, borders not yet drawn, rules yet to be made. And the American ethos as we know it was just coming into being.

That is the period of Howard Korder’s new play, “The Hollow Lands,” which premieres at South Coast Repertory on Friday, directed by David Chambers. For Korder, as for the young French aristocrat De Tocqueville before him, it’s a time marked by the mystique of the uncharted, a singular moment unlike anything this society is likely to ever see again.

“Basically, in the course of one lifetime, it went from being in many places still terra incognita to the country we’re living in today,” says the quietly affable playwright, choosing his words carefully as he battles flu symptoms during a recent conversation at the Costa Mesa theater.

“If you look at maps around 1800, the borders of the continents are well known, but there are still a lot of spots that say ‘unexplored territory.’

“And as you follow the progress of those maps through the lifetime of the characters in this play, by the time it’s over, what was blank--what was a screen for the projections of anything you wanted--becomes this rather prosaic place that we live in, where all the states are divided by nice square lines. The country was in this process of inventing itself,” he says.

“The people were in the process of inventing themselves, and there was really no strict determination of what the United States should be. It was a great mass of conflicting ideas and certainly had no fixed geographical boundaries.”

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It’s a very different milieu from what the world of theater, and to a lesser extent film and television, has come to expect from Korder. Along with such writers as David Mamet, Sam Shepard and John Steppling, he is more often thought of as one of the masters of testosterone theater, forging male-dominated worlds that are typically edgy, urban and contemporary. His plays are also marked by a finely chiseled, yet often tellingly indirect, language.

“The Hollow Lands,” then, would seem to be a departure for Korder. The setting is anything but contemporary. And while his facility with language is still very much in evidence, it is used to clearly different ends. Significantly, he didn’t set out to write a historical piece.

“I wanted to talk about the shape your life takes over time when you’re making other plans,” says the playwright. “I also wanted it to be this arduous physical journey that takes place over a long period of time, and I sort of backed into the notion that it was going to be a historical play rather than a contemporary one.”

“The Hollow Lands” tells the story of an Irish immigrant named James Newman (Michael Stuhlbarg) who lands in New York in 1815. Poor and lost, he finds succor in the kindness of a woman named Mercy (Rene Augesen). But they are soon separated, as James’ wanderlust propels him to embark on a trek across the United States. And so he sets out through the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys on a journey that will span the length of a lifetime and witness the making of a new America. Although historical, the play is no more a simple period piece than De Tocqueville’s masterpiece is mere history. Rather, “The Hollow Lands,” like “Democracy in America,” is a contemplation of the philosophy undergirding the American ideal.

“Howard is going back into history in a way that we almost never do,” says SCR dramaturge Jerry Patch. “It usually takes a couple hundred years for a culture to go back and mine it in that way. The play is about American innocence, about people who have a naive belief in what the culture promises and how that turns out, inevitably, to be false.”

Korder first embarked on the project, with a commission from SCR, about five years ago. At the time, he had just moved from New York to Santa Fe, N.M.--where he now makes his home--and began by delving into a great deal of historical reading and research.

“I, to my surprise, became enamored and spellbound by just what the country was like in that period, and I also felt I wanted to explore language in a new way,” says Korder. “The image I kept having in my mind was taking a scouring pad to received notions about the time and the place, both for myself and for anyone else who would be interested.”

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The resulting script, a daunting 200 pages, is as ambitious as its topic would suggest. The $750,000 production, which runs more than three hours, will be the most expensive ever mounted at SCR, due to a large cast and significant scenic demands (the set is by venerable Ming Cho Lee). For it, the theater received a $40,000 grant from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays.

It’s a lot to have riding on a new work, but SCR’s confidence in Korder was no doubt based on the success of the playwright’s last premiere there, 1990’s “Search and Destroy,” which was later staged on Broadway and made into a 1995 film, directed by artist David Salle.

The SCR production of “Search and Destroy” was a hit, and while the subsequent film version was not well received, the play remains Korder’s best-known work, at least here in California. The central character, maniacal Martin Mirkheim, is a cravenly ambitious bottom-feeder trying to get a movie made about a self-realization guru. Boomeranging across the country, from Dallas to Utah to Boca Raton to Manhattan, the play was seen as a fitting epitaph to the greedy 1980s. Still, there are notable similarities between “Search and Destroy” and “The Hollow Lands.” Both plays feature a man on an epic journey seeking what could be described as the American Dream.

“In some ways the whole second half of this play is what would happen after the end of ‘Search and Destroy,’ although I’m reluctant to yoke them together and say that this is some sort of response or further examination,” Korder says. “But inevitably you wind up returning to the itch you need to scratch.”

Different as James may seem from Martin or other Korder males, he too is compelled to pursue something. “For James, there is a struggle for distinction, and I think he winds up where he does because that struggle is essentially unwinnable,” the playwright says. “What is being called ‘freedom’ in the play is an attempt to escape from the self, and the play is partly asking whether that is ever, in fact, possible.

“There’s always been great tension in the U.S.--something that many people see as fundamentally irreconcilable--which is the notion of equality and the notion of individuality. In other words, we are all equal. No one is better than anyone else. And yet we all are individuals. And those two things really don’t parse.”

Now 41, Korder is the youngest of three sons born to a hardware store owner and a homemaker. He grew up in the Bronx and Yonkers and first became interested in theater in high school. At State University of New York, Binghamton, he wound up a theater major, “by default.” “My senior year came along, and I had to have a major in something,” he says, “and I was closest to having a major in theater, so--not for the first time--I took the easy way out.” After college, he moved to Manhattan and began writing his first play, “Night Maneuver,” while taking odd jobs and trying to make his way as an actor.

“I’d gotten involved with an off-off-Broadway company called the Floating Rep,” he recalls. “This was a tiny, tiny upstairs loft, and there was no bathroom, no backstage.” In this less than glamorous setting, his career was launched. “Night Maneuver,” which features two down-and-out brothers in a Darwinian struggle, was staged there in 1982, and Korder began to realize that his place in the theater was not as an actor.

“I began to see how much better it was being a writer than an actor, because I didn’t have to be in the room if I was being rejected as a writer.” Shortly afterward, Korder had another work, a science-fiction spoof called “Episode 26,” produced at another small off-Broadway venue. And as a result of that, he was given the chance to write a television pilot.

“That was the first time I’d come close to making anything big enough to make a living as a writer,” he says. “That led to my getting hired to write for ‘Kate & Allie’ for a year.” But Korder initially wasn’t sure if he should take the job on the series. “I agonized over it, being on staff of a television show, giving up my $5-an-hour job,” he says. “Then I did it for a year, and I didn’t like it. It was too much like real work for me. You had to be there every day.”

On the upside, the experience also helped Korder clarify his own aesthetic. “It was very good for me, certainly, and it also made me ask questions about my own work in terms of how was it going to be different from the sitcom scripts I was writing, and it troubled me that maybe some of them weren’t that different.”

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About the same time, Korder’s “Lip Service”--a two-character piece about a TV talk show that’s going down the tubes--was produced at Manhattan Punchline in 1985. That same year, “Boys’ Life,” commissioned by SCR, was given a staged reading at SCR. Arguably Korder’s breakthrough work, “Boys’ Life” went on to a well-received Lincoln Center staging in 1988. The play, which features three callow womanizers as remarkable for their maneuverings as for their putative lack of remorse, was also produced in 1989 by the now-defunct resident company at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where it received a more tepid response.

“Boys’ Life” was the first new script that Korder and Patch worked on. “There are some writers that just strike you with their intelligence, and Howard is one of them,” says Patch, who first met Korder in the early ‘80s. “He has a very quick and comic gift with language. But ultimately, he’s serious about a lot of things. He tries to think as deeply as he can and present the results of those considerations. If there was an American promise, he tends to look to the areas where that promise hasn’t been kept.”

“The extraordinary thing about Howard’s writing is the reach of it, the broad canvas he paints on, which is social and human,” adds director Chambers, who directed “Search and Destroy” at SCR and on Broadway. “All great American plays are about families, with the exception of Howard Korder’s plays. That is the American obsession and focus. Howard’s is much larger than that.”

Large, of course, doesn’t begin to describe the ambition of “The Hollow Lands,” but the freedom to dream without bounds is what it’s about, for both Korder and his character James.

“I’m just reflecting on the essential absurdity of being a playwright at this point in time,” says Korder, who has been able to support his writing largely through film and television work. “You might as well write whatever the hell you want, because there’s no other reason to be doing it. It’s not a rational decision.”

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“The Hollow Lands,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Opens Friday. Ends Feb. 13. $18-$47. (714) 708-5555.