O.C. Stage

Because we experience books, films, plays, paintings and musical performances one at a time, we tend to see them as things apart. But the valuable ones connect through their thematic and imaginative force like the webs of neurons that form our minds.

This collective artistic mind is forever uncertain; its essence is a collision of ideas, framing issues without solving them.

Art’s connective and fruitfully contradictory possibilities are alive at two local, grass-roots theaters in two current plays about heroism.

“Terra Nova” at the Empire in Santa Ana and “Defying Gravity” at the fledgling Six Chairs & a Couple of Artists Theatre Company--launched last weekend in Long Beach by a youthful team of Cal State Fullerton students and alumni--are clashing, mutually illuminating works. Both measure humanity’s aspiration to break through nature’s bounds and become greater in knowledge and achievement.

Ted Tally’s “Terra Nova” retells the 1911-12 expedition in which English explorer Robert Falcon Scott and four men under his command struggled on foot in a race with Norwegian rivals to become the first men to reach the South Pole. Scott’s party never returned.

Jane Anderson’s “Defying Gravity” is based on the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986.

“Terra Nova,” a tremendous play grippingly performed, is a tragedy in the classical Greek sense. A great and admirable man’s hubris, or overweening pride, spells his doom. The impact of Scott’s final recognition of that truth brings the cathartic pang Aristotle specified when he wrote that tragedy should inspire pity and terror.

“Defying Gravity” is comforting and affirming. It finds the capacity for transcendence in ordinary folks caught up in the Challenger launch, chief among them “the teacher,” based on Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire grade-school teacher who was a member of the space shuttle crew.

Anderson’s play, first performed a year after the disaster, doesn’t have the tightly wound inevitability that makes the 1977-vintage “Terra Nova” so compelling. The story’s many strands are knit together cleverly, but the stitches show as we watch the pairings of characters move toward the countdown and beyond.

There are the teacher and her small daughter (now grown, but channeling her 5-year-old self), two middle-aged tourists on hand to see the launch and a Cape Canaveral barkeep and her boyfriend, a ground crew technician. There also is the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, unstuck in time and popping up in various scenes to serve as a convenient but somewhat clunky unifying device. Monet is the play’s emblem for humanity’s restless creative spirit, always dissatisfied with the perspective enforced by nature’s limitations and seeking new ways to see.

The opening moments of “Terra Nova” frame its tragic arc. First we see Scott, fingers too frozen to write, trying to scribble last thoughts in his diary: “The causes of the disaster are these. . . .” Then we are transported back in time to Scott’s rousing speech announcing the expedition. It soars with pride in British gallantry and the rightness of the British way, epitomized by the “sporting” code of honor. The Englishmen, he boasts, will walk to the pole, heroically, pulling their half-ton supply sled themselves while the basely practical Amundsen and his men condescend to ride dog sleds--and convert their canines into calories by slaughtering them as needed.

Jay Michael Fraley, as Scott, works up a fine heroic lather in this scene, calling to mind Kenneth Branagh’s fiery patriotic battlefield oration in his film “Henry V.” In a strong tragic performance, Fraley persuades us of Scott’s heroism and nobility even as the consequences of his heroic pride play out.

In a superb, reality-bending device, Tally--best known as the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “The Silence of the Lambs”--has Amundsen appear repeatedly to confront Scott with the voice of survivalist practicality that the British explorer so badly needed to hear: “Duty. Honor. Sacrifice. . . . You’ve learned every single rule, but not one dark corner of your own heart. You’re the most dangerous kind of decent man.”

Tally, cherishing art’s interconnections here nods to “Heart of Darkness.” Joseph Conrad’s novella from 1902 is perhaps the most resonant 100 pages published during the 20th century. It explores how the cultured, supposedly enlightened nations of the world can be capable of savagery. Scott lives up to his honor code; he does not become Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz, in whom the full horror of human capability is manifest. But “Terra Nova” leaves us with a chill of recognition: If this can befall one of the best and bravest of us, should we so proudly herald our heroic aspirations?

“Terra Nova” also sparks an artistic connection with “The Hollow Lands,” seen early this year at South Coast Repertory. Critics shrugged at Howard Korder’s play, and not a few audience members voted with their feet at its sprawling, unsparingly horrible, utterly unheroic--but to my mind, indelibly brilliant--vision of America’s pioneering spirit.

Korder gave us a likable protagonist in James Newman, a plucky Irish immigrant eager to make his way in early 19th century America. Newman is undone by his lust for adventure, riches and fame as he falls into a landscape peopled by crazed zealots. The play’s tableaux of fear, madness and degradation offer a useful antidote to romantic notions about heroism and the glory of human aspirations. In the end, Korder permits a beaten Newman and his estranged wife a small reconciliation and a muted affirmation of the value of everyday charity and kindness in a world of grand designs gone horribly awry.

One can imagine Korder writing the story of the Challenger disaster as a bitter satire, full of NASA’s bureaucratic carelessness and stupidity compounded by the indifference of a tax-averse Reagan administration that didn’t want to invest heavily in space exploration.

But “Defying Gravity” plays as a paean to the human spirit. The Six Chairs production ends with stirring, valedictory music as Anderson envisions a future in which the sacrifice of McAuliffe and her six fellow voyagers is redeemed. We see humankind defying gravity and gaining illumination as it wins a permanent footing in space. The script’s final stage instruction--evoked, but not exactly carried out in this production--calls for a projected image of the exploding Challenger to transform into a telescopic vision of “the birth of a galaxy, as seen through the eye of the Hubble--God’s view of a stellar nativity. Elizabeth [the martyred teacher’s daughter] fearlessly stretches her hand up to touch it. Black out.”

It would be comforting to believe “Defying Gravity,” and we know from our collective past that humanity’s heroic aspirations can be made real. But “Terra Nova” reminds us that aspiring grandly can blind us to simple truths. “Think of the details,” Amundsen warns Scott.

April 27th’s front page told of a telescope being sent aloft in a balloon over Antarctica to capture light that sprang into being when the universe was new. Astrophysicists think the telescopic images, which could only have been gathered under Antarctic atmospheric conditions, tell us something fundamental and important about the nature of the universe: that its shape is flat. Might this discovery, in which an international team of scientists built upon previous research by NASA, validate the historic sacrifices depicted in “Terra Nova” and “Defying Gravity”? Were these losses in a blinding-white polar waste and a clear, blue Florida sky episodes in a larger, grandly meaningful story of humanity’s ongoing quest for truth and understanding?

By temperament and training, I tend not to think in heroic terms. But my need to believe in some hopeful destiny for humanity makes me want to quietly draw that connection.

BE THERE

“Terra Nova” by Ted Tally, presented by the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2:30 p.m. $10-$12. Ends Sunday. (714) 547-4688.

“Defying Gravity” by Jane Anderson at Six Chairs & a Couple of Artists Theatre Company, 1409 E. 4th St., Long Beach. Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., with subsequent performances May 20, 26, 28 and June 2, 4 and 10. $12-$15. (310) 226-7075.