History With a Head and Heart

History, said Voltaire, “is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.” James Joyce described it as “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” To Augustine Birrell, it was “that great dust heap,” and to Napoleon I, “a fraud agreed upon.” Henry Ford once quipped that “history is more or less bunk.”

As their words suggest, vastly different men of various epochs have recognized the power and the problematic nature of the chronicles we keep. Far more than an objective record of events, history is the tale a culture tells itself about itself. And playwright Charles L. Mee Jr. knows this well.

Highly regarded as a provocative cultural and political historian, Mee has written books that include “Rembrandt’s Portrait: A Biography” and “Playing God,” the latter of which explores seven occasions in which political leaders made decisions that altered the course of world events. More recently, he completed “A Nearly Normal Life,” his memoir of growing up with polio in the 1950s, involuntarily estranged from a society with great esteem for conformity.

Yet Mee began his career intending to write for the stage. He just got sidetracked--for more than two decades. Mee returned to writing for the boards in the mid-1980s and has since established himself as one of American theater’s most inventive writers.

Although he retains a passion for the past, theatrical fiction is now Mee’s preferred mode. “A nonfiction description leaves out the warring passions which you’re not allowed to have as a diplomatic historian,” says Mee, 61, speaking by phone from his home in Brooklyn. “That’s why theater feels more like the real world to me, because it does incorporate your heart and your feelings as well as your head.”

He has not left history behind, however. One of the recurring motifs in Mee’s writing for the stage is the reexamination of events and texts of the past. He has reworked such Greek dramas as “The Trojan Women,” “Agamemnon,” “The Bacchae” and “Orestes.”

Mee’s most recent success, “Big Love,” is a retooling of what is probably the oldest extant Greek play--Aeschylus’ “The Suppliant Women.” Writing about the work’s premiere this March at the 24th Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., The Times’ Michael Phillips called “Big Love” the festival’s “most striking offering.” The play is set for production at several major regional theaters during the next two years, including an engagement at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in December 2001.

But Mee’s adaptations are not limited to the Greeks. “Time to Burn” was his version of Gorky’s “The Lower Depths.” And Mee’s “The Berlin Circle” is loosely based on Bertolt Brecht’s “The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” The 1999 comedy receives its West Coast premiere Saturday as the inaugural production of the Evidence Room’s new facility, a 6,000-square-foot converted warehouse in the Temple-Beverly area near downtown. Directed by David Schweizer, the play stars John Fleck, one of the so-called NEA Four, and Megan Mullally of television’s “Will & Grace.”

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Set in 1989 on the night the Berlin Wall comes tumbling down, “The Berlin Circle” takes the classic Solomon story of a baby caught between two potential mothers and transforms it into a heterogeneous vaudeville. In the Mee version, the child is the offspring of communist leader Erich Honecker, head of the German Democratic Republic from 1971 to 1989. Honecker and his wife are attending a performance by the Berliner Ensemble on the night students storm into the theater proclaiming the upheaval. In the rush to escape, they leave behind their baby, who winds up in the hands of a Pamela Harriman-like American socialite and her punk au pair. This odd trio then embarks on an odyssey through the streets, eventually wending their way to a custody trial in which the presiding judge is none other than avant-garde writer Heiner Muller.

To say Mee’s play is postmodern is an understatement, but the eclectic style reflects his view of today’s global culture. “I think that this play contains how the world is today,” the playwright says, “and by that I mean it’s a picture of America in the world.”

“Chuck Mee’s ‘Berlin Circle’ is my absolute favorite kind of play--a deadly serious romp,” says director Schweizer, who first worked with Mee 15 years ago when he staged the New York Theatre Workshop premiere of “The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador” and who also staged Mee’s “Orestes” at the Actors’ Gang in 1994. “I love a play that meditates on something critical to the world and does so in a playful and unpredictable theatrical way.

“ ‘Berlin Circle’ examines the nature of theatricality and theatrical expression,” Schweizer says. “It examines the nature of cultural and political change by setting itself in Berlin in 1989. And it examines the birth of globalism, with capitalist values dictating the direction of social and political change. It’s the bizarre combination of a carnival atmosphere and a potential war zone that Chuck Mee has caught so amazingly in this play.”

Commissioned in 1999 by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Mee chose his subject matter to mark the 10th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. “That’s the moment that history changed in a major way,” Mee says. “Communism fell, and capitalism was triumphant over the world. The Cold War came to an end, and already it was possible to see that the triumph of capitalism was not an uncomplicated blessing.”

Mee used not only the Brecht play but also the original Chinese legend and a 1926 play by Klabund on which Brecht had served as a dramaturge. “I thought, how would it be to take this great story, now that we can look back and see what an immense failure communism has been, and see how we would tell that story now?” Mee says.

The montagist style in which Mee renders the story is undeniably hip. Yet it also has a deep personal resonance for the artist. “There was a professor at Yale years ago, Vincent Scully, who said that architects in the buildings they design always projected the structure of their own body, and I certainly feel that’s true of my plays,” Mee says.

Mee, who was born in Barrington, Ill., was stricken with polio at age 14 and still uses crutches to walk. “I’ve gone through life with a shattered body, if you will--as though you were to take a wineglass and throw it to the floor and shatter it, and then you pick up all the pieces you have left and they describe a wineglass still,” he says. “So the effort is always to put these shards back together in a way that’s harmonious and beautiful.”

He studied history and literature at Harvard. “I graduated from college with the thought of being a playwright,” Mee says. “Then I got caught up in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and my response to that was to get into political arguments and be forced back into writing about the Cold War and American foreign policy.

“So I went on this great detour writing political history, which I never meant to do. I never thought of myself as a historian. I thought of myself as a citizen engaged in political conversation or argument.”

Mee sensed that writing histories was not his real calling. “It never felt like my true life to me,” he says. “I had a lot of passionate beliefs and feelings that a lot of those things should be said, but I always wished somebody else was saying them.”

Those feelings crystallized one day when he took his four then-young children to see a revival of “My Fair Lady.” “We sat on the left side so we could see into the wings and the pit, so that the whole artifice of the theater was never more apparent,” Mee recalls. “And this man sitting directly behind me leaned forward and said into my ear, ‘This is the real world.’

“I was so amazed, I turned around to see who it was, and nobody was there,” the playwright says. “That is the first, last and only time in my life I have heard voices, and so I thought I should listen. Somewhere in the deepest place inside me, that is what I believe, and so I thought that is what I better do.”

Indeed, his acclaim suggests he made the right move. “It is as if the culture has caught up with his dreamy, fractured, collage style of writing,” Schweizer says. “He emblemizes the freshest aspect of a historically conscious, postmodern sensibility at the beginning of a new century. Chuck writes plays that people who never go to the theater will like, because they play fast and loose with theater conventions, and which people who love the theater will love for the same reason.”

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“THE BERLIN CIRCLE,” Evidence Room, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Dates: Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends June 25. Prices: $15 to $25. Phone: (213) 381-7118.