Tales of Two Histories

“Don’t know much about history,” Sam Cooke sang in 1960, speaking then and now for most Americans.

Amanda DeMaio and Brook Stowe didn’t know or care much about writing historical plays--until inspiration hit them in very different yet equally unexpected ways. The result: Two historical dramas that open this weekend in small Orange County theaters.

DeMaio’s play, “Unrelenting Relaxation,” is about five women trying to waken the world to the nightmare that befell them as “comfort women,” sex slaves to the Japanese military during World War II. By telling their long-hidden stories in documentary-like remembrances a half-century after the fact, they aim to purge themselves, win redress and warn their beholders against what nations and individuals can do when they go to war.

Stowe’s “October” is a prelude to a nightmare. It is a rapidly changing, dreamlike play, set in the Nevada desert in 1959. A manic, bebop-loving amphetamine freak and his drifter girlfriend have pulled a convenience store holdup gone bloodily awry. They find refuge at a barren, “Twilight Zone”-like homestead inhabited by a brain-damaged World War II bomber pilot and his lascivious, bitter, guilt-addled wife. In and out of the picture flits a spectral Lee Harvey Oswald, a rough beast, full of Marxist revolutionary zeal and delusions of grandeur, slouching toward Dallas for his vision to be born.

DeMaio, 30, is a company member of Stages, the small theater in Fullerton where “Unrelenting Relaxation” first was seen in 1995. The writer-director is reviving the show at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills with three members of the original cast.

Six years ago, the Fullerton resident was stunned by a “Dateline NBC” report on comfort women. From 1932 to the war’s end in 1945, these captives were held in “Houses of Relaxation,” where they were serially raped, day in and day out, by processions of Japanese soldiers. Why hadn’t she heard of this sordid and pitiable patch of history before? Others needed to know about it too, DeMaio decided. And the story would have strong roles for women, one of her main playwriting objectives.

DeMaio turned to the Internet for accounts of surviving comfort women. She said the materials were sketchy then--not until 1991 had long-silent victims begun to come forward with their testimony in hopes of winning apologies and reparations from the Japanese government. Since “Unrelenting Relaxation” was first produced, several books have been published on the subject. Museum exhibits; the documentary films “Murmuring” and “Habitual Sadness;” and a 1999 play, “Hanako,” which premiered in 1999 in Los Angeles, have shed further light on the episode.

Most accounts deal with the Korean women and other Asians who made up the vast majority of the estimated 200,000 enslaved by the Japanese. However, some were Europeans captured in Asian territories conquered by the Japanese or captives sent from Europe by Japan’s ally, Nazi Germany. The “Dateline” story DeMaio saw was about Europeans, and she decided to write about European characters. There was a practical consideration, in that most of the actresses she was writing for at Stages were white. DeMaio does not think she is co-opting an Asian story by focusing on white women who went through the same horrors.

“If there are concerns like that . . . it’s more important that the story be understood and known.”

Stowe, a freelance writer and editor who lives in Orange, began with a style of playwriting in mind, not a subject. No longer interested in stage realism after producing a series of one-act plays and one full-length work, he wanted to write a play that would unfold like a dream--disorienting, full of puzzles and seeming absurdities.

The baby boomer, now 46, started thinking about the American dream and what had become of it during his lifetime. His thoughts circled back to “The Cherry Orchard,” Anton Chekhov’s 1904 play about the decline and imminent fall of Russia’s genteel aristocrats, an old order that, although Chekhov could not have predicted it, would soon be destroyed in the historic cataclysm of the Russian Revolution.

For Stowe, the 1940s and ‘50s represented an old American order, a seemingly simple and innocent time. He set his play on the cusp of upheaval, just before the cultural earthquakes of the 1960s shook the old order apart. Only after he began writing did it occur to him that the character who could give his play scope and historic resonance would be Oswald. By gunning down John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, the U.S. Marine washout and Soviet sympathizer blasted the first big hole in America’s secure, upbeat sense of itself.

Armed with an abundance of reference material on Oswald, one of the most thoroughly researched and investigated enigmas in world history, Stowe began writing monologues for his Oswald character while taking part in a summer theater workshop at Vassar College during 1998. A 19-year-old, Kit McKay, was assigned to direct the student actor delivering the Oswald monologue. Struck by her work, Stowe showed McKay the “opaque and convoluted” draft he had written for the play’s first act. He said it was “eerie, almost” how thoroughly this MTV-generation teen from Indiana comprehended what he was aiming for. McKay, now 21, has been in on the project ever since; she is making her professional directing debut with “October” while on winter break from her senior year at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y.

The resulting play has a Sam Shepard-like desert setting; a Quentin Tarantino-like couple of wild, aimless American kids on the loose; and a distinct whiff of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” in several of its plot elements--although Stowe said he never thought of that connection until an interviewer brought it up. Oswald is the wild card; the script also calls for an off-kilter sound and lighting design to reinforce the dreamlike craziness of the piece.

The play has two sympathetic characters who try to anchor themselves in some of the old American verities, forging a connection through shared religious faith and mutual memories of Brooklyn Dodgers baseball. But in the end, those core values cannot hold. The old era is cracking apart.

DeMaio’s dramatic methods are more traditional and straightforward, although audiences will have to make an imaginative leap concerning the characters’ ages: It is set in the present, but instead of aged survivors recounting long-ago events, we see their younger selves talking as if the horrors had just happened.

Their stories come out in fragmented bits of monologue that overlap and interweave. A full understanding of what happened builds slowly and incrementally as the play goes on. DeMaio doesn’t get bogged down in historical information about dates and places and the politics and logistics of the atrocity; her thrust is to show who these women were before the war, what befell them, and what toll was taken of each one’s sense of wholeness and humanity.

“There is nothing that has ever happened that history will not justify,” one of the survivors says bitterly near the end.

DeMaio hopes her play will make it harder for ignorance to provide a cover for the bogus justifications and denials we’ve come to expect from Holocaust apologists. She wants to jolt audiences into awareness, just as the television news report six years ago left her startled that she could have been ignorant of such an enormity. “I hope that there’s a recognition that things like this happen,” she said, “and that things happen all around you and you may have no idea.”

Stowe wants to hand his audience strange and intriguing puzzle pieces and let them try to sort them out.

“People looking for me to supply answers to the American state of mind at the millennium--it’s just not going to happen. I’m interested in the change itself, the America that was and [how it gave way to] the one it has become. The plays that appeal to me are the ones where I walk out and say, ‘Man, I’m not exactly sure what that character was saying or doing, but I really liked the questions it posed.’ ”

SHOW TIMES

“October” opens Friday at the Rude Guerrilla Theater Company’s Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 4. $12 to $15. (714) 547-4688.

“Unrelenting Relaxation” opens Saturday at Chance Theater, 5576 E. La Palma Ave., Anaheim Hills. Saturdays and Sundays, 5 p.m. Ends Feb. 17. $10 to $12. (714) 777-3033.