Trying to Work Outside the Family Circle

The last time David Chambers came west for his annual directing assignment at South Coast Repertory, he led a massive, headlong charge in support of the kind of play he relishes.

The world premiere of Howard Korder’s “The Hollow Lands” last January was large in theme, striking in theatricality, dazzlingly pictorial, uninterested in the small psychological details of its characters’ malaises and--aside from one bravura oration from atop a huge, broken bed--devoid of the home furnishings that typically betoken plays about life in the bosom of the family.

Almost all the reviewers were underwhelmed. Aside from Time magazine (“confidently original . . . rich with ideas . . . stimulating to watch . . .”) they found too little character development and too much polemic in Korder’s three-hour historical epic, which portrayed America’s westward expansion before the Civil War as an act of collective self-delusion toward madness. Audience attrition was unusually high; some ticket-holders walked out before intermission.

Now Chambers is back, marshaling a piece he said calls for subtle subversion rather than spectacular assault.

He is directing John Guare’s 1979 dark comedy, “Bosoms and Neglect,” which begins previews tonight on South Coast’s Second Stage. Rather than new and sprawling, the play is tested and compact. “The Hollow Lands” featured 16 actors in 32 roles and employed 20 set changes to encompass a story flung across a continent and through nearly a half-century of history. “Bosoms and Neglect” has three characters, two one-room settings in New York City, and takes place over three days.

The play, as its title suggests, burrows into issues of family dysfunction and psychological trauma. It even requires a couch.

“I used to say, ‘I don’t do plays with couches’ . . . and now this,” Chambers said.

At 55, his silvering hair, dark bushy brows, and affable, professorial mien during a recent pre-rehearsal interview brought Daniel Patrick Moynihan to mind.

Chambers probably wouldn’t be here for his 13th South Coast production since 1988 if he didn’t see something greater than a family drama implied in “Bosoms and Neglect.”

The play opens with a first encounter between Scooper, a truly messed-up fellow, and Deirdre, his near-equal in neurosis. They have the same psychiatrist, the same terrified dependence on him and a mutual passion for literature they deem “neglected.” Scooper’s aged mother, Henny, is undergoing an emergency mastectomy as the play begins. He feels guilty for having neglected her but believes he needs to be shut of her if he is to find some peace of mind.

“I’m not interested in plays about ‘Mommy and Daddy messed me up,’ ” Chambers said. “I don’t want to dismiss the family element, because it’s critical. But I want to ask, ‘What else is on this play’s mind?’ I think its concerns resonate far beyond family.”

In directing a big play like “The Hollow Lands,” Chambers said, his instinct is to look microscopically for a core relationship, a “magnetic center” that will hold and orient the audience. Strengthening the central husband-wife relationship in “The Hollow Lands” was a focus of his more than three years of work helping develop the play, Chambers said.

With small plays such as “Bosoms and Neglect,” his tendency is the opposite: He looks first to find ways to enlarge the scope. Hence the towering, abstract set designed by Darcy Scanlin, a recent CalArts graduate making her professional debut with this production. Chambers was struck by her portfolio last summer at an annual New York City exhibition of graduating theater-design students from across the country.

“The set is an attempt to break the kitchen-sink tradition and take the play into a more abstract and surrealistic plane than has normally been done,” he said. “I’m always interested in where you can honorably and validly take a text and possibly get closer to the poetic heart of the play instead of [portraying] conventional surfaces.”

Chambers is confident that he is serving as an ally of the playwright, not a contortionist of his work. Guare, best known for “Six Degrees of Separation” and the screenplay of “Atlantic City,” is an avowed foe of “kitchen sink” realism.

Chambers has not directed Guare’s work before but rates him highly enough to have accepted the assignment without rereading the play. Part of what delights him in “Bosoms and Neglect” is what he sees as a sort of bait-and-switch game Guare plays while mixing genres and toying with theatrical conventions.

“Time and again, Guare plays with our expectations. Is [one scene between mother and son] a tender farewell? Or is it a Monty Python comedy? We’re working very carefully on setting up the audience to experience something fully at one moment, and suddenly the play reverses on them and says, ‘Actually, there’s a whole ‘nother way of looking at it.’ ”

Chambers cites Henny’s climactic speech as a prime example of Guare’s method. In the typical family story, this revelatory moment would point toward a resolution, but here it becomes tragicomically disconcerting.

“He’s breaking down the [convention of] the third act monologue, when the central character is going to break down and ‘fess up. Guare pulls quite a wonderful, touching, ironic twist on it. He shatters our conventional expectations and makes us listen in a new way.”

Chambers thinks the critics and playgoers who disliked “The Hollow Lands” were unable to let go of their usual expectations.

“If you ask any 10 people educated in the theater to make a list of 10 great American plays, they would all be psychological and they would all be about the family. “Death of a Salesman,” “Glass Menagerie,” “Long Day’s Journey,” maybe “A Delicate Balance” or something else by Edward Albee--all about the family. Our internal lives in this country are possessed and preoccupied by the psychological machinations of the family. Howard’s plays are clarion calls to pay attention to what we do to maintain an American mythology, an illusion of personal freedom.”

Chambers thinks that a year ago, when talk abounded of a new, high-tech economy impervious to cycles of boom and bust, was an especially hard time for “The Hollow Lands” to get a fair hearing.

“We were not at a moment to go back and explore in some passionate depth the underside of the American experience.”

Korder finished a “major rewrite” of the play’s final act last fall, Chambers said.

“I think it clarifies certain things. It makes the play shorter by a stretch. The ending has quite a different tone to it. I think Howard has done a great job of fixing it.”

It is uncertain whether the play will get another shot at production, given the large cast and multiple sets, which add up to a big production budget. (South Coast officials said “The Hollow Lands,” at $750,000, was the most expensive play in the theater’s history.)

“We have had preliminary conversations in a few places, but it is a difficult sell,” Chambers said. “It is a huge play, it is not a given crowd-pleaser, and it takes a very great theater, as SCR was, to do it.”

Maybe Europe would be more fertile ground for “The Hollow Lands,” said the director, who has worked extensively in the Netherlands and Russia. His big overseas project in recent years has been researching and remounting a landmark 1926 Moscow production of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Inspector General,” as conceived by director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Chambers regards Meyerhold, whom Soviet authorities executed in 1940, as an artistic beacon.

Last spring, Chambers returned from Russia with love: He and his wife, Ford Foundation official Christine Vincent, adopted a son from a Russian orphanage. Directing “Bosoms and Neglect” has meant a five-week separation from 2-year-old Dmitri.

“I feel a tremendous loss. I miss him,” Chambers said.

A second round of parenthood (he also has a grown daughter, Jessica, from a previous marriage) and a full course load teaching acting and directing at the Yale School of Drama will probably curtail his work in Europe. Despite his painful absence from home to put on yet another show for Orange County theatergoers, he has no thought of cutting back his association with South Coast.

“I’ve turned down other jobs or don’t pursue them at this point. But I sure hope [to continue here] as long as they’ll have me.”

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SHOW TIMES

“Bosoms and Neglect,” South Coast Repertory’s Second Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays through Sundays, 7:45 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Previews tonight through Thursday, regular performances begin Friday. $18 to $47, with a pay-what-you-will performance Saturday, 2 p.m. (714) 708-5555.