‘Exiles’ and Audience Disconnected

After writing one-act plays about Zelda Fitzgerald (“Bye Bye Blackbird”) and Richard Wright (“Wright From America”), playwright Willard Simms apparently felt he was not through with his subjects.

His new “Exiles From Paradise,” at the American Renegade Theatre, is half-Fitzgerald, half-Wright and at best half-conceived. Simms’ dual portrait is a case of being terribly in love with the notion of the tortured artist.

This is a show that adores a cliche and is so determined to enforce it that both the uneasy wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald and a driven African American prose artist from the South will fall under its laws.

In his program notes, Simms relates his fascination at how the personalities shared much in common, being treated as underlings and told “to learn their place and stay there,” but breaking out of their social containment and fleeing to exile in Paris, where they eventually suffered mental (Zelda) or physical (Wright) ailments.

It’s an interesting observation, even if the pair could also be no more different than the high-rent district is from the ghetto. “Exiles” hardly attempts to make the noted links palpable onstage, which would seem to be the point.

Much as in “Bye Bye Blackbird,” the Zelda here addresses the audience as if its members were psychiatrists observing her, frequently imploring them not to judge her. Unless she does something really awful, they have no plans to do so, but the constant request has a way of setting up Zelda as a victim and little more. Though she was a dilettante, Zelda showed genuine talent as a writer, which she insists husband Scott jealously tried to stifle, even stealing bits of her prose for his own purposes in such novels as “Tender Is the Night.”

This “belle of the ball” from Montgomery, Ala., comes across as kin to Tennessee Williams’ wounded, misunderstood ladies; and Elizabeth Karr’s performance, full of wide-eyed expressions and itchy body tics, suggests Williams’ theatricality. This may or may not have much to do with the real Zelda, who remains elusive.

Wright is anything but elusive: He’s utterly clear, in Simms’ writing and Tommy Hicks’ portrayal, as the angry writer of “Native Son” and “Black Boy” who coined the term “black power” and eloquently chafed at being under the thumb of the white man. This section of “Exiles” is better structured, with more dramatic dynamics but also with more sloppy miscalculations.

The piece’s framework is a 1960 speech Wright rehearsed for an American high school commencement in his adopted home of Paris, and it’s the natural medium to allow Wright to explain his ongoing rhetorical battle with what he viewed as large, systematic forces intent on oppressing blacks, as well as with his critics, including fellow black exile writer James Baldwin.

In “Wright From America,” Simms showed the author as a ghost; here, Wright is still alive, haunted by ghosts from his past, including Southern good ol’ boys and his mother. The effect onstage of some of this is startling (E.P. McKnight convincingly shifts from mother to Baldwin, in the evening’s best theatrical touch). At other times, it’s laughable, taking the audience out of Wright’s world of righteous indignation. Wright’s character is couched in a narrow range with little nuance, but Hicks does his level best to enrich things with the emotional texture of a powerful Sunday sermon.

BE THERE

“Exiles From Paradise,” American Renegade Theatre, 11136 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Friday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends March 3. $15. (818) 763-1834. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.