Searching for the Safety Zone

Thirteen days after the assault on the Pentagon and the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, a group of 75 or so playwrights gathered at New Dramatists in midtown Manhattan.

As one after another spoke, encouraged by New Dramatists artistic director Todd London, it became clear that recent events had rendered dozens of half-finished or oft-revised plays more or less . . . stupid. Irrelevant. Inappropriate.

Even “un-American.”

A few weeks ago, we thought we had a shockproof popular culture. Then came the reminder that we could be shocked, horribly. This was the worst kind of theatrical spectacle--the theater of cruelty, stripped of all artifice.

Now we are the land in need of cheering up. And we need something more.

We need a few good playwrights keeping an eye on things, keeping their ears tuned to the sounds of this paranoid new world. We need chroniclers of that paranoia. It’s the national theme; the variations are ours to explore.

Playwrights are like everybody else in this country at this emotionally garbled time. They’re trying to get over what happened, get through it, or at least find a place to put it. A safe place.

Everyone is searching for the safety zone--the zone of acceptability. For an example of a show outside that zone, look no further than the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical “Assassins,” a group portrait of successful and failed killers of presidents. The New York revival of “Assassins” was promptly postponed, at least until 2002.

This is no time for a musical that could barely be heard the first time, in 1991, amid the Gulf War hoopla.

The safety zone parameters shift continually. For some time to come, playwrights are going to be questioning their choice of imagery, their zingers, the potential interest level in, say, a yuppie romantic comedy wholly unrelated to larger world events. On the other hand, they’ll question the interest level in a play, say, about terrorism that may hit people where they live, but may also keep them home, watching CNN Headline News.

It is a time of fear, doubt, second-guessing and, no doubt, even more revivals than ever. Another Sondheim musical, “Into the Woods,” is scheduled for a pre-Broadway Ahmanson Theatre premiere in February. Its strength-through-adversity theme couldn’t be more timely; it will likely hit people where they live, even if they live a long way from Manhattan.

This is a time, many say, for safety and comfort. This is understandable. But the pronouncement is neither safe nor comforting.

Playwrights--the good ones, with a strong, clear voice and an idea or two--are often miserably out of tune with the tenor of their times. Twentieth century world drama is a history lesson in the virtues of discord and bad timing.

During World War I, George Bernard Shaw wrote “Heartbreak House,” a play taking the English leisure class to task, which ended with the sound of a distant explosion. Shaw knew his play wouldn’t find an audience while the war was on. So he held it until 1921.

“Truth telling,” he wrote, “is not compatible with the defence of the realm.”

“Heartbreak House” explored a universe unto itself, insulated from the larger universe. Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” did the same, with a chaser. O’Neill finished his play prior to World War II, but like Shaw a war earlier, he knew his timing was lousy. Broadway wasn’t in the mood for a long, craggy, sour disquisition on pipe dreams. Broadway wasn’t ready even after the war, in 1946. A decade later, thanks to Circle in the Square’s landmark off-Broadway revival, people were ready.

The World War II era wasn’t Broadway’s finest (nor Hollywood’s). The war effort required flag-waving and spirit-raising. Topical, disposable entertainments, heavy and light, ruled the day. The 1944-45 Broadway season featured such war-themed titles as “The Hasty Heart,” “A Bell for Adano” and “Soldier’s Wife.”

And now they’re gone.

Some plays are luckier, and better. In that same Broadway season, Tennessee Williams went up against the Battle of the Bulge, armed only with a dreamy memory play about a St. Louis family, set in the years prior to the war. “The Glass Menagerie” was out of step with its time, no question. It almost didn’t take in its Chicago tryout; its concerns seemed . . . irrelevant. Wispy. Off the wartime beat. Yet it found its champions, and time took care of the rest.

We have now entered a new phase in American theater. We’re in for a year or two of dog-paddling in a warm pool of nostalgia.

But if we can make it out of the pool, this may yet become a strange and rich time to be an American playwright. And to be an American theatergoer.

At New Dramatists a few weeks ago, one playwright talked about American culture in its new sobriety, underlining with a certain fundamentalist zeal the idea of a united, unified America, the citizens responding as one. For a generation, American theater artists and playwrights worked toward a somewhat different goal: a cacophony of American voices. Is one voice truly better?

There is only one way for a playwright to answer the question. Write what you know, sure, but write what you need to know.

We have become a nation of fine lines. The fine line between patriotism and nationalism; between 21st century complexities and Old Testament revenge; between artistic expression and artistic self-censorship. They’re all there, on the newly revised map of our national psyche, some faintly visible, others screaming bloody murder.

Playwrights can help us make sense of these lines. They can, in effect, write between them.