Reporting on His Times

British playwright David Edgar is a storyteller who thinks big--big ideas, big stories, big casts. Sometimes his dramatic tales are traditional, like his Tony-winning adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” And sometimes they’re unsettling, like “Pentecost,” his contemporary hostage drama packed with art history, terrorism and global politics.

It took the resources of the Ahmanson Theatre to bring “Nickleby” to Los Angeles in 1986, but the 28-character, 11-language “Pentecost” opens this weekend at the 99-seat Evidence Room, just west of downtown Los Angeles. “I knew somebody was going to do it here, and I wanted it to be us,” says the theater company’s artistic director, Bart DeLorenzo. “He happened to write a play so interesting that every theater in the country would want to do it, but so complicated that most can’t.”

Winner of London’s Evening Standard Award as best play of 1995, “Pentecost” is the second of three Edgar plays set in central Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The play starts with art historians and others debating whether a fresco unearthed in an abandoned church could predate Giotto’s early 14th century “Lamentation,” which would challenge the artwork’s pivotal position in the history of Western art. But their discussion changes considerably when a multicultural band of terrorists and refugees takes over the church and holds the art historians--and the fresco--hostage.

“‘Pentecost’ is a whodunit, or more accurately, a whodidit,” explains Edgar, 54, reached at his home in Birmingham, England. “Events of the last year have demonstrated that life can be like a thriller. We see the world through genres--thrillers, whodunits, siege stories, crime stories, romances--which is why those genres came to be in the first place. It’s a way of making sense of real experience.”

He notes that “Pentecost” offers “guns, explosions, suspense and other delights,” but those delights are just the top layer. “Most of my plays are about dealing with disillusionment of one sort or another,” says Edgar, one of the most prominent left-wing playwrights who emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. “I think we have to deal with a world in which those great ideals have been found very wanting.”

The Evidence Room’s barn of a space has been turned into “Pentecost’s” abandoned church, where actors are moving into place at a recent rehearsal. One terrorist is up on a ladder, looking out church windows for police helicopters or maybe a television van. Another idly flicks a cigarette lighter on and off. Their female colleague, a stateless Palestinian, talks at the bound hostages, her conversation laced with disparaging words for Western culture.

“He fleshes us out as real people, not just arguments,” says Leo Marks, who plays one of the hostages, an American art historian. “I don’t know who else is writing plays with so many voices where the audience can understand the wildly diverging viewpoints and find sympathy for just about all of them.”

The playwright once said he wanted to be “a secretary for the times through which I’m living,” and he has long done just that on stage and, to a lesser degree, for TV (“The Eagle Has Landed” in 1973 and 1982’s “Nicholas Nickleby”), radio and film (1986’s “Lady Jane”). Aside from a brief post-college stint as a journalist, he’s been writing plays full time since the ‘70s. His subject matter has frequently been political extremism--on the left as well as the right--and its consequences.

Edgar came from a theatrical family--his parents met while working at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in the ‘30s--but his study of drama at Manchester University often took a back seat to the political turmoil around him. “I was in my second year in 1968,” he recalls, “and I think I paid much more time to what was going on in politics than in drama.

“I was caught up in one of the last moments of radical idealism in the 20th century,” he continues. “Having seen both the successes and the failures, the achievements and the limitations, I have constantly been trying to look at the way people deal with having been involved in these great movements for the rest of their lives.”

One of those great movements changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Edgar had made many trips to Eastern Europe in the ‘80s, and when the wall came down in 1989, he took the new world order as his theatrical subject matter. “The ideals that I understood were dying,” he says. “I felt it important to write about that.”

The result was “The Shape of the Table,” his 1990 play about the shifting of power for a former government in the Eastern Bloc. He wrote it “fairly instantly,” he says, and it premiered just “one day less than a year” after the wall came down.

It was, he says, a time “when people were very confident that national boundaries were a thing of the past. But pretty soon, it seemed almost the reverse of that was happening. Eastern European countries were splitting up into ever smaller units, each with its own currency, flag and national anthem. Perhaps even worse, many of those countries started discriminating against their own minorities.

“Overall, it seemed that communism wasn’t giving way to some great new, liberal super-national United States of Europe, but giving way to old fashioned ancient nationalisms,” he says. “Having demolished one wall in the middle of Europe, all kinds of walls were being built a little farther to the east. And those walls weren’t to keep people in, but to keep people out.”

Passionate about world politics--he regularly writes political commentary for British newspapers--Edgar is passionate, too, about his craft. In 1989, he founded and ran Britain’s first postgraduate playwriting course, at the University of Birmingham, where he remained until 1999.

Edgar praises such contemporary American plays as David Mamet’s “Oleanna” and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” saying, for instance, that when “Angels in America” was done in Britain, “people were thinking, ‘Isn’t this brilliant, deft combination of the personal and political what we’re supposed to be so good at?’”

The playwright has visited the U.S. many times in the last 25 years, created several American characters, and even written a musical about Watergate (1974’s “Dick Deterred”). It was probably only a matter of time until he wrote an epic about American politics, something he is working on. That project, “The Continental Divide,” follows a six-week research trip across California that Edgar made last fall.

The two plays that make up “Continental Divide” are set in the “imminent present” and revolve around a gubernatorial election. His Democratic candidate is female, and the Republican, he hints, isn’t unlike the Republican candidates in California’s recent primary election. Its locale, he adds, is “pretty obviously a large West Coast state with very different northern and southern bits. But I never use the word California.”

The plays will be jointly produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, and will be directed in both places by Tony Taccone, Berkeley Rep’s artistic director. “David really is a student of international politics,” says Taccone, who earlier directed productions of “Pentecost” in both theaters. “And any student of international politics is going to look to the United States as the fulcrum of the world’s power struggles.”

“Daughters of the Revolution” and “Mothers Against” will open Ashland’s 2003 season in February, then launch Berkeley Rep’s new season in September 2003. Each theater, says Edgar, “was kind enough to ask me to write a new play. But the idea of writing two plays for two theaters 6,000 miles from where I live--I thought it would never get done. I thought a grand project would.”

Director Michael Attenborough, who oversaw London productions of “Shape of the Table,” “Pentecost” and last year’s “The Prisoner’s Dilemma,” the third play in Edgar’s trilogy, says he’s not surprised that Edgar is taking on American politics. “He’s an enormously sharp observer, and his eye should be roving everywhere.”

It was, after all, Edgar’s observational skills that led to the Evidence Room production of “Pentecost.” “The company was thinking about a play that dealt with internationalism and what’s the beef in the world these days,” DeLorenzo says. “When I read it, I couldn’t imagine a better piece to explore these issues and basically put on stage the conversation happening at every dining table in America.”

For DeLorenzo, “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Pentecost” actually have something in common beyond their shared playwright. “Edgar’s strength is being able to create a play of ideas that is immensely entertaining,” he says. “You don’t notice the ideas so much until you get home and want to talk about them.”

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“Pentecost,” Evidence Room, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends July 7. $15-$20. (213) 381-7118.

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Barbara Isenberg, a regular contributor to Calendar, is host of the Getty’s Art Matters series of public interviews.