Shakers and angels

Arlene Hutton was beginning the research for a new play about Shaker women when she made a startling discovery. The small Kentucky community she was studying included members whose last name definitely rang a bell: It was her own. Even though Hutton’s family came from an eastern Kentucky town 90 minutes away, she had no idea she’d had Shaker cousins.

“That felt like ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ” Hutton says.

Ultimately, her nine characters would take their first names from the Hutton Shakers. But if the playwright found inspiration close to home, the seeds were planted on another continent: at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1995, when an intriguing play about Scottish women farm workers made her wonder whether she could find an American equivalent.

Hutton’s play, “As It Is in Heaven,” grew out of more than three years of research that led her to the true story of a young Shaker woman who insisted that she could see angels.

That Hutton succeeded in mining universal truths from such an atypical tale is evident in the warm critical reception her play received at both its 2001 Edinburgh festival debut and its current run in Los Angeles. (Reviewing for The Times, F. Kathleen Foley called the play “amusing, intellectually stimulating and moving.”)

The West Coast premiere, directed by Marianne Savell at the Actors Co-op’s Crossley Theatre in Hollywood, has been extended until May 18.

The play’s successful run in Los Angeles -- Hutton’s second, after last year’s “Last Train to Nibroc” -- comes after a rocky launch in New York two days after Sept. 11, 2001. The play was set to open at the off-off-Broadway 78th Street Theatre Lab on Sept. 13, and the night after the terrorist attack, cast members decided it would be meaningful to rehearse the Shaker hymns that lace together the play’s many short scenes. Two days later, “As It Is in Heaven” opened as planned.

“It wasn’t a frivolous play,” the New York-based playwright said by phone. “The arts give context to our lives, and I hoped this would say something to our audience.”

Unfortunately for the play, its small audiences didn’t include reviewers, who called to cancel. But a preview performance was caught by one of Actors Co-op’s major donors, who later recommended it to Savell, the company’s producing director.

“I found the play to be fascinating because it was so simple,” says David McFadzean, a playwright, former theater professor and executive producer of the film “What Women Want” and the TV series “Home Improvement.” “It’s a theater piece where the actors make the magic.”

McFadzean was also intrigued by the difficulty of the play’s structure. “I knew Marianne is always looking for a challenging piece,” he says. “Oftentimes the dialogue is not sequential, so that you have re-created a world where, with one slip, everyone’s sitting there with egg on their face. It’s one of those pieces where people aren’t entering and exiting. You’re all on stage the whole time, and you’re creating the world out of relationships, not out of a beautiful set.”

If Savell intended to challenge her audiences, “As It Is in Heaven” has been successful in that respect as well. “We lose people every night after the first act because it’s nonlinear,” she says. “For a lot of our patrons, it’s a challenge. We don’t usually do nonlinear stuff. I had a subscriber say it was the worst thing he’d ever seen.”

Not that she’s out to upset the company’s subscribers, but Savell is clearly delighted to have found challenging material that doesn’t have racy language or content, two elements that rule out many edgy plays for the Christian theater company.

London’s Financial Times was similarly impressed when the play opened in Edinburgh: “A Fringe show with no ego, no sex, no rude words, no violence? But actually its account of the psychopathology of religion is something rare, subtle, and very fine.”

Although the company based at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood is clearly comfortable mounting a play with spiritual content, Actors Co-op by no means limits its seasons to explicitly Christian productions. Its next show is “Uncle Vanya,” directed by the Fountain Theater’s Simon Levy, a Jew who joins the company’s prayer circles before rehearsals.

Savell was also delighted to find a play with an all-female cast. “We’re always trying to get our women good stuff, and I was really attracted to the fact that it wasn’t about women’s issues,” she says. “I don’t like victim plays. We’re always looking for plays that have strong women’s roles. You barely dare to dream there’s an all-women’s show.”

Creating more stage roles for women of varying ages was also a concern of Hutton’s when she undertook “As It Is in Heaven.” And the Shaker community was a fertile subject because men and women lived separately. Because they were celibate, it was easier for Hutton to allow her all-female cast to explore issues beyond sexual identity, such as the respective difficulties of grappling with community and faith.

“I’d never seen true spiritual ecstasy on stage, or the attempt to portray that,” she says.

Hutton, a former McDowell Colony fellow, had become acquainted with Shaker culture during her artist’s residency at Berea College, near a reconstructed village in Pleasant Hill, Ky. She was charmed by the simplicity of the Shakers’ lives coupled with the sect’s embrace of technological progress, which resulted in several inventions, including the clothespin and the circular saw.

She wanted to place her play in the pre-Civil War era, when Shaker communities were still thriving. She learned of a young woman during that period who rattled Shaker elders with her contagious claims that she had visions of angels.

Hutton says she believes that “something must have occurred” based on diaries from the period. The Los Angeles production uses that interpretation as well.

“For the play to work, we have to play that she is absolutely seeing angels,” says Savell. “To me, for us to make any kind of judgment about the Shakers in any way would not have served the play.”

But the play itself offers no firm answers.

“I leave it ambiguous to the audience as to whether she sees something or not,” Hutton says. “My point is it doesn’t matter if you see it. If you believe in something and it affects your life, that’s what’s important.”

*

‘As It Is in Heaven’

Where: Actors Co-op, 1760 N. Gower St., Hollywood

When: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Post-show discussions on Sundays

Ends: May 18

Price: $20

Contact: (323) 462-8460