Red, white, blue and code orange

I don’t know about you, but since the ‘00s began, I’ve found myself getting more and more and more worried.

For me personally, there was turning 40 (baseline mammograms begin, increasing cancer probabilities). There were the births of my two daughters (even the instructional diagrams on the sides of their car seats demonstrate symbol-infants flying through symbol-windows, symbol-mouths open in symbol-death shrieks). And there are my ever-deepening forehead worry lines, less wrinkles than, it seems to me in the harsh glare of daylight, actual gouges.

Then there is our current world situation. In two words: not relaxing. We have been at war, of course (our official national status is: “Code Orange -- terror alert = high”) -- a campaign so complex it can’t even be fully tracked by CNN’s usual rich photo-collage of three talking heads in front of four exploding windows of smart bombs, Dow plunging in the corner, SARS death-count crawl across the bottom. No, to really keep up, you have to click back and forth between MSNBC and C-SPAN and Fox News, with NPR always murmuring in the background as a soothing chaser.

And what are we going to find when Baghdad’s last inch is plumbed? (a) Weapons of Mass Destruction, or perhaps even more worrisome (b) No Weapons of Mass Destruction!

Maybe all Iraq has left, at this point, are cheapo Russian nuclear warheads from the ‘50s, in which case the war is unjustified, triggering World War III, because, P.S., the entire U.N. now hates us -- even Kofi Annan, who’s famously mellow!

But what I’m really worried about is my new solo show, “I Worry,” currently running in a Woolly Mammoth Theatre production at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Wartime is bad for live theater, modern war being the ultimate reality show. With all those new infrared ground-cams, bouncing videophones and swirling computer animations, no wonder we keep hearing the hushed phrase “theater of war” (as in “Geraldo Rivera is leaving the ...” ). With all that firepower -- and all those great embedded-journalist divas (Peter Arnett -- there’s a problematic John Adams opera right there) -- who can compete?

The crisis of the moment

On the upside, though, the very premise of my show, originally conceived after Sept. 11, is that the world is exploding all around us -- or, at least, it will always feel so, because that is the nature of how we process our daily barrage of horrible news. Given that “I Worry’s” text is designed to always reflect and change with the topicality/venue/location/crisis of the moment -- the stresses of the world being the stresses of my show -- the good news is, this March and April we’ve had no paucity of elements to work with.

First, there are the physical elements. As the entire city of Washington, D.C., seems a sinkhole under construction, under David Schweizer’s direction and Andrew Lieberman’s design, “I Worry’s” very set seems a sinkhole under construction. A vast tilted stage is roped off with zigzags of yellow “Hazardous Materials” tape; there are frantic stockpiles of bottled water and ramen, and mysterious, torso-sized masses of rolled-up plastic sheeting clotted with duct tape.

As the audience enters, NPR buzzes its anxious background refrain, and a “Terror Alert = Orange” flashes. I enter by exploding from an underground trap in biohazard suit and gas mask. The action that unfolds is sometimes accordingly Dada-esque. Without giving away too many details, I can say that last week, I beat the Washington Post theater critic over his head with his own notepad. When he produced a second notepad, I threw it out of the theater and then went for his parka, which for some reason he did not want to give up. (Although I do not read reviews during the run of a show so as not to destroy my perfect confidence, a swarm of not-so-little birds told me recently that, given the review the Post subsequently ran, I should probably have hit him harder.)

Critics are relatively easy to deal with, in the theater, as they are so rarely attacked by stage performers. They tend to sit stunned, in their own version of shock and awe. The truly tough sells, though, are audience members who paid the full Kennedy Center price to see you. (“The Republican Guard” was the term we started using for some especially knotty houses at the beginning, as in, “They’re putting up more resistance than we thought!”) And here “I Worry” is a wartime piece, with wartime politics, in the most wildly political of cities. I’ve not done much political theater previously, and....

Well, when we speak of political theater, I think, quite frankly, every solo performer’s fantasy is what I like to call “the big liberal peace party rally in the sky.” All you have to do, aside from being a woman of color -- which is half the battle for certain crowds, because of one’s great courage/refusal to be silenced/blah, blah, blah -- is deliver an impassioned speech about the horrors of the whole Bush/Cowboy/Oil/Reaganomics thing, ending with a throaty: “And what about the Iraqi children?” Hold for applause, standing O, cab home.

Displays of patriotism

If this were just a Woolly Mammoth production in a Woolly Mammoth space, a show of unity like this might well be possible. Woolly is lefty in the very best way, infused as it is by the spirit of its director, Howard Shalwitz, whom I love. “I can’t be offended by anything -- that’s my problem -- I wish I could be offended!” is a favorite vociferous exclamation. Howard can talk about doing a Wallace Shawn monologue invoking ideas of Noam Chomsky and make it sound like a barrel of fun. Maybe it’s an East Coast thing, because -- unlike certain thin-lipped humorless morally superior types we have in California -- Shalwitz is the type of liberal you’d enjoy drinking a bottle of red wine with and, I don’t know, sharing a big old plate of meat.

But this is a production of Woolly Mammoth in its temporary space at the Kennedy Center. The Kennedy Center means tourists. And in wartime, of course, you’re talking only the most optimistic tourists, the most red-blooded (as opposed to bleeding heart) ones, the ones who’d never dream of canceling a visit to D.C. this spring because they might miss the cherry blossoms! They come from Florida, they have beehives, they tear up when seeing the Capitol building ... because, what with all the monuments, this is basically a pretty patriotic place. (With some pretty patriotic people: At the Bethesda Army-Navy surplus store where we bought my gas mask, there’s a T-shirt that reads: “FIRST IRAQ, THEN FRANCE!”)

The wild mix of audience that shows up every night -- from Florida beehives to groovy butch lesbians from Takoma Park, plus a few NPR listeners and a few Capitol Hill staffers -- sometimes makes you wish you were doing a one-woman revival of “Cats.” Because everyone likes cats, right? Just to see what kind of room it is, every night I ask, by applause, who’s pro-war and who’s antiwar. Often there is only antiwar, but occasionally, especially on weekends, people will applaud in equal numbers. When you see those enormous pro-Bush polls and wonder where those people are, they’re at my show! (At least, those few of them are who weren’t able to afford more luxurious Kennedy Center offerings like Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute.)

Happily though, no matter what one’s political leanings, anyone brave enough to get to the theater in “Code Orange” times is pretty much game for anything. Hand in hand, we’ve stepped through the Saddam Hussein jokes, France jokes, Palestinian women jokes, the part where I screamingly call Osama bin Laden “the Towelatollah!” The payoff for audiences is that they too get to unburden their personal worries, on forms we provide in the lobby. And they’ve given as good as they’ve gotten.

Examples: “I worry that the Kennedy Center is a perfect target for a bio attack.”

“I worry that you won’t be funny ... ‘cause you’re from California....”

“I worry that I will fall asleep halfway through this show.”

“I worry that everyone here tonight knows I am stoned.”

I don’t know if this is the highest art form or the lowest art form at this point. All I know is I worry, you worry, we worry: And in these exploding times, that’s just the best we can do.

Sandra Tsing Loh is a writer-performer based in Los Angeles.