Playwright’s twin passions

“Sheepie!” exclaims playwright Kia Corthron, as she spies a stuffed sheep being carried down the aisle of the Ivy Substation.

She runs to the fleecy white prop, which plays a small role in her play “Slide Glide the Slippery Slope,” and strokes it gently, wondering aloud just how authentic it is. “I want to be able to write that no animals were hurt in the making of my play,” she says.

Later, an associate producer of the Mark Taper Forum’s Taper, Too series, in which Corthron’s play is being presented, says the prop was not a formerly living sheep, though some real sheepskin was used.

The sheep isn’t supposed to be authentic. Indeed, it speaks English -- and not just simple thoughts. Its first words reflect on “what would be the fun in cloning Malcolm X’s embryo before he was Malcolm X when all we would have known about his embryo was that it was human?”

Cloning is one of the main themes of “Slide Glide,” which opens Thursday. And Exhibit A in the world of cloning is Dolly, the cloned sheep.

But “Slide Glide” is about a lot more than cloning and sheep. It’s about African American identical twins who were separated at birth when their 15-year-old mother couldn’t handle them. Soon after the play opens, they are reunited at age 36.

Erm, who lives alone on a farm, is a self-taught student of cloning. Her sister, Elo, who has returned to the nearby town with their birth mother after years of living in a big city, is desperate to give birth, her only child having died at age 10 and a number of other pregnancies having ended in miscarriage.

Corthron, 42, is not a twin -- her sisters are one year older and 16 years younger than she is. They are the daughters of a paper mill worker and a nurse’s aide in Cumberland, Md.

But Corthron has been fascinated by twins ever since a high school biology teacher told her of “super-super” identical twins in nearby Frostburg who were uncannily alike. Such twins, Corthron observes, are like “the clones of nature.”

A creative writing major at the University of Maryland in College Park, Corthron took a playwriting course during her last semester. The final assignment was to write a 15-minute play, but most of them lasted about five minutes. Corthron’s, however -- about a Vietnam veteran’s homecoming -- was 30 minutes long.

A passion for playwriting

“I was too shy to get acting students to be in it, so I asked two dorm mates who were engineering students,” she says. Nevertheless, they must have done a good job. “When it was over, there was complete silence. A person who I had thought was sighing during the play was actually crying. I was so excited by the immediacy of it. It was a life-changing moment.”

She took “boring” government-related editing jobs to support herself but kept writing plays and studying the craft, eventually moving to New York to earn a master’s degree in playwriting from Columbia.

Many workshops and fellowships later, Corthron saw her plays being produced by the mid-’90s, with Goodman Theatre in Chicago and Manhattan Theatre Club both staging her “Seeking the Genesis,” which addressed prescription drug use as public policy.

Around this time, the strands that would coalesce into “Slide Glide” began to develop. At a workshop, she met a fiction writer who lived in rural Colorado but maintained an active connection to the world of ideas; “she was the beginning of Erm,” Corthron says.

A year or so later, soon after the 1997 cloning of Dolly, she attended a theater company’s series of lectures by bioethicists “who were charging us as writers to spread the information” about such topics as cloning. She came away thinking that “if people just sit back and trust the scientists, we get nuclear bombs,” she says.

Now, however, her attitude toward cloning is a little more complex. “When I went into it, I thought cloning was just yucky,” she says. “But as I read more about it, I realized there was this huge human element of people who were desperate about infertility.”

She wrote an idea for a cloning-related play when she was on a commission from the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1997, but “it was not well-formed,” she says. She revived it in 2001, however, when she received the Taper’s first William James Fadiman Fellowship, which paid her a $15,000 commission for a new play and a series of sessions with other writers. She wrote much of the current play in a rush of inspiration at a writers’ retreat in Lake Placid, N.Y.

The script was workshopped at the Taper’s New Work Festival in 2001 and 2002, but it initially didn’t make the cut for the current Taper, Too season. The Taper released its rights so the premiere could take place earlier this year at the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana Festival.

In the meantime, Kelly Stuart’s “Mayhem” dropped out of the Taper, Too season. So Corthron’s play was scheduled.

‘Unique poetic style’

Nearly everyone who’s working on the production singles out what actress Bahni Turpin, who plays Erm, describes as Corthron’s “unique poetic style. She leaves out words and elements of grammar, but she includes other words that seem elaborate and incongruous. She asked of me that I make the character really country, almost hillbilly, but people don’t expect someone who lives on a farm to be interested in the latest science.”

“These are topics that people don’t think black people think about,” says director Valerie Curtis-Newton. Concerning the language, Curtis-Newton says she told her cast at the outset, “We all know the language is hard. We have to look at the rhythm and syntax just as you would with Shakespeare. If you unlock the rhythm, so much of it is opened up to you.”

Corthron says her “main issue” in rewrites of “Slide Glide” was “there was so much science in it, and where to cut it down.”

A play she has just written for the Royal Court is more pointedly political. “It’s a 9-11 play,” she says. “It’s also about how we still live under the legacy of McCarthyism.” She’s also writing about how Harlem, her home for the last seven-plus years, is being gentrified.

Single and childless, Corthron says she used to consider adopting a child. But she feels her professional life isn’t well-suited to the challenge. Besides, with six nieces and nephews, “I get a lot of auntie fulfillment.”

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‘Slide Glide the Slippery Slope’

Where: Ivy Substation, 9070 Venice Blvd., Culver City

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: June 22

Price: $20

Contact: (213) 628-2772