Of a murder and ‘Mayhem’

Lots of emotional weather, both sunny and harsh, has been breaking out at the Evidence Room during the run-up to Saturday’s world premiere of “Mayhem,” Kelly Stuart’s drama about the weight of global politics landing on one very unhappy Los Angeles couple. And that’s not counting what happens in the play itself.

On the afternoon of Valentine’s Day, Stuart sat in the front row, facing the actors on stage, and recounted for them, through sobs and tears, what it was like to see a life blown away in an unprovoked volley of bullets, then have to testify about it in court.

A few hours later, the bloom of love’s happiness unfurled in the small, tender kisses a woman planted on a man’s temple, and in the gift of a single, dusky-orange rose he brought her to mark the day.

The sweethearts are Megan Mullally, the Emmy-winning sitcom star who plays Karen Walker, the shrill, dizzy sidekick on “Will & Grace,” and her fiance, Nick Offerman. The parental love they lavish on their “baby,” Willa the miniature poodle, adds a further touch of happy domesticity. The quiet little dog had its arthritic right hip replaced several weeks into rehearsals, so Mullally brings her to the theater each day in a gray plastic carrying case.

The couple’s moments of real-life endearment contrast with the misery they enact each time director Bart DeLorenzo runs them through a scene. Mullally plays Susan, a novice writer of children’s books who is emerging toward political consciousness; Offerman is David, formerly a heroin-addicted punk rocker, now a drug counselor who spits endless sarcasm into the void that has opened in their marriage.

The play’s chief aim, as Stuart and DeLorenzo see it, is to examine how the fires of global upheaval throw off sparks that can set American kitchens and bedrooms smoldering with anxiety. It asks what our personal responsibility is when history is breaking out around us.

“I don’t know of any conversation I’ve had the past two months that hasn’t had politics in it and hasn’t had the metaphor of Germany in the 1930s brought up,” DeLorenzo says. “ ‘Is something happening, and am I ignoring it? Will we look back on this historical moment and say, “My God, how stupid were we?” ’ I think that’s what gnaws at people and influences their relationships and how they react to the people around them.”

Journalists as scapegoats

“Mayhem” began germinating, for Stuart, one day in the spring of 2000 at a New York City conference called “Art and Genocide.”

She had been writing plays since she was a San Fernando Valley teenager. Now, at 41, she has 13 or 14 mature scripts that she’s willing to stand behind -- including “Homewrecker,” a satire on President George W. Bush that recently had a workshop production in Berlin. Stuart’s most widely seen work, “Demonology,” was staged at the Mark Taper Forum in 1997. It blends politics and supernatural fantasy in its portrayal of an executive at an infant-formula company who develops a crazed thirst for his lactating secretary’s breast milk -- apparently out of guilt over his firm’s scandalous dumping of its products in the Third World.

At the art and genocide conference, Stuart listened while an audience attacked the panelists -- war correspondents and photographers who had covered horrors in Africa, Central Asia and the Balkans -- for behaving as observers rather than as moral agents. She saw the journalists as scapegoats -- bearers of bad tidings who were being lambasted because their audience felt angry and powerless in the face of the news they brought.

Her theme began to take shape: How do people talk about politics? What motivates them to leap from talk into action? Back in L.A. that summer, she went to protest rallies outside the Democratic National Convention, armed with a notebook.

From those experiences came much of the matter of “Mayhem.” A foreign correspondent, Wesley, comes to L.A. during the summer of 2000 for a conference on art and genocide -- a stateside pit stop between tours of duty covering the Taliban in Afghanistan. Attending is Susan; they have an affair. Her need to become politically involved brings her to the DNC protests, where she takes her own first steps as a war correspondent of sorts, photographing the police as they violently break up a demonstration (Stuart says she witnessed a similar scene herself outside Staples Center).

Stuart says that another crucial strand in the play crept in without any conscious intention on her part: the mayhem she and her husband, dramatist Robert Glaudini, beheld one night in 1996. The two playwrights watched, listened and cowered as the gangbangers downstairs from their Echo Park apartment shot an innocent bystander during a turf battle. The man, a middle-age working guy who had nothing to do with gangs, pulled into a gas station across the street, and a teenage gunman’s automatic weapon sent his life oozing into his wife’s lap.

Stuart -- whose two daughters, now 16 and 12, luckily were visiting their grandparents that night -- says she hadn’t dealt with the trauma of the shooting in a play until it began to channel itself into the character of Susan. In “Mayhem,” that trauma becomes a forbidden subject between the central couple, and a root of their discontent.

“It’s one of those things I had to write about to figure it out, to try to heal myself,” Stuart says. “It’s amazing how emotional it is. It doesn’t diminish with time.”

Which is why she struggled with her feelings while recounting the killing and the ensuing court case for the cast, which includes Jason Adams as Wesley and Cheryl White as Claire, a comic figure who’s a kindred spirit to the character Mullally plays on “Will & Grace.” Stuart wasn’t planning to tell the actors about that experience, but she complied when DeLorenzo asked her to take them through it. “I thought it was important for all of us to experience it, especially Megan,” the director says.

Stuart, who teaches playwriting at the University of Iowa, was only briefly available during rehearsals. In the past, she says, she always has stayed with important productions throughout. Now she is grateful that her job has forced her to keep her distance much of the time. She didn’t need to see her alter ego relive that gang shooting time after time.

“It’s really hard emotionally. I’m glad I don’t have to live with it every day.”

A romance is born

Around the time “Mayhem” was beginning to plant itself in Stuart’s mind, Megan Mullally was having a socially trying evening at the Evidence Room. It was the spring of 2000, the first night of rehearsals for “The Berlin Circle,” Charles L. Mee’s seriocomic fantasia about the fall of East German communism. Mullally, the newcomer, the sitcom star, felt like the odd one out in this company of grass-roots, small-venue actors.

“It was like, ‘Oh, TV girl is waltzing in on her big, high horse.’ They didn’t know if I’d even done a play or anything,” she recalls during an interview in the Evidence Room lobby after four hours of rehearsing “Mayhem.” “The rest of the cast pretty much just assiduously ignored me. Of course, later on we all became famous friends.”

None more so than Offerman, the only actor in the “Berlin Circle” cast of 19 who came up to Mullally after that first read-through to say hello and compliment her on her performance. He was new in town from Chicago, scuffling in a variety of jobs and not getting the chance to watch much TV. He had no idea that she was a sitcom star.

“He was just really genuine and normal and nice, and it really caught my attention,” Mullally recalls. By the end of the successful, critically praised run of “The Berlin Circle,” they were a couple, and Offerman had become a company member at the Evidence Room. He and Mullally started looking for another play to do there together (she, in fact, has extensive stage experience, including turns on Broadway in “Grease” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and a couple of shows at the Pasadena Playhouse).

DeLorenzo, the Evidence Room’s artistic director, had fallen for “Mayhem” when it was read at an A.S.K. Theater Projects retreat during the spring of 2001. Some name theaters were interested around that time, Stuart says, including the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Actors Theatre of Louisville. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing war in Afghanistan extinguished mainstream theaters’ appetite for a play in which central elements include the Taliban and the image of American women wearing burkas as a feminist protest.

The Taper gave “Mayhem” a staged reading last October in its New Work Festival, then announced it for this May as part of its Taper, Too series in Culver City. But Stuart says that would have conflicted with another obligation, a theater festival she is helping to produce in Iowa as part of her teaching job. A big fan of the Evidence Room, she called DeLorenzo and asked if he would stage “Mayhem.”

Mullally and Offerman quickly signed on.

He is 32 and looks like the squared-off cop he often plays in films and television; she is 44 and is considerably more self-contained and down-to-earth than the bouffanted banshee she plays on “Will & Grace.” No, thank goodness, that is not her real voice.

Offerman and Mullally find nothing strange about being in marital misery onstage when they’re apparently quite the opposite the rest of the time. The make-believe world doesn’t color their real one, they say, and, according to Offerman, being in “Mayhem” is “no different than any other relationship we might play in a fictitious piece.” Mullally says they rarely talk about the script at home.

“Mayhem” is a drastic departure from her TV gig. On “Will & Grace” she plays a comically self-involved woman who is terminally caught up in her own obsessions -- “a boob,” is how Offerman puts it. Mullally’s job on television is to make the jokes fly and not worry about her character’s dramatic development. Playing Susan, who goes through profound changes, involves artistic detective work, a search for an unknown quantity. Mullally thinks she has found the most important acting clues in the play’s fraying marriage rather than in the ominous political world that intrudes upon it.

In the past, Mullally says, she always has had a complete portrayal in mind when she began rehearsing a role. This is different.

“It’s fun to sort of piece it together and find it. There’s a definite self-loathing element to [Susan], but what’s interesting is seeing whether she is stronger than we think she is. I think we find she is strong.”

In Stuart’s eyes, Susan also finds a new awareness that can help her function as a political being in the face of global traumas.

“The important thing is seeing,” the playwright says. “Who knows what we really can do, but we have to see the situation and articulate what it is before we can act.”

Now, with a historic crisis at hand, that realization is guiding her own thinking and writing.

“It’s horrible to live through, but there’s nothing better for a playwright than to be able to see everything we’re going through. My work used to be a lot more surreal, but right now I’m just fascinated with what people are saying, what I’m seeing, what’s happening now. You never know what’s going to be important, and I really just want to document everything.”

*

‘Mayhem’

When: Opens Saturday. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m., Saturdays, 3 and 8 p.m.

Where: The Evidence Room, 2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles

Ends: April 19

Price: $20-$25

Contact: (213) 381-7118