A stage for dissent

When Adriano Shaplin, the writer for the Berkeley-based theater ensemble the Riot Group, embarked on his new play “Pugilist Specialist,” a sharp critique of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, he knew it would not be seen first by American audiences.

“Instead,” recalled Shaplin, 24, “I sat down to write ‘Pugilist Specialist’ as a piece that would work at the Edinburgh Festival and on the London stage.”

Similarly, when dramatist Mark Lee, a Los Angeles resident, turned in his new play “The Private Room” to his New York agent, they agreed it had a far better chance of being staged first in Britain.

A few weeks ago there was an enthusiastic, well-attended reading of “The Private Room” at London’s historic Old Vic theater, and now Lee is hoping it will be produced this year at another venue in the capital.

“The Private Room” takes place in two settings -- a New York dining room and an interrogation cell at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It contrasts the ethically compromised attitudes of two Wall Street traders with those of U.S. military interrogators. “I was also contacted by two British theatrical producers who feel it could eventually go to a West End stage,” Lee said. “That would never happen in America. I mean, this play on Broadway? Come on!”

Certainly, London producers and theatergoers are more welcoming than their U.S. counterparts to edgy new writing. And theaters here, especially fringe venues away from the commercial West End, are not afraid to stage plays that trade on their topicality.

In recent years there has been a growing strand of what is known as “verbatim theater” -- documentary-style productions that reenact public events. Recently, these have included a judicial inquiry into the South London death of an Anglo Caribbean teenager in a racist attack and the Hutton Inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly, a Minister of Defense weapons expert, after he was named as the source of a controversial story by a BBC radio journalist alleging the British government had exaggerated the dangers of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Meanwhile, at London’s National Theatre, David Hare’s new play “The Permanent Way,” with its apparently unpromising theme of the privatization and decline of Britain’s railway system, is sold out through April.

Clearly there is a hankering in Britain for dramatic work that grapples with contemporary issues. Call it, if you will, the theater of dissent. Shaplin and Lee agreed their experiences highlighted the difference in theater culture between Britain and America.

“London’s the important place in my book, not New York or anywhere else in America,” Shaplin said. “London’s where the interesting stuff happens.”

Lee, a veteran playwright, novelist and screenwriter, believes these differences go deeper than plays reflecting current political situations or controversies. “I think the British [theater] style comes from George Bernard Shaw, where issues of the time can be discussed on stage,” he said.

“The American style is dominated by Eugene O’Neill, and the issue there is the family. In American plays, there are two areas where there’s controversy -- race and sex. But those themes are often [filtered] through the dramatic tension of family.”

Energetic scene

Shaplin’s “Pugilist Specialist” was a big Fringe hit at Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival last summer. But unlike many Edinburgh successes that transfer south, it was a hit and a genuine talking point in London too, playing to packed houses at the off-West End Soho Theatre.

“Pugilist” revolves around four characters, all U.S. Marines on a clandestine mission to eliminate a hostile Middle Eastern political leader, nicknamed “Big ‘Tache.” Each Marine broadly represents a different attitude toward the war on terror. Shaplin himself plays a wisecracking sniper named Travis Freud. The others are an older, ex-liberal colonel (Paul Schnabel); a taciturn communications man, known ironically as Harpo (Drew Friedman); and Emma Stein (Stephanie Viola), a single-minded explosives expert distrusted by the military since she went public with complaints about sexual harassment in the Corps.

This unlikely quartet plan, attempt and botch the assassination. But it was Shaplin’s extraordinary command of language that transfixed British critics and audiences; his characters speak in polished aphorisms. Freud boasts that he “eats unconscious desires for breakfast,” while in one of his rare talkative moments, Harpo insists: “I know where loose talk goes to die. There’s a reason peace and quiet are partners.” For some critics, this recalls the young David Mamet, but Shaplin’s arresting tone is his own.

“It was great to walk into the room every night and 150 people were there, ready to enjoy the show,” Shaplin said of the Riot Group’s London triumph. “I just like to get up there and have a dialogue with the audience. I’m not some smart guy who knows any more about the war than anyone else. I’m just a 24-year-old brat.”

The Riot Group had won prizes in Edinburgh with earlier productions, and its “Victory at the Dirt Palace” played at a London fringe theater in 2002. Shaplin likes the energy and enthusiasm of the London stage scene and tells what he calls his “angry story” to illustrate a contrast.

“When we were in Edinburgh with ‘Pugilist Specialist,’ the literary director of the National Theatre came in and loved it,” he recalled. “We set up a meeting for me to discuss my next play. Also in the audience were a New York producer and a representative of a theater in New York, who both slept through it. When I walked out, the producer said: ‘Maybe I can give you a hand getting into the New York fringe.’ Well, that’s the dinkiest theater festival in the States. Anyone can get in. So it’s wildly divergent, the way we get treated in the States compared to Britain.”

This will soon be put to the test. “Pugilist Specialist” will be staged in New York in September at the new off-Broadway venue 59E59.

But Lee also has experience of the British embracing his work. “The reading at the Old Vic was absolutely wonderful,” he recalled. “It was literally packed; every seat was taken. We had several outstanding actors known from films -- Allan Corduner [Mike Leigh’s ‘Topsy-Turvy’] and Tom Hardy [‘Black Hawk Down’].

“The personal reaction I got afterward was that people were looking for some explanation of why U.S. foreign policy is the way it is these days. It’s not just this president and this political alignment. They wished to go deeper, show how certain ways of looking at the world, the Wall Street framework, provides some meaning for what happens in interrogations.”

London producer Jenny Topper, who has previously run two non-West End theaters, the Bush and the Hampstead, agrees more fully produced new work is staged in London than in America. “The National Endowment fund there is so puny compared to government finding of arts organizations in Britain that arts organizations are hugely reliant on private funding and sponsorship,” she noted.

“I think that inevitably makes for a more cautious, conservative choice of the work you present. I think the key to this is the nature of the subsidies that arts organizations enjoy in each country.”

American Nina Steiger, director of the Writers’ Centre at London’s Soho Theatre, says many U.S. dramatists want to see their work staged in Britain. She noted the work of Brooklyn-based Will Eno, a protege of Edward Albee, had been performed more and more enthusiastically received in London than in American venues. (Albee has called Eno “one of the finest playwrights I have come across in a number of years.”)

On Wednesday, Eno’s new one-man play “Thom Pain” was workshopped at the Soho. “It’s about this dissociative guy trying to be OK, to find love, to relate to the audience,” Steiger said. “But it’s about America too. Yet we hope to premiere it here at the Soho.”

Shaplin is anticipating the U.S. performance of “Pugilist” in New York with mixed feelings. “It’s exciting that our parents will be able to go see our work,” he said ruefully. “But then I think everyone in New York’s going to hate this overwritten, pretentious, poetic treatment -- telling the story of the war like ‘Moby Dick.’

“In my quiet moments, I think there’s no place for this kind of stuff in the States. Theatre’s so irrelevant. It’s such a cinematic culture.” He sighed. “I’m a bit pessimistic.”