Adrift on the river of history

The American theater has not given us many large and lasting plays examining the roots of our nation’s often interventionist foreign policy, but Robert Schenkkan has tried to fill the gap with “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates,” now at the Mark Taper Forum. That’s Euphrates, as in the river that runs through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. In Schenkkan’s ambitious and absurdist time-traveling scenario, the fabled American explorers are re-routed from their original mission to reexamine the uglier aspects of Manifest Destiny, as witnessed on battlefields in Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq.

For anyone familiar with historian Stephen Ambrose’s popular books saluting the heroism of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, this is something altogether different: a darkly comic meditation on whether the Anglo exploration and appropriation of the continent was just the first manifestation of a benighted and racist imperial power. Or, that everything went downhill starting with Jefferson, the slave-owning president who sent these misunderstood heroes up the Missouri and, eventually, so to speak, to Baghdad.

Maybe. But unfortunately this provocative conceit proves to be less convincing onstage than the idea that Lyndon Johnson was a Texas-born Macbeth (“MacBird”), for example, during the years of the Vietnam War -- if one searches for an antecedent in American political satire.

Schenkkan is a serious writer, as he showed in “The Kentucky Cycle,” the brutal six-hour epic of Appalachian history produced at the Taper in 1992 and subsequently awarded the Pulitzer Prize. But his attempt to imagine Lewis and Clark as the unwitting exponents of America’s cruel and misdirected purpose doesn’t grow into much more than a fanciful notion, solemnly ironic and fitfully funny.

Directed by Gregory Boyd, the longtime director of Houston’s Alley Theatre, “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates” begins with Lt. Clark (Jeffrey Nordling) on a bare stage, standing somewhere outside of time, apologizing to the audience for what is to come -- in effect for what he and Lewis hath wrought in their 1804-06 Mission of Discovery. The idea is introduced that a full accounting of their expedition and its meaning was never completed -- until, perhaps, now.

Capt. Lewis (James Barbour) makes a stumbling entrance, drunk and disoriented, the picture of a buffoon -- but a buffoon who speaks with the stentorian voice of a music hall performer.

Schenkkan’s purpose becomes clear when we first see Thomas Jefferson (Morgan Rusler) in the unfamiliar guise of a clueless leader, smug and unimpressive as he asks the scouts to extend “our empire of liberty,” civilizing the savages so they might take up the plow.

Act I gets rolling, literally, when the cast representing Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery board and push forward a broad wooden cart topped with a sail representing their river-going vessel. The journey up the Missouri begins; Native Americans are encountered and patronized; game is hunted and killed (falling to the stage in bags with the animal’s name stenciled on it -- a device reprised for soldiers killed in various U.S. wars).

Sacagawea (Tess Lina), the Shoshone teenager who proved so invaluable as a translator for the expedition, is acquired from a fur trader, while York (Eugene Lee), Clark’s personal black slave, becomes catnip to the Native American women even as his very presence mocks the democratic ideals flaunted by Lewis and Clark and their leader.

Before the expedition reaches the Columbia River, the playwright intervenes and feeds our revised buckskinned heroes into a time machine, where suddenly palm trees and jungle have replaced oaks and aspens. From here on, the two are fast-forwarded across decades and centuries, plopped incredulously into a series of violent misadventures that we are intended to see as the outgrowth of what they started.

The deliberate incongruity makes for some anachronistic fun, fueled by mistaken identities and comic misunderstandings. When Clark hears that the Spanish have blown up the Maine, for example, he thinks they have attacked New England. Lewis and Clark get stoned in a foxhole in Vietnam.

Along about here such easy gags begin to reveal the frayed rigging of Schenkkan’s enterprise. The humor isn’t taking us toward a deeper understanding of Lewis and Clark or anywhere in particular, anywhere political.

Nevertheless, the play jumps to life in Act 2 when Randy Oglesby takes command of the stage as several fiercely drawn and acted ogres, including a callous Marine captain in Vietnam and Donald Rumsfeld himself addressing the two on the desert plain of Iraq. In these set-pieces contrasting the relative innocence of the 19th century explorers with the poisonous cynicism of 20th century American military might, the comedy cuts closer to the bone, and Oglesby is terrific as the hard-boiled Rummy, barking the lingo of imperial arrogance at a pace approaching a twisted art form.

In these not-for-prime-time depictions of murderous foreign policy intrigue, Tony Amendola, who earlier plays the French fur trader Charbonneau, gives two more nice turns as a CIA operative undermining South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and then the oil-slick Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi.

Some of these second-act scenes take off as sketch comedy with tragic overtones but they reduce Lewis and Clark to foils instead of the main characters they started out to be. Since we know Lewis is presumed to have died by his own hand, the ending is ready-made, although when it arrives, it comes in a lugubrious and unfunny bloodbath, with Barbour repeatedly slashing his wrists as he writhes among the body bags of dead U.S. soldiers that now litter the stage.

Nordling, whose face is familiar from his good work on the TV drama “Once and Again,” is effective to the extent possible in a kind of thankless role as a duped and undone American hero.

“The Kentucky Cycle,” essentially naturalist in style, harked back at times to the political theater of Clifford Odets in its poignant and alarming portraits of economic injustice uncovered beneath the slag heap of industrial America. Here, the same playwright has looked at his nation’s larger transgressions and attempted to locate their demon seeds in this improbable and misfiring satire. Give him points for trying such a thing.

*

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Jan. 22

Price: $42 to $55

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running Time: 2 hours, 30 minutes