Lest the country look away, playwrights launch a fusillade of dramas about the war in Iraq

IN Robert Schenkkan’s new play “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates,” President Jefferson’s intrepid emissaries from two centuries ago take a wrong turn and find themselves in contemporary Iraq, just before the war. They’re greeted by the wheeler-dealer Ahmad Chalabi, who assumes that the president they represent is named Bush.

Schenkkan, who says he’s “profoundly angry” about the war, found a sharp contrast between the “noble rhetoric of Lewis and Clark and the reality they discovered. It just opened a door for me. I was finding all these ironic similarities” to events in Iraq and a few other chapters in American history. “Lewis and Clark” opens Dec. 11 at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

Across the continent, the New York Public Theater has pledged to produce “The Poor Itch,” a new play by Los Angeles-based John Belluso that examines stories of American vets who were wounded in Iraq -- as well as the broader expanse of Iraqi history. “Theater is the right place to understand the events of today,” Belluso says. “What we’re being told is happening is certainly not what’s happening.”

The Taper and the Public -- theaters that have traditionally supported politically charged plays -- are hardly alone in turning their attentions to Iraq. As the war approaches year three, a new volley of war-themed plays is landing on the stages of the United States and Britain, the countries that led the assault on Saddam Hussein. Most express strong opposition to U.S. and British policies. Many of these scripts will surely have a short shelf life. But most of the playwrights say that the theater offers ways of thinking and feeling about the war that go deeper than the images on TV -- and that the communal experience of theatergoing is likelier to change attitudes than the solitary experience of looking at a screen.

James Reston Jr., a historian and occasional playwright who wrote an introduction to an anthology of Vietnam War plays, says a line from that 1985 essay is just as valid now: “The playwright becomes even more important than the historian, for in no other war of our history was the private word more important than the public pronouncement.”

The private thoughts of the participants in the Iraq war “will emerge in the arts,” he predicts. And although a number of plays are already appearing, “once the war ends, there will be a flood of them, as there was with Vietnam.”

The musical “Hair,” in 1967, was probably the most popular Vietnam-related play that opened while the war still raged. But many of the most prominent Vietnam-era plays emerged after the war had wound down. David Rabe’s “Streamers” from 1976, Steve Metcalfe’s “Strange Snow” from 1982, and -- on a more populist level -- the mega-musical “Miss Saigon” from 1989 are among the most frequently revived.

London has been the center of Iraq play activity, but Los Angeles isn’t far behind. In 2003 -- the year the fighting started -- theaters in both cities quickly turned out broadly satirical treatments of the war: London’s “The Madness of George Dubya” and L.A.’s “Embedded,” produced by Tim Robbins’ Actors’ Gang.

Probably the most prominent Iraq-themed play is David Hare’s “Stuff Happens,” which meticulously depicts the prelude to war inside the American and British governments. It opened at London’s National Theatre in 2004 and at L.A.’s Taper this past summer.

In West L.A., the Geffen Playhouse’s season has begun with “Nine Parts of Desire,” about Iraqi women. It will end next summer with Sam Shepard’s “The God of Hell” -- which, despite the play’s setting in the Midwest, employs glimpses of U.S. government torture akin to the imagery from Abu Ghraib prison. At least six Iraq-themed productions have turned up in L.A.’s small theaters this year, including two running now.

Last summer, Shepard’s play was featured at the Contemporary American Theater festival in Shepherdstown, W.Va. -- not far from the centers of the war effort in the Washington, D.C., area. Two of the other three plays in the festival were even more directly about the war.

Ed Herendeen, founder and producing director of the festival, explains his choices: “The country’s at war. We’re a contemporary theater. Contemporary theater is about what’s happening now.”

Unbooked on Broadway

IN New York, off-Broadway and smaller theaters have examined war-related subjects, in part with British imports such as the docudrama “Guantanamo.” But Broadway remains a tough nut for such plays to crack. “No one is more militant against the war than I am,” says Rocco Landesman, president of Broadway’s Jujamcyn Theaters, “but that doesn’t mean I want to see plays about it. A Broadway audience comes for entertainment, not to be lectured.”

Yet others believe that Iraq plays will eventually find their way to Broadway as well. “If a play were good enough and had a star, yes,” says independent producer Margo Lion. “I expect these will start popping up.”

She notes that “Angels in America” was an unlikely Broadway contender -- but Tony Kushner’s two-part epic about America in the AIDS crisis not only reached Broadway but became the most acclaimed play of the ‘90s. Both Landesman and Lion were among the producers of “Angels.”

Oskar Eustis, who was instrumental in developing “Angels in America,” is now the artistic director of the New York Public Theater, an off-Broadway institution that often serves as a portal to Broadway. He is in discussions about bringing “Stuff Happens” to New York, and he calls Belluso’s “The Poor Itch” the most powerful Iraq-related play he has encountered.

Broadway will eventually confront the subject of Iraq, Eustis says. Theater at that level seldom works quickly, he adds. Kushner has been working on an Iraq play without any particular deadline. But most of the writers outraged by the war are not taking their sweet time or waiting for Broadway to beckon. British playwright Justin Butcher was inspired to mount an antiwar play as quickly as possible -- even before the war began -- after an incident in a bar in Bucharest in November 2002.

It was the evening before President Bush was scheduled to pass through the Romanian capital as part of his effort to enlist allies in the approaching war. Butcher and a friend were discussing politics at a hotel bar. When they tried to leave, they found their way blocked by security agents -- Butcher says they were Americans -- who separated them and interrogated them about their political views.

“The whole scene was farcical,” Butcher says. “It put me in mind of ‘Dr. Strangelove’ ” -- the 1964 movie about a psychotic general who decides to start his own nuclear war. Upon his return to Britain, Butcher started writing with a vengeance. Using elements from the “Strangelove” story, he dashed off “The Madness of George Dubya.”

After six days of rehearsal, the play opened in a 100-seat theater in mid-January 2004. It attracted a wave of attention and moved to a five-month run on the West End. Before the end of 2004, Butcher had turned out two additional productions inspired by the war -- “A Weapons Inspector Calls” and “Guantanamo Baywatch.”

For Santa Monica-based playwright and screenwriter Nicholas Kazan, the tipping point was the reelection of Bush a year ago. “I felt I had to do something to keep myself from going out of my mind,” he says. “I started writing on Nov. 3, and the first draft poured out in eight days.” “A Good Soldier,” Kazan’s adaptation of “Antigone” to contemporary Iraq, played the Odyssey Theatre in West L.A. this year.

The productions of four solo artists grew out of personal experiences in Iraq. Two are ex-Marines who became active in the antiwar movement after their return from the war: Sean Huze, whose “The Sand Storm: Stories from the Front” played in Hollywood last fall and again last spring, and Jeff Key, whose “Eyes of Babylon” relates not only his wartime experiences but how he outed himself as a gay man after his return to the States. Key performed “Eyes of Babylon” in Hollywood last spring and now serves as a bodyguard for antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan.

The other soloists with experience in Iraq are Iraqi American Heather Raffo, who wrote and performs “Nine Parts of Desire,” and Jerry Quickley, who will perform “Live From the Front!” at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City next spring. It’s based on his stint in Iraq as a journalist for the Pacifica radio network, when the war was heating up.

The styles of the Iraqi-themed plays wander far and wide over the theatrical map. “Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates” is a satirical fantasy that takes the explorers from two centuries ago to the western U.S., then to the Philippines and to Vietnam, before they land in a prewar Iraq.

Seattle-based Schenkkan won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Kentucky Cycle” -- which also used themes from American history but in a much more realistic style. As for the war, “the situation is so tragically absurd, realism felt inadequate. Satire and dark comedy felt like the only way to break through the rhetoric, the spin.” The idea of Lewis and Clark arriving in Iraq “snapped into place” one day when he was driving home from the airport, admiring the mountains that face the Pacific.

Belluso’s process of writing “The Poor Itch” began with interviews with disabled veterans who had returned from Iraq. But it’s no documentary. It’s a fictional narrative, not only about a particular veteran but also about Iraqi history, generously sprinkled with fantasy. Belluso, best known for “The Body of Bourne,” says that theatergoers will ask, “Why should I go to a play about Iraq when I can see it on TV?” and that “we owe them an answer. We owe them drama and a sense of universal storytelling.”

Simon Levy, who adapted a piece of nonfiction into “What I Heard About Iraq,” at the 78-seat Fountain Theatre in Hollywood, feels there is still room for documentary-style drama about Iraq. He searched for more than a year for an Iraq play before he found an article by Eliot Weinberger that detailed a steady procession of short facts and quotations about the war. Levy immediately saw it as theater, subtitled it “A Cry for Five Voices” and began adapting it for five actors.

“It’s easy to go in the direction of satire,” Levy says. “”It’s harder to go in a serious direction. That’s what I admired about ‘Stuff Happens’ ” -- but he wanted to keep the narrative going beyond the events described in Hare’s play. “I wanted people to know it’s about us, it’s current.”

Michael Kearns’ “Make Love Not War,” at the even smaller Moving Arts in Silver Lake, embodies yet another style. Unlike the other solo artists, Kearns has never been in Iraq. His theme is the effect of the war on Americans whose loved ones were killed there. Although Kearns opposes the war, he says his work “isn’t an antiwar play. I try to avoid polemics.”

Kearns doesn’t know anyone who has served in Iraq, but he sees a parallel between many of the GI victims and many of the young men he knew who died of AIDS. “I lost a lot of people in that war,” he says.

Despite the varied approaches of these plays, they share a common distaste for the war effort. Even Raffo’s “Nine Parts of Desire,” which goes into gruesome detail about atrocities committed by Hussein, would never be called a pro-war play.

Questions of fairness

ACCORDING to conservative screenwriter and occasional playwright Lionel Chetwynd, “people with a positive view about the war are unlikely to move in the circles where plays get fast-tracked. If the central theater district ran down the main street of Branson, Mo., maybe it would be different.”

The production team behind “What I Heard About Iraq” held “a lot of discussions over the issue of fairness,” Levy says. But they concluded that “this administration has had plenty of years to talk its talk. Now it’s our time to talk our talk.” And by holding audience talk-back sessions after each performance, Levy provides a forum for theatergoers who feel differently. After the opening night show, a caustic theatergoer spoke against the play’s “Bush-bashing.”

Geffen Playhouse producing director Gil Cates says he would “absolutely do a pro-war play if it was a good play.” He expresses confidence that “a lot of our large donors are in favor of the war” and says he expects flak for most of the plays he produces. He is “absolutely against the war now -- but not initially. It took six months before I saw that the reason we went to war [the purported weapons of mass destruction] wasn’t there.”

Cates and Levy, as well as Schenkkan, have participated in electoral campaigns, but some of the artists behind these plays would agree with Kearns that “my art is my activism.”

But is it enough? Don’t Iraq plays preach to the choir? And even if the audiences aren’t already converted, is the nonprofit theater audience big enough to make a difference in changing minds or policies?

“Every voice makes a difference,” Levy says. “Change happens one voice at a time.” And if the audience is already converted, “we still go to church or temple to be reaffirmed. Sometimes theater reaffirms larger humanitarian issues.”

Britain’s Butcher says his brand of acerbic satire “engenders a bubble of wind in people’s guts, and they go away with indigestion, which sparks debate and anger and a change of mind. You can’t stop a war, but you can throw pebbles into the public consciousness. The ripples contribute to a shift in the zeitgeist.”

Mass media have a wider reach, but its writers have less control, and movies take longer to make, notes Kazan. And because theater producers don’t have to worry about offending huge audiences, “the theater is a place where political material can be discussed, and passion feels at home.”

It’s also a place where the audience might feel the most moved to action, says Eustis. By contrast, “TV reaches people at their most reactionary moments -- when they’re home alone.”

Herendeen agrees: “When you’re in a room together with the artists, the communion is powerful. People walk out of a theater and talk.”

Contact Don Shirley at calendar.letters@latimes .com.