Demons so close to the surface

ON a weekend of fact and fiction, I glimpsed the soul of America.

It was sometimes dark, sometimes light and always flashing with contradictions, an apocalyptic place where deep and surprising hatreds emerge and oratorical beliefs are held to answer.

I saw hidden places of our national psyche in a play called “Omnium Gatherum” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga, a tree-shrouded outdoor theater of infinite peace that was the perfect contrasting venue for its story of a dinner party in hell.

The next day, I read of another hidden place in the soul, a landscape of vituperation, abruptly revealed, in the published comments of racial icon Andrew Young, who saw fit to demean Jews, Arabs and Koreans on behalf of a giant corporation.

The play, whose translated title means “a miscellaneous collection,” is a gathering of eight articulate and opinionated dinner guests in a post-twin towers netherworld. It may be hell, it may be that place between heaven and hell where one is doomed to face one’s self through all eternity, or it may be a contemporary world that has become hell. The eight diners may themselves be the representations of the towers’ ghostly victims.

Regardless, it is an ironic Manhattan gathering of wit and hatred that sizzles all the more in the darkness of the play’s surroundings on a night too serene to house so much anger.

But the anger is there, directed at each guest, at ideas that rush like sudden gusts of wind across the long table and at an America that is no longer what it was.

Written by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, it is a play of startling revelations in the composition of the human spirit and a hostess’ giddy effort to make everything nice, brilliantly portrayed by Ellen Geer, a daughter of the canyon.

What impacted on me were combined elements of the weekend that also included reading and rereading the comments made by Andrew Young in his shabby attempt to sell the “goodness” of an embattled and often-discredited retail giant called Wal-Mart.

The very notion that Young, a fighter for equality over many thunderous decades, should even be associated with a Wal-Mart advocacy group is astounding to begin with. That he demeaned three ethnic groups to hype the company’s fortunes borders on the unbelievable.

He is a link to the glowing era of sit-ins and marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. and was an articulate spokesman for the world that King envisioned beyond the hatreds that existed. I interviewed Young, a proud and handsome man, when he was mayor of Atlanta, a leader embraced by many African Americans in iconic reverence. In many ways, he became one of my heroes.

And now this.

Asked about Wal-Mart’s role in replacing small neighborhood stores, Young told an interviewer for an African American newspaper, “But you see those are the people who have been overcharging us -- selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables.... First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs, very few black people own these stores.”

He later apologized and said he would resign as a lobbyist for the corporation, but by giving voice to demons festering in the dark places of reality, he joined, de facto, the spirit of the fictional dinner party in hell where, as the play progresses, nothing is held back in the inferno of fear and uncertainty of a post-apocalyptic world. Conversations at the table grow from petty arguments to racial and ethnic slurs and then to violence.

Only when one of the characters, a New York City fireman, responds to a question about raising his children by saying, “I can’t. I’m dead,” do we begin to realize where they might be. Whether it is hell in the mythical/religious sense or hell on Earth, it is a dark place in our most intimate being, where we crouch like amoral beasts, ready to devour each other.

An otherwise easygoing, good-time guy I once knew used to say “in vino veritas” -- in wine, truth -- to explain the bombast of others under the influence, then would go on to prove it every time he had a few drinks by spraying the air with his hatred of anyone who wasn’t exactly like him. Confronted, he’d cower; sober, he might apologize, but there was never a question of the antipathies within.

We mute so much of our devils, but fear, ignorance and faltering egos often bring their invectiveness burning to the surface, like the sudden eruption of a volcano bursting through thin crusts of social conformity.

“Omnium Gatherum” explores a world that is increasingly becoming the world we occupy, while the venomous evaluation of other races and ethnic groups by Andrew Young reveals the terrible truths that lie so close to the surface of mannerly societal restraints.