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The following articles appeared in Actors Theatre's subscriber newsletter prior to the 2006 Humana Festival

THE SCENE
If you have ever done something despite your better judgment, maybe chose to follow the crowd instead of following your gut to avoid hard, emotionally painful work, then you will understand Charlie, the provocative and complex protagonist in Theresa Rebeck’s fierce, edgy, raw and scathing new comedy The Scene.

Charlie is an out-of-work actor who may be past his prime and who is desperately holding onto the shreds of dignity he has left. He’s spiritually famished—starving for something real in a world he sees morphing into something more surreal. He’s been a member of the New York entertainment scene for almost two decades and the lifestyle is weighing heavily on him: "People run around this fucking city saying things like ‘he has a pilot,’ ‘he has a go picture,’ ‘it's got a green light,’ when it's all just crap…Everybody's running around like psychotic sheep, bleating, ‘He has a pilot! He has a pilot—’ "

Keeping things in perspective is Stella, his wife of ten years. A competent, assured television producer with a passion for highlighters, Stella prods Charlie to speak with Nick, an old friend-turned-nemesis, about a job on his new television show. What she sees as a sensible request in preparation for their upcoming adoption, he sees a humiliating act that threatens his last tiny swatch of self-respect.

While self-medicating his premature emasculation with as much vodka as he can swallow, Charlie storms into a conversation and accidentally runs into Clea, the sexy Buckeye he met at a party a few days ago. Fresh off the bus from Ohio, she is determined to live up her salad days. Green in judgment but full of self-determination, she scorches through each Lizzie Grubman-like party with a swagger befitting the usual pretension that circulates The Scene like incense.

When Charlie loses it with Clea, his tirade becomes quite an aphrodisiac. Like her Renaissance doppelganger Iago, she sees the world and other people as animalistic, ruled by their basest desires: "You’re like this incredible lion who’s been stalking the earth since the dawn of nature," she says flirtatiously. With his mane now fully ruffled, Charlie takes her back to his lair where they engage in a heated affair that burns through him like the worst kind of disease. The white heat between them eventually dissipates, leaving him with empty pockets and emotionally, spiritually and morally adrift. What once seemed absurd and surreal suddenly becomes all too real for this lost soul.

Inspired by Rebeck's occasional forays in the Manhattan party circuit, her run-ins with celebrities six-stories high, and poignant, self-revelatory films like Of Human Bondage and Blue Angel, the play starts out sickly funny and turns darker and darker the further Charlie goes down the road. Like a good Chekhovian drama, the play showcases the humor and tragedy of everyday life. Its biting satire echoes Molière’s ruthless comedic attention to detail, and like a satisfying Greek tragedy, the piece mines humanities brutality examining how self-loathing can move from the world and into the self. "Human beings range from saints to monsters, and for me, you’re constantly being challenged as to where you’re going to fall on that continuum. What choices are you going to make? Which direction are you going to go in?" Rebeck asks.

Throughout the play Charlie struggles mightily along this continuum. "Let’s be precise," Charlie trumpets after Clea describes the view from a New York City loft. "Everyone acts like surreal is some sort of definition, water or air, how can that be surreal?" In a world where satire and reality merge and where distortions to reality can quickly be twisted into a surreal universe, the chiding for sloppy language also shows his struggle with his own moral barometer. The world shouldn’t be carelessly defined, even if it already is.

Rebeck recalls in a recent interview in American Theatre how lazy language was used to describe New York in the days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. "I was terrified not just by the event but by the way the talking heads on television tried to squeeze this very large and incomprehensible moment into their own little space of understanding, to shove meanings onto it," she says. "That seemed quite surreal to me." Three years later, Rebeck still sees America as a place where the outrageously weird and brutally real freely coexist. "We're culturally far, far adrift from what we meant to be as a country. I think there is a cultural collapse into narcissism that has not been fully examined. It makes the world more and more surreal."

We are living in difficult times, according to Rebeck, and it’s easy to be confused about what it means to be a human being in this world. For those, like Charlie, struggling to make sense of the world the play is a reminder that the journey can be funny as well as terrifying.

— Mervin P. Antonio

THERESA REBECK
Theresa Rebeck finds "something ruthlessly interesting about getting to the painful truth of an emotion, of a situation." In both her comedies and her dramas, Rebeck’s characters begin in indecision and self-delusion, "circling rather than getting down to the core issue." She puts her characters in emotional—and often legal—peril, as they are forced to confront the difference between their true identity and the personality they project to the world. Rebeck frequently lays the blame for this disparity at the feet of societal forces, and much of her work explores how these characters interact with the culture and community around them. In Omnium-Gatherum, which Rebeck co-wrote with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, dinner party guests forge a microcosmic community in the wake of September 11. Loose Knit examines the friendship of five women who sustain themselves in the complexities of the modern world by returning to the earlier rhythms and tradition of a knitting circle.

Of particular interest to Rebeck is how media damages the development of healthy community. The cult of the celebrity dwarfs the identity of average citizens; the entertainment industry has claimed and trademarked "culture," and Rebeck marvels at "how the expressions of culture make us all feel insignificant." Rather than springing from an organic collaboration of communities, culture is "being projected into our homes via the television set" and is increasingly detached from actual life experience. By forcing her characters to grapple with the gap between their true identities and the lies they try to project to the world, Rebeck has also found an antidote to this media-frenzy in a community that allows her characters to manifest their values. The struggle is never easy and fuels some of her most interesting work. In The Family of Mann, academic-turned-sitcom writer Belinda is determined to resist the compromise of vapid writing and remain true to the integrity of her characters’ stories. And in Bad Dates, onstage in February as part of the Brown-Forman Mainstage Series, Haley Walker’s attempts at intimacy are frustrated by the way film has shaped contemporary perceptions of romance. Her first date in seven years is still in love with a woman he broke up with because "she couldn’t see the way the movie ended." Haley herself patterns her love life after the romantic intrigues of a Joan Crawford movie.

If the antidote to this sense of insignificance is community, Rebeck has been fortunate to find many communities that nurture her work; she has collaborated with many regional theatres including Long Wharf Theatre, Victory Gardens Theater, The Source, Hartford Stage, and of course, Actors Theatre of Louisville. Several of Rebeck’s most recent works, including The Scene, were fostered by the powerful artistic community she has found at the Lark Theatre in New York, a developmental theatre group run by John Clinton Eisner and Arthur Kopit. Over the last four years Kopit and fellow Lark Theatre playwrights Tina Howe, David Ives and David Henry Hwang have nurtured Rebeck both "as a person and a writer." I was adopted by these playwrights with amazing careers who really took care of me and were diligent in their attention to my work." This collaboration reflects Rebeck’s belief that theatre is an antidote to the cultural strip-mining facing America today. "I’ve always thought the theatre is enormously powerful. It teaches empathy," Rebeck says. And when you reach deep into the emotional psyche of characters like Charlie, Clea, Lewis and Stella in The Scene, you witness its need and importance in American society.

— Jamie Bragg