Creative License

NEW YORK CITY: Catherine Trieschmann’s play How the World Began exists in the crosshairs of a battle still raging across large swaths of rural America. But Trieschmann wants audiences to realize that the play isn’t a platform to expound upon an obvious intellectual divide as much as it is an exploration of the complex nature of belief.

“The creation/evolution debate in the schools is certainly the presenting issue of the play, so I don’t mind that marketing tagline,” she says. “But I hope audiences dig into the sociological and psychological issues underlying the debate, as that is what most interests me. The play is not a modern Inherit the Wind, but rather an exploration of why ordinary people adopt extreme ideological positions and the ways in which empathy and conviction connect and divide us.”

In 2006, Trieschmann moved from the East Coast to western Kansas with her husband, who had been offered a job teaching philosophy at Fort Hays State University. Accordingly, he was asked to speak on several evolutionist-creationist panels. Then, in May 2007, Greensburg, the small town they lived in, was leveled by a tornado. “The juxtaposition of a natural disaster with the debates surrounding the origin of the universe struck a chord with me,” Trieschmann recalls.

Her play involves a highly educated New York City science teacher who’s offered a job at a rural Kansas high school a year after a tornado has wiped out its town. Through a simple misstatement in class, she lands in the center of the creationism debate. Though critics of creationism will find ample ammunition in a searing monologue near the play’s end, Trieschmann says she is less concerned with what people believe than why.

“Why people believe what they believe is never simple, and we probably do a disservice to one another when we assume otherwise,” she reasons.

Written on commission from the Manhattan Theatre Club, How the World Began was read there in 2010, then workshopped as part of South Coast Repertory’s 2011 Pacific Playwright Festival. A full production at SCR followed in September, and the play’s current run—courtesy of New York City’s Women’s Project—continues through Jan. 29.

“I’d say this is the quickest any of my plays has been picked up for production, and I feel extraordinarily lucky to have had three productions with such fantastic companies,” Trieschmann declares. “Pinch me.”

—Joel Beers

Sweet Talk

BOSTON: Robbie McCauley doesn’t remember when she first started craving sugar. “I knew something was amiss, but I didn’t admit it to myself,” says the Obie Award-winning playwright, performance artist and director. Despite the healthy meals being served at home, she found herself constantly sneaking candy bars, bingeing on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and feeling completely exhausted.

But diabetes education was minimal in the 1940s and ’50s, and McCauley wasn’t diagnosed and treated for the disease until the age of 20, after reaching a tipping point that required several weeks of hospitalization. Over the years, one of the ways she’s come to terms with her condition is through her art. A professor in the performing arts department at Emerson College, McCauley lists among her credits performing in the Broadway cast of for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. She draws from theatrical and personal experience in her one-woman show Sugar (Jan. 20–29, produced by ArtsEmerson at the Paramount Center). In Sugar, McCauley shares stories of survival from her own life as an African-American with deep ties to her family, as well as interviews of other diabetics and their supporters from around the country.

A combination of entertainment, advocacy and education, Sugar is the centerpiece of an event sponsored by Emerson College and Artists in Context (AIC), a cross-disciplinary project assembling artists and other creative thinkers to address the critical issues of our time. AIC has developed ongoing story circles among diabetics in Boston and promoted guest lectures and liaisons with civic and health organizations. Each Sugar performance will be followed by facilitated talkbacks.

For McCauley, Sugar provides a way to tell the story of her struggle and connect to others—those with and without the condition. But the show is also therapeutic for her. “In the piece, I say that diabetes is connected to feelings of shame and blame, though for me, those feelings are less as time goes on. By naming it, it’s easier. It’s healing for me, and I would hope it would be for others.”

—Karen Campbell

A Soldier’s Tale

NEW HAVEN, CONN.: “The Scottish play” calls to mind witches and ghosts, superstition over saying the play’s title in a theatre, and famous quotes like “Out, damned spot!” along with regicide and its aftermath. But director Eric Ting is undaunted by historic stagings of Macbeth. He reimagines the Bard’s classic, Jan. 18-Feb. 12, at Long Wharf Theatre, where he is associate artistic director. In Macbeth 1969, Ting casts the three witches as nurses in a Midwestern hospital on Christmas Eve during the Vietnam war. Macbeth and Banquo become veterans returning home. “The roles have been conflated so there are only six actors,” explains Ting, adding that he and his team were inspired by images of shell-shocked soldiers from World War I who were sent to convalesce in idyllic British countryside settings. “The trauma of war is carried inside of them wherever they go,” says Ting. “As long as there is war, soldiers will return home and have trouble reintegrating into society and connecting with their loved ones. No one is immune to it.”

—Eliza Bent

Hometown Shenanigans

CINCINNATI: Theresa Rebeck grew up in Cincinnati, but her career as a writer of plays and television series has flourished on America’s coasts. “It’s complicated to be so thoroughly from the Midwest but to settle on the East Coast. I always feel like a child of two lands,” Rebeck says. That dichotomy is the crux of her new play, Dead Accounts, premiering Jan. 14–Feb. 11 at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park.

Dead Accounts—commissioned by the Playhouse following its hit productions of her Bad Dates (2005) and The Understudy (2010)—is set in her hometown, amid a family of adult siblings. Prodigal son Jack is running from a dissolving marriage and financial shenanigans in New York, while sister Lorna lives a stalled existence in Ohio, monitoring their aging parents and ignoring her personal life. Hiding out at their parents’ house with a load of cash, Jack retreats into local comfort foods: gourmet ice cream, Cincinnati chili and chicken pizza.

Although the play’s insider Cincinnati references could be adjusted for productions in other cities, Rebeck calls Dead Accounts a love letter to a place with “great authenticity and good-heartedness.” Her knack for character and dialogue keep the comedy sharp—but Dead Accounts digs beyond humorous family dynamics. When Rebeck’s son was small, she watched “Sesame Street” with him and wondered, “Why are we teaching that sharing is good and it’s good to be proud of yourself and all that other stuff? When you’re an adult, you’re told that all these values are silly. That conundrum has puzzled me for a long time. Those questions got crystallized by the catastrophe that is the economy and the banking system. I wanted to explore questions about America’s moral center and what’s happened in the last 20 years. We’ve become a country where shame has no place. That’s a very dangerous reality.” And a formula for serious laughs.

—Rick Pender

Good Heavens!

BERKELEY, CALIF.: “I fear your independence of mind is the way to damnation,” declares one of the characters in Mark Jackson’s God’s Plot, which bows at Berkeley, Calif.’s Shotgun Players through Jan. 15. Based on a scantily documented performance of Ye Bare and Ye Cubb, which satirized the King of England in 1665 at a Virginia colony tavern, God’s Plot mines a little-known yet rich historic footnote. “The artists were sued for blasphemy,” reports Jackson, and the resulting scandal mixed art, religion, politics and clandestine love. Among the characters involved are a spirited young woman who must confess to singing unholy music; a landowner who rises to wealth only to lose it just as quickly on a bad loan; and an ex-convict from England who makes his way to Virginia by way of Barbados as an actor-cum-scribe.

According to Jackson, most Puritans were suspicious of theatre. Nevertheless, when Ye Bare and Ye Cubb was performed in 1665, it was not immediately rebuked due to the colony’s preoccupation with a difficult economic climate and a Puritan appreciation for jokes about England. But the political concerns that trumped religious ones soon gave way to a lawsuit. A local man, who Jackson describes as “rankled about some alleged stolen property and an ongoing inequity between the Puritans and Quakers,” used the performance of Ye Bare and Ye Cubb as an opportunity to settle his vendetta.

“So you had art, politics, religion, theft, a tough economy and a frivolous lawsuit all bound up together,” says Jackson. Sound familiar? “It may be about a story from the distant past, but it’s about things we are dealing with right now.” Jackson maintains that God’s Plot is not a message play but admits to it having patriotic tones: “Openly questioning one’s government and country is about as American as it gets.”

—Eliza Bent

It’s Mandarin to Me

NEW YORK CITY: “All of my plays are about people looking for a home in very weird places,” says playwright Zayd Dohrn, whose latest effort, Outside People, directed by Evan Cabnet, is currently lodging Off Broadway in a Vineyard Theatre/Naked Angels co-production through Jan. 29. Outside People’s particular dislocation is China, where an American man falls in love with a Chinese woman and must navigate the maze of personal and political factors that inform their relationship.

The play makes for moment of synchronicity: Two New York premieres this fall also covered similar Chinese/American terrain—David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish, on Broadway, and Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, at the Public Theater. Dohrn chalks the surfeit up to timeliness. China, he says, is “like the Middle East was 10 years ago,” integral to American prosperity yet widely misunderstood.

Dohrn came to understand China by living there on-and-off for a decade. The play’s opening scene, in fact, was inspired by Dohrn’s first night there, when an overwhelming, multilingual jab-fest at a bar proved “intoxicating.” The rest of the play, Dohrn says, is not autobiographical, a fact that may disappoint political junkies—as the son of former Weather Underground leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, Dohrn’s background is an especially potent one. And yet, Dohrn says all of his works ask the same fundamentally revolutionary question: “What’s the way forward? Clearly what we’re doing now is not sustainable. There has to be some other world that we can find.”

—Harrison Hill