Playwright Steven Dietz, whose "God's Country" will have its regional premiere as Salt Lake Acting Company's 1992-93 season opener this week, writes about the things that make him angry.
"There's a quote somewhere from Brecht that the goal of theater should not be to merely interest the spectator into buying a ticket, but to interest him in the world around him," Dietz said last week during a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. (where he was directing yet another one of his recent plays). "It's a very daunting challenge."So it's not surprising that most of Dietz' plays are based on or around current issues. And what could be more timely than the recent flurry of white supremacist activity in Northern Idaho.
Fact: On June 18, 1984, controversial radio talk show host Alan Berg (who had described himself as "the man you love to hate") was shot and killed outside his Denver home. The police probe included a review of his hate mail and telephone threats. (In November, the murder weapon - a .45-caliber submachine gun, was traced to a home that had been occupied by white supremacist leader Gary Lee Yarbrough near Sandpoint, Idaho.)
Fact: On Dec. 9, six months after Berg's slaying, FBI agents had tracked one of Yarbrough's cohorts - Robert Mathews - to a hideout on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. They fired flares, which set the house ablaze. Mathews, whose body was later recovered from the site, was founder of The Order, a neo-Nazi organization. He had also been associated with such extremist anti-Semitic and racist groups as the Aryan Nations and White American Bastion.
Playwright Dietz was born and reared in Denver and was a frequent listener to Alan Berg's radio show. At the time of Berg's assassination, Dietz was living and working in Minneapolis. The case piqued his interest, and he began compiling material for an overview on the white supremacy movement in the United States.
About three years later, Dietz was in Seattle, where he now lives, meeting with Jeff Steitzer, who had just been named artistic director for A Contemporary Theatre.
"Jeff wanted to do a new play in the 1988 season. He asked me what I was doing - and I tend to be juggling four or five new projects at any given time - so I threw some ideas out to him. One was the Berg case and the white supremacy movement, and I have to thank Steitzer for saying that so much of that story took place in Seattle that ACT would commission it. I was not that far enough along in a formal sense, so you could say he called my bluff."
Dietz then spent three to four intensive months researching the project.
"The main breakthrough was when the theater put me in touch with federal prosecutors in Seattle," said Dietz. (Between December 1984 and April 1985, the FBI had arrested 27 members of The Order. In December 1985, following a lengthy trial, 10 were convicted of racketeering.)
"I had access to 60,000 pages of transcripts from the trial and the prosecutors pointed me toward elements that were especially dramatic or of note. The trial itself became the core of the play," said Dietz.
His play, which is structured more like a "docudrama," focuses on three actual people - Alan Berg, Robert Mathews and the government's star witness, Denver Parmenter. The title, "God's Country," comes from the vision of the kind of whites-only nation the extremists dreamed of establishing in the Northwest states.
While the production is a blend of factual and fictional characters, Dietz said "it became clear in working on this that one goal began to emerge - and that was to take the words of record and put them out into public view . . . bring them out into the light of day with a theatrical component so that audiences would not be able to say `Sure, that's horrific, but this is just one writer's fictional account.' But that's not true. The dialogue is, literally, word for word."
The play does contain five monologues by unnamed characters, but these are Dietz' only inventions - devices on which to mount various points of view, "to sort of vary the music of the piece."
Dietz had considered going underground and infiltrate some of the organizations to research the play, but a friend warned him that this was probably not a good idea. Most of the necessary material was already public record, anyway. "It's not that these are hidden beliefs and hidden actions," said Dietz.
Dietz said "God's Country" is "one of those plays you write and then hope that, sometime during your lifetime, it will become unnecessary to produce."
When it first premiered in 1988 in Seattle, "I thought it was just a Seattle story, since the trial had taken place there," Dietz said. But he is gratified that the play has traveled so far. Ironically, it hasn't yet been produced in Denver.
"My hope in writing it was that it would become a community forum in those cities where it was produced. It was running in Los Angeles shortly after the riots and, obviously, the post-show discussions there had a heightened edge to them. In Louisville, many discussions centered around recruitment by white hate groups in the Kentucky prison system. It has served as a lightning rod in those cities for what theater does best, which is to get a group of people in a room to talk about things that matter to them."
Dietz hopes that audiences will learn something about tolerance (and intolerance) from "God's Country," although the play itself isn't preachy.
During the Los Angeles run, Thomas Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance, attended a performance with a handful of young neo-Nazi skinheads.
"It's probably not accurate to say they liked the show," said Dietz, "but they had no qualms about it because it did present their views."
- THE SALT LAKE ACTING COMPANY production of "God's Country" is being guest-directed by Rick VanNoy of Cedar City, operations manager and associate casting director for the Utah Shakespearean Festival.
His cast includes Leslie Suzanne Brott, Bobbi Fouts, Charles Lynn Frost, Thomas E. Jacobsen, Kurt Johnson, Sam Littlefield, Mikel T. MacDonald, Steve Mehmert, Mark Mineart, Brenda C. Myers and Steve Phillips, all of whom portray multiple characters.
VanNoy, making his Salt Lake directorial debut, hopes "God's Country" will help Utah audiences discover their own prejudices. "Too often we say things that are racist or sexist without even thinking about it. We make off-the-cuff remarks like `Don't let them jew you down' . . . and with the so-called `family values' push, I feel the truest value is being tolerant of others."
- PERFORMANCES at Salt Lake Acting Company, 168 W. 500 North, will be Wednesdays and Thursdays at 7:30 p.m.; Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 2 and 7 p.m., from Sept. 23 through Oct. 25. There will also be an additional Saturday matinee at 2 p.m. on Oct. 10.
Post-show discussions are scheduled following the Sunday matinee on Sept. 27 and the Thursday evening performance on Oct. 1.
All seats during "premiere week," Sept. 23-27, are $12. Following this week of previews, admission will range from $14 to $18.50, depending on performance day and time. Group and student discounts are available. For reservations, contact the SLAC box office at 363-0525. Box office hours are Tuesdays-Fridays, from noon to 6 p.m., and prior to performance time.
- NOTE: SLAC's annual Fall Free Reading Series will begin Monday, Oct. 5, at 7:30 p.m., with a staged reading of Dietz' "Halcyon Days," which the playwright is currently directing for the new Theatre of the First Amendment in Washington, D.C. He describes it as a dark satire about the invasion of Grenada.