Croatia calling

Trinity Rep launches Ambition Facing West

by Bill Rodriguez

There's a particularly clarifying observation in Anthony Clarvoe's latest play. A child of immigrants describes the early 20th-century Europe of her heritage as a crazy, Alice in Wonderland place, where "the people stay put and the countries move around." In a wisecrack, the playwright has managed to distill the essence of a whole continent's people in a way that's direct, trenchant and funny.

Similar alchemy has been burbling away in the weeks of rehearsing Ambition Facing West, under the direction of Trinity Repertory Company artistic director Oskar Eustis, for the April 18-May 11 production. Eustis commissioned the work when he was associate artistic director at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. It is the second and final world premiere of Trinity's debut Providence New Play Festival. Company members Timothy Crowe, William Damkoehler, Phyllis Kay and Anne Scurria are joined by Trinity Rep Conservatory students Mauro Hantman and Elizabeth Quincy.

The play spans more than 70 years and concerns three generations, beginning with roots in Croatia. It follows an immigrant who left Yugoslavia for America, as Clarvoe's own father did, where he became a union organizer for miners in Wyoming. The play also traces the life of his daughter, from teen years during World War II, when the loyalty of foreigners was suspect, up to the 1980s, when as a business consultant in Japan (like the playwright's mother has been) she and her son wrestle questions of assimilation and cultural identity.

Clarvoe's plays have been a diverse lot. Let's Play Two is a romantic comedy in which a couple driving through Minnesota listen to a Twins game and discuss whether they're really suited for each other. Another comedy, Pick Up Ax, gets into with the computer industry. The Living deals with the Great Plague in London in 1665. And Clarvoe has also adapted Ibsen's play Ghost in his own translation, as well as Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other institutional benefactors.

He spoke after rehearsal last week, surrounded by posters and photographs from previous seasons in a Trinity Rep conference room.

Q: This new play has been cooking in rehearsal for four weeks now. What has boiled off in the process? What flavors have become stronger?

A: Well, I tend to let the characters think out loud, especially when I'm starting. It's that old line about how do I know what they mean until I hear what they say. As time goes on, especially because this deals with so many themes, it takes me a while to hear and see what are the most important themes and what are the thoughts that are going to propel them into action. So as the writing goes forward, they tend to think less and do more and to think more specifically about what has become most important to them.

Q: And what came to the fore in that process?

A: There was a whole section in the draft you read that took place in California, because I thought that would be interesting. But the California material had felt thin compared to the other. Certainly relevant but I had thought of it as perhaps the bridge section of a song with verse and chorus. As soon as I [removed the scenes] I said, "Oh, what had I been thinking in the first place?" And the stuff that had been in there actually worked better dispersed out to the other parts of the play and actually made things much stronger, much more direct.

Q: You're working with one of the country's top development dramaturges. To what extent are Oskar's fingerprints on the play?

A: Oskar's dramaturgical imprint is that he's more than capable of mentally encapsulating what I'm trying to do with this piece and getting where it's going, and where the resonances are, and keeping you honest politically and esthetically. He knows how to handle a play with multiple plots. He knows how he's also directing the piece to tell the story clearly when the story isn't simply a few people in a room but is about a lot of people covering a whole lot of territory. He is arguably the best dramaturge in the country. He's been doing it for a very long time and with the best. So it's a privilege.

Q: Coming to this country as a poor immigrant is easily as dangerous as venturing into territory with Indians and bears. Does Ambition Facing West suggest that a kind of frontier mentality will always be part of the American character?

A: One of the things about the American character is that it has been so defined by people who have started elsewhere. Robert Frost observed in "The Gift Outright": "the land was ours before we were the land's." That it is in our nature to see in a place its possibilities, not its history. That's such a contrast with everything that I've ever been able to learn about Croatia certainly it's clear since the war, that's a place defined by its history. One of the things that concerns me is the extent to which there are people saying, "We're Americans because we were born here, and so we have rights as Americans that people coming here shouldn't have." My family taught me that being an American was something that you earned. And that if you could make your way here and work hard enough to make a place, that made you an American it wasn't a birthright, it was an opportunity. As you can tell, this is something I'm emotional about it means a lot to me.

I think that one of the reasons we were so threatened by our image of the Japanese in the '80s was that they seemed more American than we were at that point that kind of ambition, that kind of drive.

Q: There's such a diversity in the kinds of plays you've done comedies, period dramas. Do you see any common denominator to your inspirations for writing plays?

A: Yeah, I think so. There's an old truism from Aristotle's Poetics, that a play's supposed to be a single action. And I've come to feel that in a way that single action mirrors the single action of the playwright in writing a play. So much for me about writing has been an attempt at continuing education, that I get intrigued with something, I get curious about something and I go and try and learn about it. And so I think the common denominator in all my plays is the primacy placed on learning and teaching.

Over and over again I find quite without any volition on my part that the characters are struggling to explain to each other, to teach each other, to get knowledge from each other that they need. And, generally speaking, in my pieces I've come to realize that the person at the end who wins tends to be the best learner.

Q: With that focus and effort do you have to struggle against didacticism in developing a play or do you finesse that sufficiently?

A: (laughs) Well, something about the dramatic mind is inherently . . . how do I say this? Argumentative? Divided against itself? The stuff that interests me, that I want to go learn about is stuff that I don't have a single opinion about. There's a conflict inherent in the nature of the subject. Which is why I felt that even though I think of my people as the movers, I had to honor the stayers as well. There are stayers among them too. It wasn't until I articulated the importance of staying and loyalty, as well as the importance of cutting loose and going, that the play really began to have its full life.