HOUSE OF CORRECTION

The salvation of New York City these past few years is such an extraordinary and unanticipated event that it will take a decade or more before we can really appreciate the effect it is having on the nation’s cultural life. It is, as the Stalinists used to say, no accident that the artistic decadence of our time has been accompanied by the physical and civil decay that beset America’s cultural capital.

Nowhere is the city’s renaissance more evident than in the theater, both on and off-Broadway. For the first time in memory there are dozens of things to see — an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser called The Last Night of Ballyhoo is the latest to open — and there are dozens of promising offerings waiting in the wings, from flashy musicals like Steel Pier to a delightful little show I saw in New Haven a few weeks ago called The Triumph of Love.

This is a significant development because there cannot be a healthy American theater without a healthy New York. This statement may not sound controversial, but it is contrary to every piece of theatrical propaganda foisted on the American people for three decades now. In 1965, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts led to the so-called regional-theater boom; because there was available money, hundreds of venues opened up across the country. Indeed, never before in the history of any nation had any high art form been so democratized. The result is that there are now hundreds of theaters and festivals dedicated to the staging of new plays and revivals of great old plays. Sounds wonderful, no?

No. The regional theaters have, it is true, been a godsend for movie and television producers, for whom they are a federally subsidized farm team where young performers make their bones and get an agent before moving on to the big money. They have also led to employment in the thrilling profession of arts administration. But for the rest of us and for the theater in general, the story is rather more ambiguous. The growth of regional theater — deriving as it has from government money administered by backscratching panels at the federal, state, and local levels — has led to the nationwide imposition of a stifling cultural orthodoxy about what constitutes a good or important piece of theater.

The orthodoxy is so cliche-riddled by now that a list of its acceptable topics reads like a right-wing parody: racism and its parlous impact; homophobia and its parlous impact; capitalism and its parlous impact; the bourgeois family and its parlous impact. And for an author who might actually have something interesting or original to say, such hard-and-fast rules of playmaking can destroy the creative impulse outright.

That may well have been the case for Jonathan Reynolds, who, in two works from the late 1970s and early 1980s, gave every sign of being the most talented American playwright of his generation. One was a brilliant and sustained existential monologue called Yanks 3 Detroit 0 Top of the Seventh, about the agonies of an aging baseball pitcher in the midst of the almost impossible accomplishment of a perfect game. The other was a full-length, multi-character comedy called Geniuses, which I saw in 1983 and which remains the best contemporary American play I have seen in 25 years of theatergoing.

Set in the Philippines during and after a typhoon, Geniuses is nominally about a team of male screenwriters working on an American film epic (Reynolds worked on Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) trapped together in a bungalow with an ingenue whose presence sets off a series of sexual rivalties between them. Geniuses takes off so imaginatively in so many directions, from a hilariously incisive dissection of the Hemingwayobsessed writers of an older generation to the deal-making acumen of the supposedly dumb Hollywood blonde, that it is not surprising the play has never received the attention it deserves. Reynolds established themes and situations later used to lesser effect by the better-known David Mamet and David Rabe in Speed-the-Plow and Hurly Burly, respectively. Geniuses is not only the best play ever written about Hollywood — it may be the best piece of American writing about Hollywood altogether.

After Geniuses, Reynolds disappeared from the American theater, working on screenplays for indifferent comedies. Had he been lured from his true calling by the corrupt world he had so tellingly portrayed in his masterpiece? Apparently not, for judging by an astonishing new play called Stonewall Jackson’s House that is playing in a tiny theater five levels below the street just off Times Square, Reynolds was driven away from the theater by what George Orwell would have called its “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Written in what seems like white heat, Stonewall Jackson’s House is an inventive piece of political theater, but for the first 15 minutes, you are tempted to walk out in a huff. It begins with a black tour guide named LaWanda showing two couples — one Alabama white-trash bait salesmen, the other kindly Ohio farmers — through the plantation of the eponymous confederate general. The characters are poorly drawn caricatures, the writing wretched. LaWanda, we discover, is a 23-year-old crackhead so desperate to lead a better life that she decides she would be better off as a slave owned by the kindly Ohioans — as do the white-trash couple.

At this point, the lights go dark, and it turns out that what we have been watching is a play-within-aplay — a manuscript for a play, that is, which has been submitted for consideration to a regional theater company planning its upcoming season. And for the next 90 minutes, we watch characters argue about what we have just seen.

Oz, the company’s artistic director, wants to stage the play; he thinks it provocative. Helen, his actresswife, is appalled by his opinion, not least because the lead part is one she cannot play because she is white. A young black woman named Tracy, the company’s assistant director, declares it racist. Helen objects again: “I,” she says with a dramatic pause, “am a Jew,” which is supposed to be self-explanatory.

The play’s author, a young white man named Joe, defends it as a portrait of shattered lives desperate for direction and control. It can’t be racist, he says, because both the white-trash couple and the black tour guide want to become slaves. Amazingly, nobody objects to the thing because it’s lousy. Finally, it becomes clear to Oz that the play is unproduceable because it was written by a white man. If it were the work of an African-American, then at least there would be some protection from the charge of racism. And so, as the first act closes, Reynolds springs another surprise: The play was written by someone black. In fact, it was written by Tracy, the black assistant director whom we just heard condemning it for its racism. Joe, it turns out, is an actor she hired.

In Act Two, to paraphrase Snoopy, Reynolds ties it all together. Tracy is a black conservative and her play is intended to be an indictment of the welfare system that, she says, has kept blacks in servitude just as surely as slavery did. She blasts Oz and Helen for being Upper West Side liberals who don’t understand how paternalistic their views are. After a time, every single character on stage launches into a speech about how he or she has been victimized.

Tracy cannot prevail; not only are her views unacceptable for staging, but Helen decides Tracy must be driven from the theater altogether. Terrified of losing her place, she finally agrees to change the play. And in a scene directly parallel to the one with which Reynolds began, Tracy’s play is turned into the tale of a young black male tour guide named LaWaldo (played, in a stroke of gender- and race-neutral casting, by Helen) who praises Mrs. Stonewall Jackson for managing to survive her husband’s repeated acts of date rape and explains that the Civil War resulted from low male self-esteem. It wins the Pulitzer.

Reynolds may be trying to do too much here by mixing a highly literate political argument about affirmative action with a parody of bad modern theater, though structurally he is up to something ingenious. And while some of Tracy’s arguments seem rather didactic, God knows George Bernard Shaw can get pretty didactic as well. Indeed, Tracy so burns with conviction that she does put one in mind of Shaw’s great anti-capitalist heroine Major Barbara. And rather like Shaw, who gave the best lines in Major Barbara to his villain, Andrew Undershaft, Reynolds does put good counterarguments in the mouths of Tracy’s interrogators.

In truth, I don’t really know what to think of Stonewall Jackson’s House because I still can’t quite believe I saw it with my own eyes. It is the first politically conservative (or neoconservative) American play of my lifetime, and its author is a writer for whom I had immense respect 15 years before I knew he was an ideological compatriot. One thing is for sure: Of all the signs of cultural vitality New York’s renaissance has shown of late, the fact that the American Place Theatre would actually stage Stonewall Jackson’s House is the most unexpected and the most hopeful. And the fact that it has received favorable notices from both the New York Times and the Village Voice I can’t think very much about, because the cognitive dissonance will be so intense I fear it will lead to nervous collapse.

John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.