Divided we stand
David Edgar's two-part look at American politics takes a long time to go a short way.

By Robert Avila

Everything that one feels about this country is, or ought to be, conditioned by the awareness of American power: of America as the arch-imperium of the planet, holding man's biological as well as his historical future in its King Kong paws.

Susan Sontag, "What's Happening in America" (1966)

AN ILLEGAL COLONIAL war, a mass movement rising against it, a menacing expansion of the national security state, the Federal Bureau of Investigation spying on protesters, the trampling of the Bill of Rights – it's easy these days to get a sense of history repeating itself. After the above-quoted lines, Susan Sontag goes on to skewer 1966 as a year that saw a movie star become "the new daddy of California" and John Wayne "chawing spareribs" in a Texan White House, calling it indicative of "pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was describing" in the 1920s. But at the time she was writing, the nation had entered a period of crisis that made life as usual, and therefore politics as usual, impossible for millions of Americans. America had always ridden a wild and brutal streak of "manifest destiny," but the difference in 1966 was simply that, given its now world-historic force, neither Americans nor the world could afford it any longer. In this sense alone (not to mention the synchronicity in the occupancy of state and national capitals), it's 1966 all over again, only worse.

But, in the same sense, British playwright David Edgar's ambitious two-play cycle, Continental Divide, parties like its 1999 (i.e., four years ago). Exploring the contemporary American political landscape from the vantage point of the '60s generation now come of age as the establishment, Mothers Against and Daughters of the Revolution are built around the final days of a gubernatorial race in an unnamed Western state. Together they unravel a kind of incestuous baby-boomer family drama in a network of former New Left leaders and lovers crisscrossing the current political spectrum. And yet, in the recycling of formulas and themes ultimately friendly to the status quo, neither play captures nor meaningfully addresses the urgency of the present moment.

Mothers Against takes us inside the campaign headquarters of Republican challenger Sheldon Vine (Bill Geisslinger), which is to say inside his redwood-shrouded home, comfortably furnished in gaudy tribute to pioneer rusticity (the Vines are timber men) and equipped with the obligatory mock-debating set. The house also holds a traditional family melodrama, sparked by the unexpected arrival of the Vines' eco-warrior daughter, Deborah (Christine Williams) – an "eco-terrorist" in the casual parlance of her father's milieu, but either way a humorless caricature.

Meanwhile, the fairly static set (in sharp contrast to the vibrant scene-shifting in Daughters) conveys a bit of the closeness of those smoky back rooms of yesteryear, especially as it fills with an assortment of even less-congenial political types, including the ever snide campaign manager (Michael Elich), the black conservative (Derrick Lee Weeden), an Ann Coulter-like character (Susannah Schulman), and the icy candidate's wife (Robynn Rodriguez).

Wielding expository dialogue sheathed in thin humor, the characters actually tell us little we don't already know. Even without widespread exposés of modern political campaigns on-screen and in print, the hucksterism of American politics would be all too obvious. Most understand that candidates are largely products sold to us by professionals. In the small and suffocating world of Mothers Against, the calculations of political salesmen get an unnecessary unveiling, while the familiar tension between maintaining one's principles and winning power substitutes for any serious challenge (rebel daughter Deborah notwithstanding) to the nature and legitimacy of the system.

From the consummate insiders of Mothers Against, Daughters of the Revolution leads both outward into the world – including the old-growth forest, where environmental activists roost in treetops – and back in time, to the radical fringes of the 1960s. Yet it, too, winds up self-absorbed, more interested in the mistrust and betrayal among former allies than in any serious opposition to the status quo.

The plot unfolds like a noir thriller: With the release of his FBI file, radical prof Michael Bern (a sympathetic Terry Layman) realizes an old political associate must have turned informer. Bern once belonged to a militant underground organization allied with the Black Panthers called Bad Moon Rising (clearly modeled on the Weather Underground) and has a past to hide, especially as a dream job hangs in the balance. So he visits his old comrades one by one in search of the snitch, leading him into the center of the gubernatorial campaign of the Democratic incumbent, Rebecca McKeene (Melissa Smith).

If the noir plotline, redolent of paranoid individualism, already serves as a subtle indictment of the communitarian ideals of Bern's youth, his rounds-making generally underscores his isolation. Although he insists on his commitment to social justice (in word and deed), the solidarities of the past are hopelessly fractured, and the play is at least as hard on the inconsistencies and contradictions of the revolutionary left as Mothers Against is on the political right.

Edgar, who has done much to revive political theater on the English stage, is a rapt observer of American politics and conducted numerous interviews with political animals of various stripes in developing his scripts. The surprise is that after six hours of flamboyant political and historical excavation, we are left with so little of an impression. Strong performances across the large cast and director Tony Taccone's nimble staging mean those hours are far from grueling, but their peaks and frustrations never add up to much of consequence.

Maybe it's because it's difficult to forget that the same system that sells us candidates also sells us wars. If the environmental activists of Daughters come across as cartoony and naive, their politics at least recognize the stakes; on the other hand, survival of the species is something the political system as such is incapable of seriously contemplating, let alone prioritizing, since its main function, the exercise and expansion of power, runs in precisely the opposite direction. If the real enemy is still, as Sontag insisted, American imperial power, Continental Divide hardly accounts for it – the only evidence the federal government exists is a photocopy of an outdated FBI file (which Bern leaves behind in a final act of therapeutic self-liberation).

Despite its present-day setting and meticulous attention to detail, Continental Divide seems of another era, albeit one only recently passed. The attempt to digest the legacy of the '60s places it, ambivalently, somewhere between the narrow pragmatism of political insiders and the ideals of outsiders dismissed by their counterparts as "utopian," if not simply subversive. The compromise reached by the end of Daughters, however, wrings only small change from the system, while preserving more fundamental change for some future constellation of political forces. This tempered, establishment idealism ironically leaves Continental Divide emphasizing politics as usual at a moment that makes it, once again, impossible.

'Continental Divide: 'Mothers Against' and 'Daughters of the Revolution' ' runs through Dec. 28, Berkeley Rep's Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk. $10-$55. (510) 647-2949, www.berkeleyrep.org. See Stage listings for shows and times.