Continental drift

I AM – forgive me – forever hopeful, an aggravating quirk that makes me easy prey for anyone selling something thus related. And of course the joint Oregon Shakespeare Festival-Berkeley Repertory Theatre Continental Divide project broke through my defenses, despite the generally mediocre reviews it received last February, when first staged. With eight months to work on problems, there was, I felt, ample time to shore up the project.

I entered the Roda Theatre last month not just hoping for the best, but needing the best, too. Because in the eight months since Mothers Against and Daughters of the Revolution debuted in Ashland, Ore., our world has been dramatically altered. And what does that have to do with Continental Divide? Well, where else but art are we to turn to find human truths necessary to guide us from daybreak to sunset? Certainly – Matt Gonzalez notwithstanding – we can't expect to find them bursting forth from the same stinking congressional halls that have led the country into war and given it the USA PATRIOT Act. I don't know how anyone else copes, but art – theater in particular – plays a big role in my world.

Three weeks ago I watched embedded reporters riding with police squads as they chased down opponents of globalization who were shot with wooden or rubber bullets, beaten, arrested, and jailed. The action took place in Miami, not Baghdad, and when history looks back to see what "we learned," it won't say a word about Miami. But the counterhistory, found in whispers, welts, scars, and someday, I'm sure, in art, will note the occasion and point to the PATRIOT Act.

And what does Continental Divide have to do with all this? Well, during the 1980s I survived on a steady diet of the Eureka Theatre, where Tony Taccone and Lorri Holt were principals. Their presence meant that I should expect strong work. And early in the next decade, both were involved with Kushner's Angels in America, a towering, transforming, liberating piece of theater whose unique qualities include an implicit belief, no matter how torn and fragile, that an essential good lurks somewhere in the corners of humanity's heart. Holt wrote about Continental Divide in the October 2003 issue of American Theater Magazine – an interesting and instructive piece that quotes Taccone a number of times. Perhaps the forest was being obscured by a tree or two when he said, "[Political consultants are] engaged in the real world, they're engaged in a belief system that absolutely, every day, has to invest in the hypothesis that you can make a difference."

But he also made statements like this: "I've come to think that politicians are the last place where any real change is going to come from, because of the structure of the world now. I think that to get elected now you are so entrenched…. Obviously that's not inspiring, but I do think it's absolutely the contradiction we all feel."

I couldn't agree more with this sentiment, but I didn't feel it much on opening night. It wasn't just that mad-dog political consultants have been old news since Lee Atwater, that the phrase "compromised politicians" is an oxymoron, and that opening any show with Jimi Hendrix playing "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock is a cliché of such proportion as to serve as a disclaimer. I used to think I knew what needed to be done about the world we find ourselves in. I no longer think that – which is probably why artistic magic means more to me than ever before. And if magic is in short supply, then how about Utopia? In Kushner's essay "A Socialism of the Skin (Liberation Baby)," he quotes Oscar Wilde saying, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing." The plays I saw were heavy on chattering hacks and – what's the fashionable word, "back-enders"? – from the '60s, but Utopia wasn't on the map. The glance was certainly worthwhile, but I can't say much more than that.

J.H. Thompkins