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Full Circle brings Charles Mee full circle

by Scott T. Cummings

For playwright Charles L. Mee and the American Repertory Theatre production of Full Circle, little Elián González could not have washed ashore at a better time. Mee's play, which hinges on a politically charged child-custody battle, joins Joe Orton's Loot in repertory at ART on February 11. But its world premiere came at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 1998, and that makes its uncanny parallels to the current international tug of war over six-year-old Elián another strange case of life imitating art.

If, once you've read about or seen Mee's play, it seems heady or abstruse, just think about the Elián affair -- the Cuban grandmamas on Capitol Hill, Elián's dad on Ted Koppel, the showcase visit to the Magic Kingdom (what could make a kid more instantly American than that?) -- and Full Circle will make perfect non-sense as a Cold War historical comedy starring an American socialite suggested by Pamela Harriman, a female firebrand borrowed from a Brueghel painting, and the postmodern East German playwright Heiner Müller.

Chuck Mee, as he is known by colleagues and friends, writes history plays. On a snowy day in Cambridge, he shares with me his dual perspective as playwright and historian. "So much of our theater and movies make us stupid and ill-prepared to live our lives because they seduce us into believing that human destiny is worked out only in the intimacy of one-on-one relationships. I am a big believer in Aristotle's remark that human beings are social animals. People don't exist apart from a society. They are deeply affected by their history, culture, gender, economics, and politics. To understand what a human being is, you have to see a human being in the world."

Born in 1938, Mee grew up in the Chicago suburb of Barrington. In the summer of 1953, he contracted polio and was immobilized for months. He chronicled his experience of the disease and its life-changing effects in his 1999 memoir A Nearly Normal Life. Polio may have cut short Mee's high-school football career, but it ignited a prodigious life of the mind. He went on to Harvard, where he majored in history and literature and wrote plays under the guidance of Archibald MacLeish and Robert Chapman.

"I came out of college," he explains, "with the intention of writing for the theater, and got all caught up in anti-Vietnam War activities which led to political arguments which led to writing about politics which led to writing about political history. Before I knew it, I was drawn into this public conversation about the history of the United States and its Constitution and the values that are put in jeopardy by an active internationalist foreign policy." On Mee's side, that "public conversation" included roughly a dozen books, including two on the origins of the Cold War, Meeting at Potsdam (1975) and The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana (1984).

Mee, who no longer writes history, had misgivings about it all along. "I'm glad I am out of it. I felt like a fraud all those years. First of all, I felt not adequately schooled as an historian. Second, it was for me not a satisfactory way of talking about the world. The basic assumption of history is that you are going to be able to formulate dispassionate statements about events that really make you want to scream and cry out and weep. I really think the theater is more my place because I can write about the world and not pretend that my view is dispassionate."

After getting sidetracked by politics in the 1960s, Mee resumed playwriting in the 1980s. His text for Martha Clarke's 1986 movement theater piece Vienna: Lusthaus drew early attention. He went on to write a series of politically inflected plays with such titles as The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem, The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador, and Another Person Is a Foreign Country. His work attracted some leading avant-garde directors: Anne Bogart, with whom he will develop a piece on Robert Rauschenberg this summer; Tina Landau, who directed the world premiere of Full Circle in Chicago; and Robert Woodruff, who heads up the ART production.

Along the way, Mee supported himself with work as an editor, including 15 years with Rebus, a health and medical publisher. He taught playwriting at Brown for two years and then, as he tells it, "it finally occurred to me to ask of life what I really wanted": a patron. He approached Richard B. Fisher, a dear old friend and investment banker who had "ascended to Olympian heights" at Morgan Stanley, to see whether he might want to start what Mee euphemistically refers to as "a playwriting company." Fisher and his wife, Jeanne Donovan Fisher, said yes. They provide the capital, Mee provides the labor.

This direct support has allowed Mee to give up his day job in order to concentrate on his unusual brand of American history play, one that avoids the easy comforts of a tidy narrative and instead captures the chaos and contradictions of historical process. Mee's texts comprise other texts. Many are based on a classic precursor, usually a Greek tragedy, that provides a point of departure and a shadow structure. His Orestes and The Trojan Women a Love Story, both derived from Euripides, have been performed in recent years by the ART's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. Big Love, Mee's variation on Aeschylus's The Suppliant Women, will receive its world premiere next month at Actors Theatre of Louisville's Humana Festival of New American Plays.

Mee's dialogue often incorporates passages from his wide-ranging reading and research. Full Circle draws snippets from the writings of Warren Buffett, Katharine Graham, Andy Warhol, and Georges Bataille, as well as Klaus Theweleit's Male Fantasies and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. "I look at this material as a historian does, that is, as evidence of the world we live in. As a playwright, it makes it hard for me to lie about it. I have to deal with it as stuff that cannot be fudged. I also think of it in the way that Max Ernst did when he made collages back at the end of World War I. He took the materials of the real world and rendered them as hallucination. There is something that I just love about taking real materials and putting them together so that it feels like a work of imagination and reality at the same time."

The foundation text for Full Circle is Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which was written during Brecht's exile in America during World War II. That, in turn, was inspired by the ancient Chinese legend of the chalk circle and its 1925 stage adaptation by the German poet Klabund. Mee changes the characters and updates the situation, appropriating Brechtian techniques and themes in a manner that offers as much critique as homage to the German master. "Here's this incredibly tough-minded cynical guy, Brecht," he argues, "and yet his utopian politics were built on a naive and sentimental view of what it is to be a human being."

As Mee puts it, "Full Circle is a play about the collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalism," an event that he neither celebrates or laments. The action begins in 1989 in East Berlin at a command performance of the Berliner Ensemble, the theater created for the repatriated Brecht in the early days of the Cold War. In the play, its current "slimeball artistic director" is Heiner Müller, the experimental playwright known for his dense, cryptic meditations on German history and his subversion of the conventions of plot, character, and dialogue. When the revolution in the streets spills into the theater, the aged Erich Honecker, head of the crumbling German Democratic Republic, and his young wife take flight, abandoning their baby to the care of a wealthy American tourist and a student radical. The effort to reclaim the child triggers a helter-skelter chase across the changing face of Germany that comes full circle when Müller, now an enemy of the people, is called upon as judge to determine the baby's true and rightful mother.

Robert Woodruff returns to ART to direct Full Circle, having mounted the troupe's stunning 1998 production of Brecht's In the Jungle of the Cities as well as an earlier ART Institute workshop of Mee's The Trojan Women a Love Story. When I meet with Woodruff one Friday before rehearsal, he admits that he had some hesitation about taking on Full Circle. "It is tearing down icons that I have held very close. I think that Brecht was the greatest theatrical mind of the first half of the 20th century, and Müller was the greatest in the second half. That covers a lot of ground. There was some difficulty for me in deciding if I wanted to dance on their graves."

As it turned out, once rehearsals got under way, it felt for Woodruff "more like fun with Bert and Heiner than stabbing them in the back. I think it is truly a brilliant adaptation just on the level of construction and sheer dramaturgy. It's really smart, and as broad a political satirical sketch as it is, it is also extremely subtle. It's funny, but the play also seems to be a journey of surrender -- of naïveté, idealism, and utopian vision. I think Chuck is more a realist than a fatalist, and as anti-utopian as the play is, I think it still cleaves to some image of a better thing, a greater society beyond capitalism."

That impulse takes on an unexpected resonance on the freezing cold day when I visit Full Circle rehearsals at the Episcopal Divinity School, across the street from Radcliffe Yard. In a basement room ringed on two sides by high windows overhead, a boisterous folk-wedding banquet scene is in progress, involving nearly two dozen actors and a bevy of crew and staff looking on. In the midst of the drunken revelry, a character steps up on a bench and shouts, "Let us pray that we find a third way/Neither communism nor capitalism/But a third way/Some middle ground/To get rich, like in the West/And to share like in the East/Because the choice that we are being given/This should not be our only choice."

At that point, something catches the corner of my eye. Overhead, outside, a dark amorphous mass leaning up against the window begins to move. It's a man rolling over in his sleep, a homeless man in a cheap sleeping bag patterned -- believe it or not -- after the American flag. Awakened, or so it seems, by the raucous goings-on inside, he crawls out into the cold, and over the next few minutes he pulls on a dirty, torn parka, rolls up his stars and stripes, gathers his things, and ambles off into the afternoon, hatless and gloveless, just as the "bride" inside is brandishing a "piece of the Berlin Wall" and saying, "Don't let anyone tell you/You can't change the way things are./It happens all the time."

The irony would not be lost on Chuck Mee.