Go West, Young Man

By Richard Zoglin

How far d'ye have to go to get past everyone else?" asks Jim Newman, an Irish immigrant just a few years off the boat in the second decade of the 19th century. We've seen his type many times before: one of those restless individualists who helped settle the rapidly expanding American continent. Yet the trek he makes during more than 40 years--from Manhattan Island down the Ohio River Valley to St. Louis, Mo., and beyond--in Howard Korder's extraordinary new play, The Hollow Lands, leaves most of the romance behind. The journey is populated by criminals and charlatans and half-crazed messiahs; there are coldblooded shootings that go unpunished, families separated without even a pause for goodbye, dreams that always seem just off the map. "I have played my life out," says Newman near the end. "In pursuit of dust." Go west, young man, the play seems to say; you're doomed to it.

The Hollow Lands, having its premiere at the South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, Calif., is not your garden-variety revisionist history. Bleak and Brechtian in style, it has no overt political message; no easy, retroactive moralizing about the sins of our ancestors. Achieving the nation's "Manifest Destiny," it implies, was not a great quest or a great crime but a kind of communal neurosis, a manic need to chart the uncharted--an endeavor people in the play are constantly, fuzzily describing as "freedom." Yet those great white spaces of terra incognita on the map are being filled in faster than the maps can be redrawn, and the result is something like a mass nervous breakdown.

Korder (Search and Destroy, Boys' Life) has specialized in cynical, Mametesque comedy, but with The Hollow Lands he raises the stakes and instantly leaps to the front rank of American dramatists. It is a beautifully written work; Korder seems to have invented the very language of his 19th century characters--formalized yet colloquial, terse yet grandly poetic. "Shall we speak of profit?" urges Samuel Markham Hayes, the Pied Piper who lures Newman west. "You will see it fiftyfold, I guarantee it. Shall we tell of kings? Look into the glass, you will find the measure of one. Shall we dream of empires? We need not dream. Only reach out, sir. Reach out and close your fingers."

Director David Chambers has shaped Korder's sprawling scenes with a conductor's feel for the mix of noise and quiet, action and repose, and Ming Cho Lee has designed some of the most strikingly eccentric sets in recent memory, full of skewed angles and semiabstract swatches of color. Michael Stuhlbarg, as Newman, spans nearly half a century with utter conviction, and Mark Harelik fires up the stage as Hayes.

This is a big, unruly work--three hours long, with dozens of characters--and probably destined to be picked apart by critics more comfortable with the tidy contemporary dramas that win most of the awards these days (like Margaret Edson's Wit and Donald Margulies' Collected Stories, both also developed at the enterprising South Coast Rep). To be sure, The Hollow Lands wanders a bit uncertainly in its third act. But few plays are as confidently original as this one, as rich with ideas about the making of America, or as stimulating to watch unfold on the stage. Not a bad way to start a nation's new century.

--By Richard Zoglin