New York theater takes on world history

I've been learning a lot at the theater lately, but please don't run away.

Suddenly, or so it seems, we're seeing lots of plays and musicals that, in varying ways and with varying success, end up teaching us world history.

Some - for example, "The Great Game: Afghanistan" - specifically want to sit us down and help us understand what is happening in that complicated, war-torn country. But most playwrights set out with the same intentions they always have had: to engage, to entertain, ideally to enlighten.

And theater, of course, is generally agreed to be a learning experience. As stuffy as that may sound, this is meant to be a good thing. What we usually learn, however, involves the complexity of the human psyche and the power of culture to speak to us in deeper, more mysterious places than can be reached in everyday life.

How odd, then, that I've been walking out of so many plays - even imperfect ones - excited by new information, or at least new thoughts, about history, frequently our own.

On one level, "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" is an irreverent, bratty rock musical about our seventh president as a baby rock star who loves his tight jeans and a sociopath who loves his big gun. Embedded in the Wild West satire, however, are serious questions about the importance of charisma in the selection of American leaders and the justifications our forebears used to grab land in the fancy name of Manifest Destiny.

In most of the messy, crazy-ambitious "A Free Man of Color" at the Lincoln Center Theater, playwright John Guare and director George C. Wolfe are unable to balance their frivolous Restoration style with the sober racial history of New Orleans and Haiti in the early 19th century. But finally, in the gripping final half-hour, these artists taught me more about the tragic significance of the Louisiana Purchase than I ever learned in school.

Anne Cattaneo, dramaturge (essentially, literary manager) of the theater, audibly winces when I say how much the play taught me. But I learned much about how the greed and bigotry of Spain, France and Thomas Jefferson's America from 1801 to 1803 affected and is still affecting the fates of Haiti and New Orleans.

"None of the authors I know say they are teaching anybody anything," she says, and I believe her. "I think they get curious about something - in John's case, a certain moment in American history. They investigate to see where it leads, then say 'Look at what I find interesting' That's what people respond to."

If that is always true, why are there so many plays with historical context right now? "Well, since I work at Lincoln Center Theater, I'd like to say it's because of the influence of 'The Coast of Utopia.' " She refers to Tom Stoppard's brilliant 12-hour trilogy about intellectual and political thought before the Russian Revolution. The British playwright wrote it in 2002, but the monster was a huge surprise success at Lincoln Center in 2006.

"We were astonished," she says, "that something as obscure as 19th century Russian history was such an emotional thing. But I think curious and adventurous people are interested in things that matter to what's going on in the world."

Not everything we're learning is quite so serious. "Long Story Short," written and performed by comedian-satirist Colin Quinn (and directed by Jerry Seinfeld), condenses centuries of fallen empires into 75 minutes of shrewd psycho-political history. Despite the silly connections between Antigone and Snooki, Quinn makes smart conceptual leaps from antiquity to a place awfully close to our own.

In a country where more and more people get their news from Jon Stewart, is it really so odd to get our world history from Colin Quinn?

In "The Scottsboro Boys" (which closed last Sunday), we learn the true story of a '30s racial injustice told in the notorious style of a minstrel show. Everything about the production was first-rate, but predictable, as if the storytellers (score by John Kander and Fred Ebb, direction by Susan Stroman) could not push their good intentions into danger zones of revelation.

In "The Pitmen Painters" (which also closed last Sunday), British playwright Lee Hall ("Billy Elliot") tells the true story of untrained miners who became a celebrated art group in the '30s. The paintings are an education in themselves. Instead of firing up what should be a compelling chunk of art and social history, however, Hall weighed it down with dull exchanges and repetitious statements about the meaning of art.

I'm still thinking about "The Human Scale," which had a limited run Off-Broadway this fall. Written and performed by Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, the play about Israel and Gaza used a lecture/demonstration form to explain a tragedy so intractable and raw that crises blur and defy rational conversation. Wright described the play to me as "nonfiction theater," which sounds like a contradiction but haunts like art.

"The Great Game: Afghanistan" places itself clearly between nonfiction and theater. The 12-play, three-evening British import (which closes Sunday night at New York University's Skirball Center) uses imaginary stories and real history to explain the English, Russian and American involvement in the country from 1842 to the present.

I was only able to see the final third, which begins in 1996, and found the work rigorous and illuminating but uneven and surprisingly sentimental. But Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle Theatre in London, makes a strong case for the importance of experiencing the whole work, preferably in a single 12-hour day.

"After all," he told me, "people are losing their lives. The least we can do is give up a day and make a commitment to understand the most important issue in the world." Asked if he might not have reached more people with a shorter work, he said, "We might reach more people, but I don't think we would reach people as well."

Kent sees his company as "part of journalism, part of theater and part of the education system." But why bother with the theater part? "Unlike with television or newspapers, people in the theater can't switch off or turn the page. People come together and sit together. They take in information in a communal way and empathize - put themselves in other peoples' shoes - together."

He pointed out that Shakespeare did history plays. But it's the drama, not his manipulation of history, that lives on.