Playwright: Simon Stephens. Playwright: David Edgar. At: Pegasus Players,
1145 W. Wilson ( Truman College ) . Phone: 773-878-9761; $25. Runs through: Nov. 16
British author David Edgar is among the few successful English language playwrights who are defiantly and obsessively political. In Continental Divide, composed of two full-length plays, he turns his piercing gaze on the soul-sucking gamesmanship of the American electoral process in which 'the choice you sometimes face ( is ) between your political beliefs and the principles upon which you base your conduct,' as one character sums it up. You can count on Edgar to state his thesis flat-out.
The plays portray a governor's race in a Western state much like California. Each play fills in part of the backstory of the other, with just enough additional content to stand alone. Mothers Against introduces Republican candidate Sheldon Vine, the son of a late multi-term senator and lumber fortune heir. Sheldon is the kind of liberal Republican the real world hasn't seen in 30 years, intent on running an honorable campaign. But when his poling numbers start to rise, his advisors—among them his closeted brother—urge him to attack using new-found dirt about their opponent.
The Democrat is popular state senator Rebecca McKeene, a one-time radical ( think Tom Hayden ) steadily shifting to the right and delighted to rationalize the shift. The campaign is hers to lose rather than Sheldon's to win. The new-found dirt has to do with an incident in her 1970's radical political past, and in Daughters of the Revolution we learn the history of this event through the eyes of Michael Bern, her one-time radical colleague and now a college professor. While Mothers Against is an examination of the clinical calculations of hardball politics and how far honor will hold, Daughters of the Revolution very much is a quest about the failure of revolutionary movements in the United States, and the costs of personal and political betrayal.
Temperamentally the two plays are excellent contrasting companion pieces that share inherent challenges to successful production. First and foremost Edgar is a didactic playwright. His plays preach and teach no matter how entertaining and stylish they may be, no matter how intelligent and penetrating his observations. Indeed, his plays are too dense with intelligence and the detailed mechanics of political campaigns, and all at the expense of creating full-blooded characters. Inevitably, Edgar's people are stand-ins for positions and points-of-view as Edgar is his own Devil's advocate. You easily could take 20 minutes out of each play without short-changing a character or derailing the central storyline. Daughters of the Revolution, for example, has an amusing but unnecessary scene of the tree-naming rituals of eco-terrorists in a redwood forest, followed immediately by nearly equal time given to a loony white-supremacist terrorist. Edgar's theatrical sense sustains this material, but objectively one says 'This could be cut.'
Under director Alex Levy, Pegasus Players takes on this dense material with a large and mostly first-rate cast, several of whom appear in different roles in both plays. Timothy Hughes as Sheldon Vines and Steve Ratcliff as Michael Berns are quite on top of their big roles and fill them with a great deal of dimension. Karin McKie deliciously channels a young Angela Lansbury at her hard-edged best in different roles in each play. Tien Doman neatly handles different roles and distinctly different looks in each play. Paul Meyer as Sheldon's brother and Ron Quade as his campaign manager provide edgy support. The shows look good, too, on Tim Mann's deep, wide, stone-and-plank set lit by Denise Karczewski.
By any measure, the two plays of Continental Divide make a very big show, and a well-done production. Your enjoyment of it may depend on whether or not you're a serious political junkie and/or wax nostalgic for 1970s revolutionary rhetoric.