Theater: Home and Away Principia Scriptoriae

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Two young men, an American and a Latin American, have been jailed by the police of an unnamed country's rightist dictatorship. The crime: distribution of subversive leaflets. In their cell, they converse clumsily, united less by ideology than by a rapturous and surprisingly sophisticated passion for literature. Yet at every turn they misunderstand each other, responding to received images from each other's popular culture rather than to the actual person across the room. The American is a wandering would-be writer. He cheerily acknowledges that he knows no Spanish and thus has not even read the flyers they handed out. It hardly matters, he explains, because he knew what was meant--sort of. In fact, his politics are so ill formed, so much a product of simple adolescent rebellion, that he might have endorsed any radical cause. His alternately amused and annoyed companion is, it turns out, the author of the leaflets, an Oxbridge-educated scion of a prominent family who has joined the opposition. He admits that his people are ignorant, that his country does not feel like home. Even so, he felt honor bound to come back and fight.

That encounter, which leads to brutal police beatings for both, takes place in 1970. Fifteen years later, the men meet again, this time at a diplomatic session between the same country's newly installed left-wing dictatorship and an international human rights group. The visitors are pleading for the release of an imprisoned poet who had served the former right-wing regime as its Ambassador to Spain. The air is abuzz with debate about the competing political and aesthetic duties of the writer, the distinction between artistic merit and moral virtue and the uneasy relations between the industrial nations and the emerging Third World, where freedom and tolerance are often viewed as unaffordable luxuries.

These two acts make up Principia Scriptoriae, a passionate, enlightened and altogether admirable play by Richard Nelson. Now being performed off-Broadway, it has been accorded a rare honor for an American play: Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company will produce it in London this fall. The cumbersome title is a punning Latinate reference to the rules for sound literary construction and the morals that artists ought to live by. Yet Nelson focuses on two characters who are not artists, merely intelligent men. The narrative is less concerned with the fate of the poet than with their enduring misunderstanding and mistrust.

The American (Anthony Heald) has failed to sort out the conflicting impulses of his roles as observer, returning revolutionary, reunited friend and working journalist. His former cellmate (Joe Urla) pecks away at poetry but works primarily for a malign, fanatical government minister. In rich and subtle performances, the opponents lacerate each other with unwelcome truths as they strive to rekindle affection. Then, in a finely calibrated and powerful final scene that shifts back to 1970, at what the two believed would be the hour of their death, Nelson makes their antagonism all the sadder. As they quake, bound and blindfolded in terror, "hugging" by pressing their backs together, he shows how simple and intense their devotion was when they had only each other and not the world to comprehend.