Omnium Gatherum

After the horror of 9/11, artists, like everyone else, were stunned. Then, after a period of silence, those in creative fields began working out their grief through their art.

COURTESY PHOTO Michael Strange, Miriam Schroetter, Katie Pankow

Anne Nelson's play, "The Guys" was one of the first theatrical responses, playing offoff Broadway in early 2002, months after the attack. (The two-person play went on to become a movie.)

"Omnium Gatherum," written by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gerstern-Vassilaros, followed, playing off-Broadway the fall of the following year.

It takes place at the Manhattan condo of Suzi, a Martha-Stewart type. She's holding a dinner party, and as the play's title suggests, it's a miscellaneous collection of people. All seven characters are types: there's a Tom Clancy type, an insufferable Englishman Christopher Hitchens type, a firefighter, a token African-American woman who's a minister, an ardent feminist and vegan, and an Arab. Each one argues his or her own point of view.

Actors at Florida Gulf Coast University's Theatre Lab have just opened a student production of "Omnium Gatherum." It runs through April 20.

"One of the more important elements of this production for me was looking at the relationships between these different people and seeing how these relationships build and change, how alliances form and break, through the process of the evening," says director Stuart Brown.

Brown isn't on the faculty of FGCU. He's president of Chaos Productions, Inc., a Fort Myers video production company, and has a background in theater and film.

"The play had been selected by another member of the faculty, who for whatever reason, was not able to direct it. And so Barry Cavin, the chair of the department, contacted me and asked me if I was willing to direct the show," Brown says.

He readily agreed, though he wasn't sure how the students would perform such a complex, mature play. The dialogue is dense and sophisticated. (Think "My Dinner With Andre" with quadruple the actors.)

"It's incredibly verbal, a very talk-y play," Brown explains. "Many of the characters are kind of analogs of contemporary figures. The hostess is kind of a Martha Stewart character who became a mogul. There's a British intellectual, a kind of Christopher Hitchens, a writer who's kind of Tom Clancy or Clive Custer. Not the people themselves, but their type.

"But they are all people who are all at the peak of their career, they're people you could meet today and are alive today. But it's tough for a 20-year-old theater student to really hook into a character like Martha Stewart. Medea or Lady Macbeth, a huge tragic figure, you can get your arms around easier, than a character like Martha Stewart. It's a big challenge for a young actor to do.

"We spent a great deal of time working on finding choices and finding ways into these characters, for the kids in the play."

Initially, Brown had his doubts.

"I have to say, that when I first read the script, I thought, 'This is tough stuff for college kids. It's tough stuff for adult actors who have the life experience!' These kids are 20 years old. I wasn't sure how close they were able to approach the play with them. I have to tell you that they're a fabulous cast, they have really surprised me with all the things they're capable of."

The play, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2004, can be difficult to stage, because, for the most part, the characters sit at a dinner table. Brown worked around that by using an oval table, and staging the play in what's called an alley; the audience sits on either side of the actors, so attendees look through the set and see the audience on the other side of the actors. Brown didn't want to have a long table with all the actors lined up on one side, like a panel discussion.

"I saw photos of productions that were done like that, and that had no appeal to me," he says. "It looked like the Last Supper. It's a hard way for the actors to interrelate. We settled on an oval table, which is not quite round, but it's also not a panel discussion.

"The play was a pretty immediate response right after 9/11 to those events, and people were really struggling with that whole experience and trying to find meaning, make sense out of what was going on. I think the play grew out of that desire on the part of many Americans to find some understanding of those events."

Brown took some liberties with the play's ending.

"Here we are, six years since 9/ll, the attacks, and we're still here and we're still struggling with it," he says. "I think we know a lot more and understand a lot more about our relationship with the Muslim world than we did at the time of the attacks. The ending of the play was originally written that there's a series of explosions, and one big white explosion, almost as if a nuclear bomb goes off. That ending didn't work.

"An apocalyptic time in 2002, for us, that ending might have made sense. But my feeling is, here we are in 2008, and we haven't resolved this issue, and we're still having a conversation about it as a nation. To me, it was too simplistic to blow the play up at the end. So we changed it, without changing any of the dialogue. We did make some changes in the way that the play ends, because it's being produced in our time, and it was written in that time. That's one of the interesting things about seeing a play as opposed to just reading it."

He recommends viewers read a play prior to seeing it performed, so they understand what choices were made by the production team.

"Some playwrights go on and on with huge descriptions," he says. "Some are very, very spare. Shakespeare says, 'exit' and 'enter,' and that's all you get. George Bernard Shaw was famous for pages and pages of descriptions of the set; people say he was a great playwright but a horrible set designer.

"If you read the play before you go in, then you are able to more fully appreciate the choices that have been made by the director and cast and designer. Theater is a collective art. And what you're seeing is the product, the creative energy of a whole team of people.

"And if all goes well, then what we're doing enhances the work that was there from the playwright in the beginning, but also makes this production a specific production in this time, in this place, with this cast, with this budget, with these actors."

if you go

>> What: "Omnium Gatherum"

>> When: 8 p.m. Wed.-Sat. and 2 p.m. Sunday through April 20

>> Where: Theatre Lab at the Arts Complex at Florida Gulf Coast University, 10501 FGCU Blvd. South, Fort Myers

>> Cost: $10 ($5 for FGCU students, faculty and staff with valid ID)

>> Information: Call 590-7268