Audiences See a Troubling Reflection : At Oregon’s Shakespeare Festival, ‘God’s Country’ focuses on neo-Nazism both on and off stage

ASHLAND, Ore. —  At this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival in this bucolic town, amid performances of “Comedy of Errors” and “Henry V,” theatergoers are being unnerved by a distressing play about the rise of neo-Nazism in the Pacific Northwest.

Steven Dietz’s “God’s Country”--a mix of surrealism and headline news--is a fistful of hate made in the U.S.A. It focuses on the amazing one-year rise, and fall, of The Order, a small band of racists responsible for the nation’s most successful crime spree in history and the murder of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg. The docudrama is as urgent as a baying street-corner newspaper boy.

“It’s a matter of grabbing the audience and not allowing them to get comfortable,” Dietz explains during a telephone interview from his home in Minneapolis. “I enjoy rollicking musicals just like the next person. The theater can be a wonderful escape. But the theater is also a necessary place for a society to confront itself.”

The Order, like a number of other supremacist groups, espoused a twisted view of Christianity--the “Identity Doctrine”--that non-Jewish Caucasians were the descendants of the 12 tribes of Israel and God’s chosen people. The group set out to establish an Aryan republic in the Pacific Northwest.

Many members of The Order were convicted of federal racketeering charges after committing numerous armed robberies. (They netted $3.6 million during an armored-car heist near Ukiah, Calif.) No member faced murder charges for Berg’s killing, but a few were indicted for “violating Alan Berg’s civil rights by killing him,” as one actor says in the play. The cantankerous Jewish radio personality was riddled with automatic-weapon bullets as he stepped out of his car on the evening of June 18, 1984.

The play, in Ashland through Sept. 16, is gaining worldwide attention. “God’s Country” premiered two years ago in Seattle, where The Order’s founding father, Robert Jay Mathews, was killed during a standoff with the FBI in 1984. The piece was also presented by the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Ky. And on Aug. 21, “God’s Country” will open in Johannesburg, South Africa, before making its way to Pretoria--both presented by the Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal.

Jerry Turner, artistic director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, heard about “God’s Country” from actors involved with the play’s Seattle production. He examined the text, which read like a living newspaper. But Turner had reservations about producing “God’s Country” in Ashland. The play, which spills out into the audience, is “on the edge of something dangerous,” he says.

“I had an uneasy feeling that the theme of the play--the Nazi ritual--was pornographic for the Nazis. You might do more harm than good. But I don’t feel that way anymore.”

Instead, Turner decided the play’s message of growing racism in the Pacific Northwest was vital to his audience.

“It’s very powerful stuff. It’s a dynamic play. It’s a docudrama, and we haven’t done one of those for a long time. It was a change of pace for us. The theater can have a reflection on the immediate times, as well as the universal appeal.”

“God’s Country,” though, isn’t always a sellout in Ashland. But Turner doesn’t regret selecting the play for this season.

“A part of that has to do with its form,” he says. “It’s about neo-Nazis. “It’s ugly . . . (but) I wouldn’t have done anything else.”

It is a timely piece of theater, coming during a period when racial incidents are flaring up around the country, from New York City’s Bensonhurst to the Pacific Northwest--birthplace of The Order and home to many like-minded groups. Accounts of racial attacks or threats appear virtually every day in newspapers in Portland and Seattle.

Even in this picturesque southern Oregon hamlet replete with art galleries and coffee shops, right-wing skinheads are suspected of randomly killing household pets. Not far from town, the bodies of three cats--one hanged, one beheaded, one mutilated--were found recently.

“They have to kill something in order to be able to call themselves true warriors,” explains Michael Kevin, director of the Ashland production. “An apartment in town had all of its cats disappear in one fell swoop. It’s horrific to think it’s right in your back yard.

“It’s very rare in any theater, particularly at this Shakespeare festival, to be involved in a piece this contemporary and this vital for everyone to see,” Kevin says. “We all have racism in us to some extent. This makes you look at the thin line between who you are and who these people are.”

Each performance of “God’s Country” wraps up with a 20-minute discussion between the audience and performers, designed to ease the play’s intensity.

“The discussions have been very lively,” said Turner. “Now we consider them a part of the performance. The actors wanted to bring it back to some rational discussion, a sharing of information and feelings. It’s a way of coming back to earth. The image of audiences leaving at the end of that play and just dissipating was not comfortable for us.”

The fiery play draws applause from some, but its subject matter leads others to walk out mid-performance. One Ashland hotel manager reported that a group of 40 East Coast tourists refused to see the performance, though they had already paid for tickets.

“It’s like watching the 6 o’clock news,” wrote one Ashland critic. “You wish you could turn it off, but you can’t.”

Some critics have blasted Dietz for his unconventional style--narrating scenes instead of acting them, such as Berg’s murder. Others are convinced “God’s Country” is a potent, and compelling, statement of our times.

The play is ostensibly set in a Seattle courtroom during the trials of members of The Order. But its focus extends beyond the men’s jejune ideology; Dietz takes his audience into the hearts and homes of America, where racism is born and bred. A farmer losing his land needs an enemy to blame; a father warns his son to be wary of those with a different shade of skin, slurring those who are changing the color of America. The casual acceptance of racism, an off-color joke or two rewarded with polite guffaws, gives way to extremist ideology. Attitudes give way to action.

“We’re living in a culture in chaos right now, a culture whose moral barometer is bouncing all over the place,” says the 32-year-old Dietz. “We’re not the most forward-thinking country on Earth anymore. We’re not the richest country. Instead, we’re watching countries we used to consider backwards make stunning steps forward. That’s sending shock waves through this country.

“People are trying to deal with a world that’s changing faster than they are able to, and it comes down to blame. (They say) ‘Let’s blame the blacks, the Hispanics, the gays. We let them in and they’ve made our country weak! Let’s blame the artists for loosening our moral fiber.’ Those (racists) are, in a frightening way, at the right place in our history. What frightens me is that so often we just see the tip of the iceberg.”

Dietz grew up in Denver listening to Berg, the sardonic talk-show host who both defended the First Amendment rights of the right-wingers to speak out and denounced their beliefs. It was this early interest that initially prompted Dietz to follow Berg’s case.

“He struck me as an amazing character and an amazing story. He had the ability to be both benevolent and belligerent in the same breath. The only mistake you didn’t want to make with Alan Berg was to call him up and agree with him. I called him once and agreed with him and I got destroyed: ‘You are contributing nothing at all!’ ”

In Seattle, where “God’s Country” premiered at A Contemporary Theater in the summer of 1988, theater officials were worried that the play might draw a violent response from white supremacists. An undercover police officer was stationed in the theater during every performance. Fortunately, no incidents occurred. White supremacists did not publicly comment on the play. But it did get the attention of the national press, which led to the upcoming presentation in South Africa.

A South African actress touring the United States heard a report about the play on National Public Radio. She phoned Dietz and asked him for a copy of the script, which he promptly mailed her. He heard nothing again until a year later, when he received a letter from Peter Terry, assistant artistic director for the South African theater where the play will be presented.

In the letter, Terry told Dietz that “God’s Country” speaks of neo-Nazism in a voice “more powerful, we feel, than any locally written play about our own brand of thuggery.”

In addition, Terry wrote, “there is a very strong neo-Nazi movement in South Africa. One of their acolytes recently murdered eight black people in a shotgun spree right outside the office I sit in as I write to you. The subsequent trial and multiple death sentences fueled the fires of political and racial tension that characterizes this country at present. I then read the play and was extremely impressed with it, both as a play and as a piece of theater with enormous resonance for South African audiences.”

The young and relatively unknown playwright was taken aback with Terry’s request to perform the play abroad.

“I was just dumbfounded,” Dietz said, “to think a specific story in the United States would ripple out that far. I was shocked and amazed.”

Playing the parts of virulent racists in “God’s Country” has been emotionally and physically draining for the Ashland performers: 12 actors are required to portray 41 roles. The play does not follow dramatic convention of character development, and there isn’t a beginning, middle or end. “God’s Country” is a collage of court records, wire stories and racist rituals--linked by surrealistic vignettes depicting xenophobic madness and the seeds of the Holocaust.

Dietz hopes to jar theater goers into an awareness of jingoistic extremists--and hidden hates buried in their own hearts. Director Kevin employs much sound and fury to reach this end. There’s a burning cross, cultlike incantations, and the waving around of semi-automatic weapons. Big American flags, as well as rock music and clever lighting effects, produce a hypnotic aura.

“Part of the power of showing this to a group of people is to not only talk about (these groups), but to convey their ability to be seductive and to arouse,” Dietz says. “No matter what your politics are, when you hear that music and see that American flag, you have a visceral response. Having a character come on stage and say, ‘These people are bad, don’t be like them,’ you’re not learning anything.”

The play wraps up with U2’s song “In God’s Country” rumbling through the theater, and Mathews, played by Remi Sandri, screaming, “The Order lives!” The shadow of a cross is cast on a huge U.S. flag as a boy wearing camouflage fatigues and a Nazi armband recites the Pledge of Allegiance. In Ashland, there is no curtain call.

“We didn’t want to give a signal to the audience that the play was over. The story lives on,” Dietz says. “When people leave the theater, it cannot be with a sense that justice was served, the bad guys were caught. It’s got to send people back to their communities knowing (the problem) is in your community. It’s a part of your life.”