In some respects, the decision to build an entire Plan-B Theatre season around the works of a 31-year-old Utah playwright appears unprecedentedly bold, perhaps even extraordinarily risky.

However, Plan-B’s visibility and reputation have increasingly been built upon works of original voice, always transcending local and national borders when its comes to the contemporary problems and challenges of our individual and collective selves.

Therefore, creating the 2008-2009 season around the world premiere works of resident playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett made perfect sense for Jerry Rapier, producing director, and Cheryl Ann Cluff, Plan-B’s managing director.

“Really, it all sort of just fell into place,” Rapier explains. Bennett already was slated to do the live radio play based on Frankenstein for Halloween as well as a script deconstructing the myth of Leonardo da Vinci. Meanwhile, Bennett’s “Block 8,” set during World War II in the Topaz, Utah internment camp for Japanese-Americans, had been slotted for the following season but amid a national election campaign where the issue of race figures predominantly, Plan-B’s directors decided that the timing was right to bring forward his play into the current season.

Bennett’s metaphysically spiritual voice shades the gutsy realism of his plays with a sincerely sounding lyricism – hopeful and loving at times but also stark and urgent at some moments. And, as a critic, I can appreciate the significance of a writer who channels familiar territory into contemporary expressions that precisely put timely problems and challenges before his audiences.

Furthermore, Plan-B’s selection of Bennett, a native of the state who earned his bachelor’s degree in theater arts at Southern Utah University, suggests the growing realization that Utah is being transformed in exciting – and for some, likely unsettling – ways. Politically and socially enlightened as well as culturally cosmopolitan, Utah men and women of Bennett’s generation, in deep love with the natural riches of their state, are finding themselves increasingly comfortable at home to forge socially conscientious and sensitive communities – in business, in school, in the public marketplace of ideas, in the concert halls, and on the theatrical stage.

He brings to this season a professional CV that has begun to grow rapidly in the last three to four years. His plays “Cold” and “Mesa Verde” were seen on stage at Plan-B’s Script-In-Hand series, and he’s done four of the five seasons of Plan-B’s 24-hour theatre festival SLAM. His radio plays, “Lavender” and “Exile” were performed for a national audience on Halloween 2007 through KUER and XM, and his one-act works, “To Go Boldly” and “The Voices,” have been presented in Chicago with Circle Theatre and Shakespeare’s Shorts.

He’s also been on stage as Puck with the Utah Shakespearean Festival’s educational tour. His first play, “The White Light of Terrence,” received awards at the American College Theatre Festival.

“I knew forever this is what I wanted to do,” Bennett says, adding Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” was an early favorite and inspiration. Indeed, “Ghosts” went further than Ibsen’s equally famous “A Doll’s House” in terms of revolutionizing social significance during the late nineteenth century. A brutally intense psychological drama stark in its presentation of the ghosts – or taboos – of marital infidelity, out-of-wedlock children, euthanasia, incest and venereal disease, the play lays to waste the belief that one’s commitment to duty supersedes following one’s desires in finding the path toward a good and noble life. Ibsen’s plays were always set in the contemporary moment and his work reshaped the force and direction of modern drama. Save for Shakespeare, Ibsen’s works remains among the most frequently staged around the world.

Bennett’s plays are marked by feminine structures. “I do tend to use lots of intensely emotional peaks and valleys in my work,” he explains. To wit, his offering at last spring’s SLAM. As I noted then:

“Into The Black … proved to be the most profoundly spiritual offering of the evening. The cast did remarkably well with Bennett’s intricate weave of metaphors of the woods and wolves plumbed from the depths of Christian gnosticism. Working from an outline that he created in less than an hour, Bennett generated a coherent, provocative script positioned in its commitment to chronicle one’s spiritual journey — an impressive effort that certainly merits being expanded into a larger play.”

Certainly, his use of shadowy metaphors link the creative artistry of the three plays that will comprise Plan B’s current season.

Up First – Radio Hour: Frankenstein

In his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bennett plays wisely upon the most common misperception of this immensely famous story. While many mistakenly associate the Frankenstein name with the monster and not its creator, Bennett invokes the divided self concept as the emerging creature. That is, the monster’s loneliness echoes that of his creator’s and of the narrator’s as well so Bennett invests an articulate voice upon the creature.

He also accentuates key discursive strains of the Promethean device. As in the novel, where Victor Frankenstein advises the narrator (Walton) to “seek happiness in tranquillity and avoid ambition,” Bennett’s play also notes Frankenstein’s implication to listeners and audience members to experience the dream and its glorious — if untenable — capacity for the sublime creation. Yet, the outcome is a “horrendous mistake,” as he describes it, adding that Frankenstein’s fall is not because of his creation but of his utter failing in giving love to his creature. It is Frankenstein’s quest that is the destructive state of self-obsession, leaving him mired and dejected in the shadows of his collapsed relationships.

The show will run Friday, Oct. 24, through Sunday, Oct. 26, and Friday, Oct. 31, through Sunday, Nov. 2. in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Both Halloween performances (at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.) will air live on KUER-FM radio and XM Satellite Radio. Friday and Saturday performances will be at 8 p.m. and Sunday shows at 2 p.m.

Although this is the fourth annual radio hour, Plan B is moving the production out of the radio studio and staging it as a live radio-style production with music and sound effects and the audience amid the action. Veteran Plan-B actor Tobin Atkinson will essay the role as monster while media personality Doug Fabrizio will take the role as Frankenstein. Cheryl Ann Cluff will direct the production with music provided by Dave Evanoff.

More details about this production will be featured as the run dates near.

The rest of the season:

Block 8

In February of 2009, Plan-B will offer “Block 8,” set in Topaz – just outside of Delta, Utah – where one of 10 Japanese internment camps operated on American land during World War II. The cast comprises two individuals: Ken Miyasaka, a Japanese-American college student in his 20s whose life is disrupted at Berkeley in the days following the Pearl Harbor attack, and Ada, a middle-aged Mormon resident of southern Utah who is a teacher at the camp.

Ken’s story is an aggregate of the experiences, expressions, concerns, disruptions, dashed hopes and emotional accounts shared by those who were held in the camps, bolstered by extensive primary and secondary research carried out by Bennett and Rapier.

“Block 8” is destined to be the emotional apex of the season. For Bennett, who talked directly with survivors and descendants of internment camp residents, the pain of a most disgraceful period of American History remains palpable more than 65 years after the first orders were issued. The script’s structure and flow are infused heavily with Japanese cultural notions and ideals of shikataganai (it can’t be helped; it’s inevitable) and gaman (the concept of enduring pain).

And set against the parallels of a post-9/11 world where Muslims are stereotyped and innocent immigrants are demonized for seeking a better economic lot in life, “Block 8” is crafted as a vigilant theatrical sentry, a reminder that we should be ready to call upon ourselves and our elected representatives to avoid the blatant, racist, intolerant excuses and ignorance that compelled such irresponsible policy in the first place.

The production is slated to run Feb. 20 through March 8. More details will be featured in this blog as the production nears.

Di Esperienza

Bennett’s script which seeks to dissect the myths and the doubts of Leonardo da Vinci appears as much a master’s thesis as it is a commissioned work by Plan-B. Supplemented with a rigorously reviewed and annotated bibliography, Bennett tackles the imperfect person that few have even been willing to do when it comes to theatrical works concerning the great artist and inventor.

Among the rare recent finds have been Mary Zimmerman’s “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” which directly incorporates entries from his surviving journals into a series of vignettes carried out by eight performers who do as much acrobatics as they do vocalizing of lines. Critics have disagreed about the artistic impact of this production – some calling it unfathomable avant garde while others say it is absorbing if not occasionally over-ambitious experimental theater.

Bennett tries a different tack, relying upon representative figures from three of da Vinci’s most iconic – and unfinished – masterpieces. They are La Giaconda (a/k/a The Mona Lisa), Judas from the Last Supper (which actually was da Vinci’s take on earlier versions of Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio), and Isabella d’Este (often called the first lady of the Renaissance who was featured in a portrait drawing).

In a bit of deft, postmodern counterpoint, courtesy of the playwright, these iconic figures become narrators – defying conventional time-space dimensions – to deconstruct the demigod and to begin revealing a man with whose emotional peaks and valleys ordinary beings, normally transfixed and confused by the dictates of an unsustainable paradigm of perfectionism, can comprehend and appreciate. As Bennett put so succinctly in his artistic statement on the theater company’s blog:

“A man of ups and downs. A man of good ideas and bad ideas. At times happy, but like all of us, not 100% sure of who he really is, and who is pursued by the Shadow that says ‘you aren’t good enough.’”

In particular, Bennett’s play attempts something that Internet and digital media users will appreciate and recognize – that on stage, the characters will be much like images online that can be held in a state of suspension, in effect inhabiting a virtual space where any viewer can recall the images at will, thereby connecting them back to their time and space characteristics at their creation.

The production will run April 3-April 19. Again, more details will be provided as the run dates near.

And The Banned Slammed On

And, as the perfect punctuation to an historically adventurous season, Plan-B will combine, for the first time, its 24-hour SLAM play competition and its annual fundraiser, And The Banned Played On, into a closing season event on May 30 in the Jeanne Wagner Theatre of the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Bennett, of course, will be among the participating playwrights.

Season ticket information is available here.