Gray Skies Ahead in ‘Hollow Lands’

In “Search and Destroy,” the Howard Korder play that premiered in 1990 at South Coast Repertory, a modern-day American dreamer with a taste for blood comes to a realization. The worst thing a man can do? “He can undertake an adventure. He can misjudge his strength. And he can destroy himself.”

Ten years later, playwright Korder--whose taut, nasty way with the language of venality has served him well--has written a saga picking up where “Search and Destroy” left off, following a Candide-like Irish immigrant into the heart of American darkness.

“The Hollow Lands” is a paradox: a frustrating 19th century saga about a frustrated man, an artful three-hour illustration of an enormous but essentially monochromatic idea. It reads sharply and well on the page; Korder’s heightened language of a lost age has its spiky, funny side, recalling the modernist tinge of the Coen brothers’ period argot (“Miller’s Crossing”), as well as Korder’s own “Search and Destroy” and “Boys’ Life.”

On its feet, however, at least in the stolid, unevenly acted staging by director David Chambers, Korder’s tale is a bit of a grinder. It’s a story of rugged individualism run amok, the human cost of our country’s bloody and belligerent westward-ho ethos. But the individual at the center of “The Hollow Lands” illustrates a thesis, rather than embodying a theatrically forceful life. The minute James Newman (pronounced deliberately by the actor playing him as “New Man”) lands in America, America starts smacking him around. He starts out trying to conquer a world with no boundaries and, in a touch of poetic justice, he ends up selling barbed-wire fences.

The play begins in 1815, with James (Michael Stuhlbarg, who convincingly ages from 17 to 59 across three acts) on a ship bound for New York. Ireland behind, “new life ahead,” he says. A fellow traveler (Richard Doyle) suggests that he try dying, for “it truly clears the mind.”

His harsh fate sealed with that comment, James, once in New York, is apprenticed to a dry-goods seller (Hal Landon Jr.). A robbery leaves the owner dead. The owner’s widow, Mercy (Rene Augesen), whose early years were spent in the captive of “savages,” hitches her wagon to James, the young man who promises her the stars.

James, Mercy and their infant son, Allegheny, alight in the frontier town of St. Louis. There they struggle to make a go of a dry-goods store of their own. Laden with “debts and obligations,” James falls in with a self-made explorer, Samuel Markham Hayes (Mark Harelik). Hayes is gathering a group of young toughs for a beaver-pelt expedition, untold riches awaiting beyond. Seduced, James abandons wife and child.

“The Hollow Lands” takes its title from Yeats’ “Song of Wandering Aengus,” with its yearning lines: “Though I am old with wandering / Through hollow lands and hilly lands, / I will find out where she has gone / And kiss her lips and take her hands.” Korder’s play is about a man who wanders through hollow, blood-red lands--scenic designer Ming Cho Lee throws a lot of crimson at us--losing nearly all in the process.

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Korder goes for the jugular, as do his most wrongheaded characters. At one point, a sociopathic “settler,” Spivey (Rob King), shoots an Arikara native (Sol Castillo) point-blank in the head. The script calls also for an onstage hanging, well-faked. Korder’s not letting anyone off easy. This isn’t the tasteful revisionism of, say, Robert Schenkkan’s neat and tidy “Kentucky Cycle.” Intermittently, “The Hollow Lands” taps compellingly into the language of the bunco artist, mixing up talk of liberty and equality and racism and opportunism and rascals all at once.

Director Chambers has proven his mettle with classics (a fine “Hedda Gabler” at South Coast Rep) as well as contemporary works, among them Korder’s “Search and Destroy.” He may have misjudged the strengths and weaknesses of “The Hollow Lands.” He and scenic designer Lee don’t favor the crisp, fleet-footed rhythms of Korder’s best writing. The actors tend to thrash and bully the material, pumping it up but also weighing it down.

Stuhlbarg’s dogged Newman is an exception. Besides handling the aging process well, Stuhlbarg gives us a resonant wrinkle or two in a rather programmatic character. Korder provides a tight, terse breaking-point encounter between Newman and Mercy that brings out the best in both Stuhlbarg and the plaintive Augesen. Korder has, however, misplaced his faith in the flamboyant, ultimately syphilis-ridden antagonist Hayes, portrayed by an atypically strident Harelik. In the minor role of James’ cohort Tresguerras, Armando Duran adds some welcome zip to Act 3.

After touring America, Charles Dickens wrote of his perceptions of a nation in love with dirty dealing. Korder’s play perceives the same, and empathizes with those who got suckered, “the flotsam of history, drifting about the blank spaces of the continent.” If Korder could make Newman a richer presence in his own stern chronicle, “The Hollow Lands” might take us further into territory well worth the trouble.

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* “The Hollow Lands,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2:30 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 13. $28-$47. (714) 708-5555. Running time: 3 hours, 5 minutes.

Michael Stuhlbarg: James Newman

Rene Augesen: Mercy

Simon Billig: Tommy

Graham Shiels: Daniel

Mark Harelik: Samuel Markham Hayes

Doug Spearman: Roscius

Rob King: Spivey, Besmahal

Richard Doyle: Devoy, Stanwick, Blount, Ephryheram

Hal Landon Jr.: Elias Chase, Proskauer, Kashtenk

Armando Duran: Itinerant, Weeks, Lauderbeck, Tresguerras

Don Took: Marshall, Carson, Sheriff, Col. Leland

Art Koustik: Woodsman, Bonte, Mulcahy, Sergeant

Sol Castillo: Sauk Indian, Arikara Boy

Mark Coyan: Sauk Indian

Marika Becz: Mrs. Rogers

Alex Mehra, Steven Morse (alternating): Boy

Written by Howard Korder. Directed by David Chambers. Set by Ming Cho Lee. Costumes by Shigeru Yagi. Lighting by Chris Parry. Music by Dennis McCarthy. Sound by Jon Gottlieb. Stage manager Julie Haber.