Here is what Karen Hartman says when people ask what her play "Gum" is about: "I usually say it's about a fictional country where there's a ban on gum and one sister has chewed the gum and is a fallen woman, and the other sister wants to know what's so exciting about the gum, and that's where it begins."
Where the play goes from there will no doubt surprise many audience members. It even surprised the playwright. "I was halfway through a play about female genital mutilation when I realized that was the play I was writing," Hartman says.
A 1997 graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Hartman, 28, is having a rather extraordinary year for a newcomer. "Gum," which she wrote during her last year in graduate school, is receiving its world premiere at Center Stage beginning tonight; a second production opens at San Francisco's Magic Theatre next month. Another play, "ALICE: Tales of a Curious Girl," an adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland," is currently at the Dallas Theatre Center, which commissioned it. A third play, "Girl Under Grain," has received numerous workshops and staged readings; the latest takes place at Center Stage tomorrow.
"Gum," however, is the play most likely to provoke controversy. "There are always surprises whenever I write, but with 'Gum,' the play took such a radical turn that it caught me off guard," Hartman explained from Dallas, where she was in residence before the opening of "ALICE."
"Gum" was inspired by an article in the New York Times in July 1996 about young Egyptian women believed to have suffered severe moral lapses after chewing illegal, aphrodisiac-laced gum.
At the time, Hartman was looking for a companion piece for a one-act play she had written about Egyptian music censorship. The chewing gum issue, she says, "seemed to me to be a lighter take on the subject of fundamentalism and its connection to passion. It didn't turn out that way."
Instead, she pulled off a feat most playwrights don't achieve in a lifetime -- she wrote a play about something no one may have ever written a play about before. When she discovered she was dealing with the unlikely topic of female genital mutilation, she says, "I found myself both doing lots of research to make sure I had some idea of what I was talking about, and doing a lot of writing exercises to free up an unconscious impulse."
The exercises, encouraged by a Yale teacher, playwright Maria Irene Fornes, took such forms as imagining "that a character from your play comes to speak to you because the character feels misunderstood," Hartman explains.
The research involved "both sociological books, mostly about Egypt, and a lot of fiction because I wanted to get a sense of these women's imaginations. So I found books of fiction by Egyptian women," says the playwright, who spent a year in Israel and the Middle East on a Fulbright Scholarship in the mid-1990s.
Yet when it came time to specify the setting of the play, she wrote "a fictitious faraway country." "I'm not interested in pointing fingers," she explains. "I'm interested in how passionate girls live with restrictions. How passionate people live with restrictions. Why some people desire restrictions."
Tim Vasen, director of the Center Stage production, brought "Gum" to the theater's attention. He discovered the play as a judge of the prestigious Jerome Fellowship, a Minneapolis playwriting award, of which Hartman was one of the winners. Vasen says the play "jumped off the page" at him.
He was attracted by the elements of mystery and secrecy, by Hartman's ability to transport an audience to that "fictitious faraway" place and by her economical use of language, which he compares to that of Harold Pinter.
And though the subject matter might be a barrier for some theaters, Vasen says, "I don't think it crossed my mind that this will be difficult to produce." Indeed, he supported the play so thoroughly and "without reservations," that he felt, "I have to pass this on to Center Stage."
Hartman, however, says, "It never occurred to me that I would find a theater willing to stage this -- less because of the subject matter than because of the style of the play, which is poetic and therefore slightly elliptical. The challenge is that while you and I are sitting here conversing openly about female genital mutilation, ... in this household in 'Gum,' it's a subject of taboo and therefore of secrecy."
It is, in fact, a subject that has received increasing attention in the United States. Not only has it been featured on TV newsmagazines, it was the subject of a book by Alice Walker, which became a documentary, and it has even surfaced in pop culture (on NBC's "Law & Order" and in Vogue and People magazines).
Hartman attributes the recent interest to "a series of attempts by African women to gain political asylum in the United States." But she also points out that female genital mutilation is not as foreign a practice as Americans might like to think.
"Clitoridectomy was practiced in the United States and in Western culture through the end of the 19th century. It was recommended for a cure for everything from masturbation to lesbianism," she says. "There is a practice of clitoridectomy in this country mostly on the part of immigrants. Of course it's illegal here, but it wasn't officially illegal here until a couple of years ago."
Although "Gum" charts some new territory for Hartman, it also bears certain similarities to the playwright's other work in that it focuses on women characters. "Girl Under Grain," the play receiving a staged reading at Center Stage, is a retelling of the Book of Ruth, set in rural America during the Depression. And "ALICE" is, of course, based on Lewis Carroll's famous heroine.
A native of San Diego, Hartman decided on a career as a playwright at a young age. "I'd been interested in theater and in writing as early as I can remember, definitely by 3 or 4, and it occurred to me at about age 12 that maybe I should be a playwright because then I could combine theater and writing," she says.
Her interest was heightened by the San Diego-based Playwrights Project. The program, aimed at California writers under the age of 19, produced two of Hartman's scripts in the late 1980s. "That defined me, through adolescence," she says. "It was a tremendous gift, an extraordinary opportunity."
However, as an undergraduate, also at Yale, she changed majors several times before settling on literature. "I went there terrified that I'd gotten into college because I was a high school playwright, and then I would not be a playwright and somehow disappoint everybody," she recalls. "I think I was halfway terrified that I would not become a playwright and halfway terrified that I would."
Less than two years out of graduate school, she appears to be one of the country's hottest young playwrights, or, as director Vasen puts it, "She's getting more cookies than any young writer I know about."
"My philosophy now is, I've given up waiting for signs to continue. I'm waiting for a sign to stop," Hartman says. "I will proceed until there is a sign that I'm on the wrong track. But it would have to be a very large sign."
"Gun"
Where: Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.
When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 7:30 p.m. most Sundays; matinees at 2 p.m. Saturdays and most Sundays; and 1 p.m. March 17. Through March 28
Tickets: $24-$29
Call: 410-332-0033
Also: "Girl Under Grain," free staged reading, 7:30 p.m. tomorrow
Pub Date: 03/07/99