A World of Ordered Chaos: Behind the Lines With Bill Davis

"I get the feeling that a lot of what goes on in the world is staged. Someone who really has the psychology of the masses figured out is up there manufacturing incidents as they're needed. The thought that there's some group of people who meet and decide what to do--to maintain the economy, to keep people calm--is horrifying, and I think sounds absurd even as I talk about it. But a part of me says there really is somebody in that much control."

Bill Davis, a 29-year-old playwright with seven full-length plays and 15 one-acts under his belt, leans forward as if to get a better view of the world he sees unfolding before him, a world of ordered chaos--a vision not too distant from that holy perception of God as Manipulator. Raised in Catholic schools. Davis was familiar enough with the Church to write a play about it. Mass Appeal, after a two-and-a-half week run at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston, opens on Broadway tonight at the Booth Theatre.

The dilemmas faced by the protagonist, Mark, in his uncertain road to priesthood, are closely tied to Davis' own struggles as a writer. "At first I just wanted to tell people off, to kick ass. Like Mark, I just wanted to say things that were shocking and upset people, make them change. But you can't just come out and od that because it's not going to sustain an evening at the theatre. People will say, 'Big deal, you think that, so get lost.' You have to have structure, you have to have movement, you have to have humor, in order to make what you're saying more palatable. You have to appeal to the people and then you can give it to them.

"I didn't do this diatribe about how awful authority is, how awful middle-class people are They're not awful. I think that everybody is very redeemable. They're shackled by all the things that they've purchased and have encased themselves in and they just can't see clearly. They come to mass once a week and think everything's fine. And they're lovely people, they're wonderful, they're just letting themselves be enslaved. I don't think people want to be free. I think people like bondage, unfortunately. It's more easily done here in America because everybody believes that they're free, and those are the easiest people to control."

Davis sees the playwright as a prism focusing the quirks and obsessions of society. "It's important to be very conscious of the pulse of society. I think people go to the theatre to be fed, to be nourished in some way, and I think that that's the obligation a playwright has: that they are in some way to look to themselves and to be a reflection of what's going on in society, and then write about that."

There is something compelling you to write and along with that compulsion there's an obligation to open yourself up to all the craziness in the world. And then usually when you have all that, when you have a clear picture of the craziness and you write about that, that's usually what's funny. I think that's why people laugh. It's good laughter when you point out all the ironies and you're not afraid of the ironies anymore. Sometimes people laugh because the're scared and can't figure them out."

Much of the humor in Mass Appeal comes from the interplay between the two characters, Father Farley and the young seminarian he takes under his wing. Alive with contradictions and weaknesses, they take on a life beyond the dimensions of the theatre whenever Davis discusses them. "Characters are separate entities that kind of write themselves. I think a good writer is someone who allows passage. You let things pass through you and don't try to steer it all into your own personal biases. You just pick the words they should be saying. Ultimately, though, it's not really an examinable process because I can't find the moment or the place where the ideas rise up."

Some of Davis' ideas arise during the course of the play's performances. "It's not carved in stone. You make changes, try things out. It makes it real exciting."

This exchange with the audience is something Davis takes seriously. "Once you present something to the public I think it's important to have some kind of interaction afterwards. I think critics should do that, but I think the're more like consumer advocates than critics who kwant to let an artist grow. Critics generate an incredible amount of money--a good review can be worth millions of dollars--but the critic is still part of the audience who sat through the work and can now come forward and ask this and that and the artist can respond. I think that's an important process. Maybe it's asking too much, but I think the critic should be someone you can go to, there should be some kind of dialogue instead of the hostility that's there."

Davis faced his audience without a mediator when he took over the role of Mark Dolson for four performances two weeks ago at the Wilbur. "It was a good feeling because a play goes through the hands of so many people that you don't really feel it's your own. Playing Mark was a way of reclaiming it." The kinship between Davis and his character is clear--both had to achieve a balance between "Kicking ass and kissing it."

I think there was a working out of these two elements in myself. It's when Mark end the Father join forces that they become effective. Together they're not dangerous because the Father would never be doing anything that might upset the people and Mark would be upsetting the people so much that he wouldn't have any effect on them."

Currently, Davis is working on a screenplay for 20th Century Fox called "Internal Combustion," "about an inventor who, through technology, is going to liberate people. He invents a car that turns on a tuning fork and makes music as it runs. Traffic noise would sound life symphonies. But of course big businesses don't want the car marketed because of what it would do to the economy. Original ideas only cause trouble."

Davis unbraids the twistings of society in order to make these strands more comprehensible. He finds the promise and generative force of a system in its self-extinction. As Mark asserts. "The purpose of the Church is to become obsolete." Davis adds, "Whether that will ever happen is secondary, but that should be the drive. When you think toward that end you allow an evolution toward it."