Red Alert for Big Brother : Steve Tesich's drama 'Square One' explores a society whose government has eroded the idea of individuality

By T.H. McCULLOH

Nov. 8, 1992 12 AM PT

<i> T.H. McCulloh writes regularly about theater for The Times</i>

George Orwell’s “1984” has come and gone, and Big Brother isn’t watching anyone. Well, maybe he’s peeking around the corner.

That’s part of the premise of Steve Tesich’s drama “Square One,” opening Saturday at the Hudson Theatre. But that’s only part of the story. The rest of it is already happening, and that’s why Tesich is confronting audiences with a triptych of plays that hold up a warning sign.

“There is ‘Square One,’ ‘On the Open Road’ and ‘Speed of Darkness,’ ” Tesich says. “They all have to do with the simple fact that something is going on in the country, the world, and I don’t hear it being addressed anywhere. Essentially, there seems to be no need for human beings to survive.

“There’s a need for mankind to survive, but the idea of human beings, humanity, and the high standards that that stands for, the tradition that we’re supposed to inherit from prior generations, enhance and handle--the whole notion is somehow irrelevant today.”

All three plays, but “Square One” probably in the most succinct form, deal with various aspects of this question of the human being. The story concerns a government that subsidizes artists, but only when they follow the art that government approves. Adam, the central figure in “Square One,” is a performer, ambitious and motivated, but too comfortable within the system, which also requires artists to make political speeches to qualify for their subsidy.

“Performing is Adam’s life,” says Clay Crosby, who plays Adam. “Yet, in the play’s society all originality is looked down upon. He performs old music. He’s an entertainer in the broadest sense, insincere, almost hollow. He’s an individual, but as society gets bigger, and government becomes centralized, people continue to expect the government to take care of them. They give up their individuality, and Adam is very willing to do that. He thinks it’s a fair exchange.”

Crosby, who has been seen in local theaters in Michael Arabian’s production of “Spring Awakening,” and most recently in the Golden Theatre’s staging of Rue McClanahan’s “Oedipus Shmedipus,” has been involved with the production since the idea first came to director Toby Yates, son of Peter Yates, who directed Tesich’s cult film classic, “Breaking Away.”

Toby Yates found out about “Square One” when he picked up a copy from his father’s desk. He couldn’t get it out of his mind. An assistant film editor by day, Yates also has worked as Gregory Mosher’s assistant at Lincoln Center in New York. And, he has directed Tesich plays before, including “Touching Bottom” at London’s Rose Theatre.

What kept gnawing at Yates’ imagination is that “ ‘Square One’ is about how society refuses to grow up. It won’t develop, it won’t move on. It’s the whole problem of constantly trying to find easy solutions to major problems. We find solutions that seem to solve the problems on the surface, but don’t really get to the root of them. It’s not in our interest to question what’s wrong with the way we live.”

Continuing the comparison between our society and the society in the play, Crosby says: “Either you go along with what society tells you to do, and you’re happy with it, or you’re just discarded by society. You have to give up any sort of inner voice, or personal feelings that might go against going along with the program.”

Does this sound as though they’re overreacting? They don’t think so. The efforts of special-interest groups to control the content of television programming is on their minds, and fundamentalist attempts to dictate the viewpoint of the National Endowment for the Arts. Even the media predilection for replicating a success ad infinitum seems a signpost that Tesich, Yates and Crosby have reason to be concerned.

There’s also the statement of values that Yates says “the state wants to hand down for us to accept verbatim. Children should be brought up by two parents in a middle-class house, and they should just do their part. Don’t worry about what’s going on above us, because it’s beyond our control.

That’s what they would like us to believe. Just settle for it, just do your part. It’s in the state’s interest to get everybody to follow that line.”

Tesich puts a very fine point on the theme of “Square One,” a point he says he honed while watching the presidential debates. “All you really hear,” he says, “is ‘job.’ I know people need jobs. But something so much bigger is being overlooked in this change of life we’re experiencing in this country, and in the world. It has nothing to do with whether you have a job or not. The question is, what kind of human being are you? The answer today is that you don’t have to be one.”

Yates continues the thought. “It would be easier to be head of a government if all individuals behaved the same,” he says. “What makes it difficult to run a democracy, is that everybody thinks individually. It’s what makes us humane. If we start to lose that, if we buy into these systems, then we start to lose all sense of our own future as human beings.”

“Square One” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, and 2 and 8 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 20, at the Hudson Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Tickets $16. Call (213) 660-8587.