Anything goes at American theatre festivals. This inclusive spirit encourages a creative diversity lacking in the English cultural diet, discovers Dominic Dromgoole

Standing in line at a brunch buffet in a roadside Iowa diner recently, I was startled by the variety on offer. There was the expected - thin streaks of over-fried bacon, plump sausages, dried-out potato chunks cooked three days before. There were the pleasant surprises - watermelon, fruit and Mexican eggs. There was the unexpected - bread-and-butter pudding, together with creme anglaise (whose confusing name made me suspect that Napoleon may have been more successful than I thought). And the downright weird - lamb masala, coq au vin and gambas al ajo.

The variety was enough of a shock, and enough of a temptation to a glutton. But what induced real alarm was the way all the various wobble-bottoms ahead approached the task of eating as much as they could. They simply put everything on the same plate. No matter the difference of flavour, texture or whatever, it just went together. Garlic mushrooms butted up against waffles covered in syrup. Curry sauce swished into custard. The sight of a mound of bread-and-butter pudding surrounded by spicy prawns was almost more than I could bear.

All of our old European strictures about the architecture of taste were blown away in this great gorging desire for as much flavour as possible - here, now. I switched into automatic old-world mode, as you do when confronted with the further reaches of Midwest weirdness, and scoffed. I didn't examine what is necessarily wrong with filling a ring donut with chilli con carne, since there probably is nothing necessarily wrong with it. I simply fell back on my ancien regime prejudice. But from that position you miss what a steaming plate of combined breakfast, high tea and dinner indicates - America's extraordinarily blithe and naive inclusiveness.

My brunch was at the beginning of a festival week of new plays by young writers, at which I was a sort of dodgy eminence. It reminded me of my previous trip to Iowa. While working on a new play at the university late last year, I'd been invited to see an evening of monologues at Iowa City's professional theatre, the Riverside. My heart sank and my jet lag sagged right down to my boots when I realised that there were 25 monologues and I had to stay to the end. It sank further when the evening was introduced by a plump old man in a tight black polo neck who did a coy monologue about the magic of theatre and ended it with a lousy mime. It practically stopped during the first piece, a middle-class parable about the difficulties of mastering the piano.

But then the evening started to get weird, and as it got weird, it got interesting. More plump old men appeared in black polo necks (that was the unifying element), but the content became stranger and stranger. One guy, who announced himself as the Old Farmer, gave us some homey, down-on-the-farm wisdom, then launched into a passionate defence of Saddam Hussein and a tirade against the iniquities of sanctions against Iraq. A kid came on and spoke in nothing but numbers and letters for three minutes, while somehow articulating the facts of a murder. A woman came on and cried a lot for no apparent reason. An etiolated old gent sat down with an elegant stillness and recited a chillingly beautiful poem about the New York of the Fifties and Sixties, the virtues of marijuana and LSD, and the unmitigated pain of missing his dead wife. They came and went at speed, the normal and the whacked-out, the right and the left, the straight and the bohemian. There was no link, no hierarchy, no sense of precedent nor judgement. They were all just offered up on the same plate. Black polo necks and belly overhang (most of the old guys pulled their belts too tight) were the only recurring motifs.

By the end I was ready for just about anything, and anything duly arrived. A patchy green light in the corner picked out a crouched figure. He turned, shivered, then with a deep voice told us how greatly he was disturbed. He had recently met Satan, who had shoved his huge, all-encompassing cock in his arse. Battered by the weirdness that had gone before, this goblin yarn proved terribly convincing and induced a genuine shudder. How did this Poe-ish tale accord with the twee piano-learning piece of two hours before? I had no idea, but the audience was as happy to take this tale of infernal sodomy as they were anything else. They lapped everything up. It was all interesting or amusing or clever or moving or well performed. If anyone had got up, stripped, shoved a firework up their arse, jumped up and down and screamed "Bomb Iowa! Bomb Iowa!", they would have been applauded as warmly as someone doing a harp recital. Coming from England, where nothing is interesting or amusing or clever or moving, or only more or less so in comparison to something else, this blithe acceptance was fantastically refreshing.

The festival I attended six months later at the University of Iowa was shot through with the same pluralism. This has long been an important breeding ground for young playwrights. Tennessee Williams was the first famous alumnus, but there have been many, climaxing recently in Naomi Wallace and Rebecca Gilman, two writers who have done well in the UK. There was an extraordinary level of talent among the 12 plays that were performed or read. There was wit, imagination, specificity and passion.

Again, what was most extraordinary was the level of difference. No play was remotely like any other. There was a crowd-pleasing tongue-in-cheek murder mystery; a Southern exploration of mood in a dying town; a ludic deconstruction of the life of Philip K Dick; a naturalistic fable of the movements of global workforces; a historical epic about a Boston plague; a rock musical set in Sarajevo; a beat poem about a doomed love affair - and on and on, each play madder and wilder than the one before.

There were fault lines running through the week. A general absence of politics proved exasperating and, when it appeared, it could be fairly clunky. There is a naivety about the world beyond America, which is positively weird in people so sophisticated. But above and beyond the fault lines, the whole week kept on echoing this tremendous feeling of divergence and abundance.

A few years ago, the students at the university began a weekly series of evenings called "No Shame". Basically, they last an hour, and anybody can do anything they want. There are no auditions, no try-outs, no selection process, no rules. None of the ball-breaking sadism or public-school politics that infect the Footlights Smokers comedy nights. You simply get up and do your thing, be it a song or a poem or an event or a mime or a sketch or whatever. The only rule is that you are not allowed physically to harm yourself or anyone else. Almost every week, there is some nudity; every week, there is sustained boredom; and every week, there is hysterical laughter and tears. Out of this idea is fostered some wildly good writing, and an entirely proper attitude. No shame. In a country like Britain, whose theatre is petrified by the judgement of nitwits, crabbed in by the fear of its practitioners and locked rigid by a terror of getting anything wrong, no shame could prove a rather wise change of direction.

America, for all its occasional ghastliness and idiocy, still knows how to translate the exhilarating truth that culture can be anything, and can include anything. And that the plate should be full and mixed.

Dominic Dromgoole is artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website