Hannibal Rising

The war in Iraq is the subtext in personal relationships - or is that the other way around? - in Christopher Shinn's play Dying City, an intense two-hander that delves into the complex strands of need, honesty and deception between an Iraq War widow, her husband and her husband's twin brother. Beginning on a whimsical note with the unannounced arrival of the brother, an actor who's just walked out of a performance because he was fed up with a homophobic co-star, the play slowly builds into a carefully measured exploration of the comfortable lies people tell each other - and themselves.

Dying City makes its Boston debut at the Lyric Stage this weekend, after receiving rave reviews in London and New York City. The New York Times's Ben Brantley praised the play's subtlety, calling it "crafty and unsettling" and hailed Shinn as "among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today." It's a surprising level of success for a young playwright whose first big production was at the 2002 New York Fringe Festival. But in a phone interview, the very down-to-earth Shinn was quick to put his relative fame into perspective.

"My secret is that I worked really hard. I was aggressive about getting my work out there," says the writer, who goes on to explain that he chose to work in theater, instead of TV or film, for both practical and artistic reasons. Not only is it easier to produce a play than fund a movie, the writer's vision is more respected in theater.
"If you want to do serious art in America, you just have to accept that it's highly unlikely that you'll become a house hold name," muses Shinn. "That's just the way it is. We invented the movies. England can claim Shakespeare as its own, and here it's Hollywood. You just have to accept that."

He pauses, and laughs. "Okay, it took me some therapy to be okay with this."

It's certainly difficult to imagine Hollywood treating the political concerns and provocative subject matter of some of Shinn's plays - a gay hookup in The Sleepers, a frank look at the awkwardness of adolescent sexuality in Four, the psychological after-effects of 9/11 in What Didn't Happen - with the quiet delicacy and brutal honesty available in the intimacy of a theatrical setting. But then, intimacy is a key concept in Shinn's work, which tends to ground big ideas in the little details of interpersonal relations.

"I'm always looking for the ways our public lives affect or are affected by what is happening in our public lives," he explains.

"I think the genesis [of Dying City] was wanting to write about truthfulness in an intimate relationship. So I was thinking a lot about truth and deceit, especially sexual deceit. This was around 2004, when it was becoming clear that a lot of the intelligence that led to the Iraq War was not true. There was a growing sense that people had been deliberately deceived in order to justify the war. So I began making links between personal deceit and political deceit.

"And I began thinking about the link between sex and violence. That was something else happening then with Abu Ghraib. So things I would see on an international scale, I was also seeing in the exploration of this relationship. So that link fed the writing of the play."

In addition to continuing Shinn's interest in work that addresses current affairs, Dying City is also a return to the twin motif, which he used in his earlier play, The Coming World.

"Twins are interesting," says Shinn, "because they represent the mystery of how we come to be who we are. For instance, studies show that if you're gay and an identical twin, there's a 50 percent chance your twin is gay. Now, that's really interesting. That shows we can't say that genes are 100 percent responsible for sexual orientations. Using twins is a great way of bringing these kind of questions into theatrical space."

Dying City runs Oct. 19 through Nov. 11 at Lyric Stage, 140 Clarendon Ave., Boston. Tickets $25-$50. For info visit www.lyricstage.com or call 617.585.5678.