Editor’s Note: The Selective Echo presents a two-part wrap-up of the closing events of Plan-B Theatre’s 2008-2009 season. The first part presented here focuses on the season of plays featuring resident playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett. The second part at the end of the week will preview And The Banned Slammed On, Plan-B’s annual benefit and playwriting slam competition which will be held May 30.

The decision to build an entire Plan-B Theatre season, now nearing its end, around the works of Matthew Ivan Bennett, a 31-year-old Utah playwright, wasn’t as daring or as risky as some conventional observers would have it.

Jerry Rapier, Plan-B’s producing director, points to the consistently sold-out houses and expanded performance schedule as solid votes of confidence for the strength of Bennett’s three works, all world premieres. More importantly, it’s a resounding affirmation for Plan-B’s audience-centric approach paralleling a community becoming ever more politically and socially enlightened as well as culturally cosmopolitan.

As I noted in the preview last fall and as demonstrated continuously throughout this season, Bennett’s metaphysical, spiritual voice shades the gutsy realism of his plays with a sincerely sounding lyricism – hopeful and loving at times but also stark and urgent at some moments and unapologetically political in others. The Plan-B stage was the exemplary proving ground for a writer who channels familiar territory into contemporary expressions that effectively put timely problems and challenges before his audiences.

And, there were performances striking in their palpable presence and credibility: Tobin Atkinson as Frankenstein’s creation in the ‘Radio Hour: Frankenstein’, Anita Booher as the librarian in ‘Block 8,’ and Teresa Sanderson as Isabella d’Este in ‘Di Esperienza,’ just to name a handful. The actors, well-schooled and committed to the uncompromisingly intimate and intricate demands of small-theater productions, consistently embraced the ‘word’ of the plays with a memorable sense of respect that epitomizes the Plan-B culture.

“It wasn’t a risk. The works fit our style,” Rapier says. “And so distinct these works were in content that two or all three of the plays could have swapped out Matt’s name with pseudonyms.”

Perhaps the season’s most surprising moments came in the emotional reactions of audience members to ‘Di Esperienza’ where Bennett wrote the play so that audience members could experience simultaneously the uncertainties, self-doubts and the ironical hesitant decisions of Leonardo da Vinci through the figures from among his most iconic, unfinished masterpieces. “This was a heady, intellectual, above-the-shoulders play,” Rapier explains. “But, it clearly had a gut impact with audience members. They found it worth taking the risk of where the journey might take them, even going to the library to research and learn more about the artist.”

The plays also brought new audiences to the Plan-B theater, such as the individuals and direct descendants of those who suffered the indignation and humiliation of racism in its ugliest form. In a genre and realm where the precise moment of impact to make the compelling statement about a deeply-rooted yet unresolved issue is so fleeting that it’s easy to miss, Bennett and the Plan-B company hit the apex with ‘Block 8,’ a play set in the Topaz, Utah Japanese interment camp during World War II, which, as guest reviewer Peter Golub noted, walks the razor edge that all retrospectives about government-sanctioned racism and violence must walk.

As both a catalyst and a platform for emotional validation, ‘Block 8’ succeeded not by magnifying injustice but by drawing down into the intimate, honest setting the unfortunate circumstances that shaded the lives of a pair of decent yet imperfect human beings. And, in that intimate space, audience members could then contemplate their own reactions and experiences on their own grounds and at their own time.

“It is always about honoring the audience,” Bennett explains. That certainly was the case in ‘Di Esperienza,’ where his language became a form of social practice, giving the audience member a resource – an artistic platform, so to speak – upon which the audience can focus on how the characters participating in this stage discourse ‘feel’ by analyzing their own interactive social and cultural behaviors.

For Bennett, the season also provided lessons of self-confidence. “Over the last seven months, there were more positive than negative comments,” he says. Clearly, there was no sign of indifference about the young writer’s work. “I never heard it was just all right – or adequate,” he adds.

The lessons ran even deeper for Bennett. Writers obviously are easy targets for public criticism. And, even among friends, avoiding criticism is impossible, especially if someone has read all of a writer’s previous works. Such was the case with a friend who read the ‘Block 8’ script and suggested changing a scene.

“Her advice had always been good but, in this one particular instance, I didn’t change it,” he recalls. “Well, four nights before we open, there’s the realization that it didn’t work. I would and should have fixed it months before but now I was forced to fix it in 20 minutes. The scene was much improved.”

However, it really was not hubris that kept Bennett from changing the scene. “I had taken the majority opinion which said it was okay,” he explains. “It goes to show that writing a play by committee or formula doesn’t work.” Yet, he also is quick to note that, contrary to a couple of critics who believed that he was being constrained in his writing, the input of others proved to be creatively effective in producing scripts such as ‘Di Esperienza’ which involved “so many different parameters.”

Plan-B theatergoers can expect to see more of Bennett’s work in the future as well. On May 27, he will be joining seven other writers in the playwright’s lab recital being presented by Plan-B and Meat & Potato Theatre. And, he will be, for the fifth time, among the five playwrights participating in Plan-B’s And the Banned Slammed On benefit on May 30.

For next season, he also will pen the script for Plan-B’s Radio Hour during the Halloween season, a dark, surreal, shocking take on the Alice in Wonderland story. “It will not be a faithful adaptation,” Bennett explains, adding that the characters are being reconfigured into disturbing personae.

With elements of hypnosis and psychoanalysis interspersed, he is venturing into new territory – putting ritual on stage, articulating the narration in the second person, and knocking down the symbolic “fourth wall” that likely will make some audience members quite uncomfortable. On one level, it’s an attempt to capture the element of horror popularized in movie series such as ‘Saw’ but it also invites the individual to probe the fantastic realm when it is emancipated from the binding aspects of capitalistic and materialistic discourses.

Bennett also is turning to other social issues, working on a play tentatively titled ‘What Goes Up,’ a look at suburban sprawl, inspired, in part, by the fact that a favorite spot in Taylorsville where he once rode his BMX bike has now been “mutilated” by a strip mall. In his hands, the play will likely invite others to contemplate how they interact with their material and built-up environments as well as the ways in which they individually conceive and perceive of place. Indeed, one sees Bennett’s coming challenge to rethink not just location but the priorities of investment. That is, recognizing that capital alone does not lead to an improved quality of life and acknowledging that if we really want to make our communities the best we must then consider what it is to live in these spaces, not just to consume them.

Even as he steps up his ability to write social and political pieces, Bennett is sensitive to the timeliness of their impact, to strike precisely when the public consciousness is ripe for such issues, such as ‘Block 8’ coming at a watershed transformative moment in American history with Obama’s election.

More critically, he intends to avoid the route of the self-congratulatory piece, ensuring that the audience is not let off so easily as well as taking the play into the realm of the subconscious. For example, the theme in his play about suburban sprawl moves more broadly into the essential challenge of “holding onto a sense of wildness” or otherwise “we lose a sense of wildness in ourselves and become so predictable.”

The most recent season suggests that Bennett will continue to experiment, “pushing the boundaries of multidisciplinary performance.” Along with dark, dream-inspired surreal pieces in the works, he also is trying his hand at comedy and he wants to build upon the experiences he’s had with musical theater, perhaps as a librettist. Undoubtedly, the young writer’s sense of personal wildness is being continuously freshened – for our mutual benefit.