In the forthcoming world premiere of Plan-B Theatre’s “Amerigo,” playwright Eric Samuelsen relies, in significant part, on comedy to highlight fundamental issues of American identity for a robust debate between Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, as moderated by Niccolo Machiavelli and adjudicated by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a Mexican lesbian nun, playwright and poet.

“Comedy is the only way to capture some of the beliefs expressed by the characters in the play,” Samuelsen says, adding that one of the inspirational sources for his work was a book about Columbus’ religious beliefs, a personally bizarre eschatological amalgam rooted in 15th Century Catholicism that even finds curious parallels in Mormon appropriations of Biblical scripture.

The play runs April 8 through April 18 at the Studio Theater in the Rose Wagner Center for Performing Arts. Tickets are going quickly for the performances (Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 p.m., and Sundays, 2 p.m.).

The centuries-old characters of the play carry out an historical debate that is as comical and irreverent today as it is alarming in the questions it raises about how we define an American identity in the 21st century. On one hand, we have a raucous Tea Party Movement ruled not by soulful patriotic contemplation but by raw extremism. We have a stalemate on reforming a system for immigration. We have citizens who make no attempt to hide their bigoted contempt and racist-fueled disgust at a surprisingly centrist multiracial president who seeks to restore civility to the political discourse. And, we have a postmodern pop culture in which MTV’s Jersey Shore has made the The Situation, Pauly D, and Snooki household names, where ignorance, mediocrity, and self-absorbed indulgences strangely become admirable traits of American success.

It becomes surprisingly easy to laugh at the absurdities of our contemporary experience and even easier to parody them. However, Samuelsen’s 70-minute play augurs as more than an amusing confection. “Amerigo” demands its audience to confront the ignorance at the core of this national identity crisis.

Samuelsen’s thematic impulses are wisely prescient even as “Amerigo” had a long gestation period. “I had thought about doing such a play after all of the 500th anniversary celebrations for Columbus in ’92 but I could never find my way into the material but once I focused on Amerigo [Vespucci] and had them debate about who really discovered America, then the writing was pretty easy,” he explains.

Once Samuelsen settled on Machiavelli, and Sor Juana, after reading Mexican poet Octavio Paz’s definitive 1982 biography about her, as the remaining characters, he instinctively shaped Amerigo as an iconic “pimp businessman” proud of his own ability to shape-shift continuously and to adapt readily to his circumstances. Machiavelli, his portrayal anchored in line with the genuine gist of his iconic book “The Prince,” is hardly interested in who wins or how the issues come out. He’s in it for the sport of the debate itself, Samuelsen explains.

And, Vespucci’s character precisely encapsulates the core epiphanies in the play. Compared to the multimedia galas that marked 1992 celebrations, the 500th anniversary of the naming of America went virtually unnoticed in 2007, save for a few events, a sampling of magazine features, some history journal monographs, and the release of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s book about Vespucci. Summarizing the biography’s theme, the author says the explorer prefigured the typical modern American story – “of life, at least, in the United States, which has become the land of self-reinvention, of makeover, of celebrity rehab, of flexi-careers and flexi-lives.”

And, that is where Samuelsen focuses his play, not on the issues or the politics but on a fundamental reality that none of us today seem to share any common ground or as Plan-B’s producing director Jerry Rapier explains, “it’s become far more about being popular and what it will take to get people behind it.”

Hence, on the surface, the debate between Columbus and Vespucci is about who really “discovered” America, set on a stage where the floor is covered by a large map of the world. But, more compelling questions emerge, such as one suggested by a line in the play that stresses how can it be a discovery when the land already was home to 50 million people.

The themes of “Amerigo” will resonate immediately for Plan-B’s audiences who should take up their own debates after the play ends. In fact, to make things interesting, Samuelsen encourages traditional Plan-B audience members, who might proudly identify themselves as progressive and enlightened liberals, to bring a radical conservative along to ramp up after-glow discussions.

The themes inevitably do come back to politics. Just last month, the Texas Board of Education, which enjoys a remarkably disproportionate influence on the social studies textbook market for the entire country, adopted curriculum standards that are shockingly revisionist in their nature. These include removing Thomas Alva Edison and Albert Einstein from discussions about American scientific contributions, recasting McCarthyism as essential to national security during the 1950s, situating the Civil War not upon questions of slavery but upon those of economic oppression by the North, emphasizing that white men were responsible for achievements made possible by the civil rights movement, and removing Thomas Jefferson from a list of writers who inspired the revolutions of the Enlightenment and adding instead St. Thomas of Aquinas, William Blackstone, and John Calvin.

And, audience members will quickly comprehend why Samuelsen picked a 17th Century Mexican nun to be the play’s pivotal moral voice. Going back to the Texas board meeting, as reported in The New York Times coverage of the board meeting: “Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, ‘They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.’”

Certainly, one could legitimately argue that extremism is not reserved for one partisan stripe. In the aftermath of 9/11, anti-war protesters were seen in as equally unflattering media light as today’s Tea Party protesters. However, Samuelsen’s play does nudge audience members to consider which is more tolerable – the act of protest as an elementary necessity in the American tradition or the ill-informed, extremely prejudiced intentions to erase African-Americans, Hispanics, and others from history, including Thomas Jefferson. And, more broadly, to consider for the daily conduct of our business, the glaring omission of participants who deserve to be at the tables for the most important decisions that affect our lives and shape identities in our American communities.

For the full impact of irony, Samuelsen sets the Columbus-Vespucci debate in Purgatory, which represents a mysterious and poorly understood concept of catechism. In the traditional Catholic sense, purgatory is a temporary holding platform for those who have died and have the opportunity to be purified of any remaining consequences of sin that had not been previously settled on earth.

The concept is unique to Roman Catholics. Eastern Orthodox churches have no catechism for it. Protestants as well as many literal interpreters of Scriptures, especially evangelical fundamentalists, vigorously disparage the notion of Purgatory, going so far as to say that it was a convenient invention of early Catholics to assure their ecclesiastical treasuries were always full. Martin Luther left intact Purgatory at the start of the Reformation but within 10 years publicly disavowed it. Oddly enough, some recent writers have erroneously targeted Rick Warren, one of the best known evangelical pastors in the United States today, as supporting the Catholic concept of Purgatory in his writings about spiritual salvation.

Pope John Paul II suggested that Hell and Purgatory were more than physical places; that they represented actual states of being. Dante’s allegorical intentions reflected what he wrote in the letter to Can Grande della Scala: “the subject is man, how by actions of merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he justly deserves reward or punishment.”

The setting should effectively work to synthesize the large, broad themes of Samuelsen’s compact play. It definitely is not a capricious device. Richard Fenn’s 1995 book, ‘The Persistence of Purgatory,’ lays out in extensive detail just how deeply nineteenth century Americans – from European Catholic immigrants to liberal and evangelical Christians – shared the evangelical objectives of their religious campaigns. And, this included the adoption and adaptation of the Catholic ideal of Purgatory, despite what many popular religious polemics suggest.

The cast, wearing variations on Catholic monastic robes, comprises Kirt Bateman as Machiavelli, Matthew Ivan Bennett (Plan-B’s resident playwright) as Vespucci, Mark Fossen as Columbus, and Deena Marie Manzanares as Sor Juana. Rapier is joined for staging duties by Phillip R. Lowe for costume design, Cheryl Ann Cluff for sound design, Randy Rasmussen for set design, Jesse Portillo for lighting design, and Jennifer Freed for stage manager.

Tickets are $20 and $10 for students and can be purchased here or by calling 801-355-ARTS. An April 7 preview performance will benefit the Sunstone Education Foundation, which provides an independent outlet for the consideration of Mormon scholarship, culture, and art independent of the formal Mormon church organization.

There also will be a free screening on April 13 at 7 p.m. in the Tower Theatre of “I, The Worst of All,” an Argentine film about the life of Sor Juana, in conjunction with the Salt Lake Film Society and the Utah chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

For more information, see here.