Performing Arts

The folks at Kitchen Dog Theater think Zayd Dohrn is about to break out of the pack as a playwright, beginning with the rolling world premiere of Sick currently playing at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary. If his plays get his name out there, though, it won't be anything new to him. He has been living his life in public from the start.

MIKE STONE/Special Contributor

Playwright Zayd Dohrn, who's premiering Sick at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, spent his early years hiding from the law with his Weather Underground parents, William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Google Mr. Dohrn's name, and you find images of him as a baby or toddler with his mother, Bernadine Dohrn, from the time she was in hiding from the law as part of the Weather Underground.Mr. Dohrn's father, William Ayers, made headlines again this April when Sen. Hillary Clinton brought up the issue of the former Weatherman's association with Sen. Barack Obama on the board of a Chicago nonprofit.

Quite independently, the young Mr. Dohrn earned another kind of celebrity after starting college. As a freshman at Brown University, he became a character in Ron Suskin's A Hope in the Unseen. This was the follow-up book to a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post series about a young black man named Cedric Jennings. Mr. Dohrn was the first Brown student to befriend Mr. Jennings, so became a kind of co-hero in the book.

FILE/The Associated Press

Zayd Dohrn, 4, walks with his parents, Weather Underground members William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, in 1982.

"These are angles on your life, but not actually your life as you live it," Mr. Dohrn says. "I think sometimes that's why I write – an effort to make these things comprehensible."

It seems to be working.

"The most interesting thing about Zayd is how normal he is, how well-adjusted," actor-playwright Lee Trull, who's starring in Sick, says. "His writing reflects that, a sort of odd call for moderation in life."

If all the early publicity weren't enough, even if Mr. Dohrn became the most successful American playwright since Arthur Miller, he still wouldn't be as famous as his wife – at least in some parts of the world. Rachel DeWoskin starred in a 1990s Chinese TV comedy and later wrote about it in her memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing. She remains a major celebrity to the 600 million Chinese who watched the show.

"That's a hard thing for me sometimes," Mr. Dohrn admits with a smile. "You could be President Clinton and not be as famous as she is, by some measures. The Chinese can be pretty subtle about it, though. Sick was written when we spent a year in Beijing. We had a couple of experiences bargaining in a market. Only when the deal was done would they say, 'Thank you, Jessie.' That was her name on the show."

The playwright says that he has begun to realize that being in China while writing Sick profoundly influenced the piece. The leading character is a professor who takes his graduate student in writing home with him – and opens up the family's dysfunctions to this outsider

"There's a feeling of isolation in it, which was very real from me because I don't speak Mandarin the way my wife does. Also, it was written only a year or two after the SARS epidemic, and that had the same kind of impact there that 9/11 had here," Mr. Dohrn says. "At the time, I thought I was writing an American play about American characters. But in a way I'm not as brave as my wife about communicating with strangers, and that is in the play."

Similarly, Mr. Dohrn's early life has influenced his work in unexpected ways. He says he has only fleeting memories and images of the time his family spent in hiding from the law. But the later memories are more difficult.

"My mother went to jail when I was 6," he says. "I had to live for more than a year without her."

Both Ms. Dohrn and Mr. Ayers, who was never tried because of prosecutorial irregularities, went on to become professors at Chicago-area universities. Their son was off to college before the controversial party thrown for an early Obama campaign at the family home, so he hasn't been directly involved in the recent controversy.

The couple also reared Thai Jones, the son of imprisoned friends; he has written a book about a century of the American left, A Radical Line. Zayd Dohrn took the photo that appears on the jacket of his foster-brother's book, but he says he couldn't have attempted something like that.

"I wouldn't presume to write about that generation and what they were thinking – I have no idea what they were thinking," Mr. Dohrn says. "In my own generation, that political controversy is less a part of the zeitgeist. From very early on, I was always interested in writing fiction, not political in the way my brother was."

Mr. Dohrn's family background, however, did inevitably make its way into his work – the way it did for Eugene O'Neill or Edward Albee or recent Pulitzer winner Tracy Letts. A previous play, Haymarket, for instance, was based on 19th-century riots in Chicago, and the wife in that play goes into hiding from the law with her child.

A play written since Sick, called Magic Forest Farm, is set on a collective farm like the ones in California where Mr. Dohrn hid with his parents. But it's not about the older generation's politics.

"That play is about the kids of that generation and how they make their way forward," the playwright says.

Mr. Dohrn learned early not to take too literally anything somebody else writes about your life, even when it purports to be journalism, not fiction.

"I don't recognize myself in A Hope in the Unseen," he says. "He says Zayd is blond and blue-eyed, and I have dark brown eyes. Cedric and I hit it off for all sorts of reasons, not just politics. As a writer, I have empathy: You transform me in your head, but the character called Zayd in the book is not really me."

Contrariwise, lots of Mr. Dohrn's friends and family members tell him that they recognize themselves, even real incidents or bits of dialogue, in his plays.

"Whenever a play is done and people come to see it, everybody thinks it's about them," he says.

But his family's academic background does show up in Sick. His in-laws as well as his parents are professors.

"The play has some of that in it, but it's also about the weirdness and sickness in families. It's partly about 'write about what you know,' " he quips.

"If I've done my job, everybody will see a little of himself, but I don't think anyone will feel particularly implicated."

Plan your life

Sick and Kitchen Dog Theater's New Works Festival continue through June 28 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 3120 McKinney Ave. $15 to $25. 214-953-1055; www.kitchendogtheater.org.

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