Writer’s ‘Lullabies’ Start at the Same Point, Then Veer in Distinctly Different Directions

Morton Reed, once a psychiatrist and now a triple-threat writer in theater, film and television, looks sufficiently comfortable and pleased with the world as he sits in the lobby of the Burbage Theatre, where his new play, “Lullabies,” opened Friday.

He also looks remarkably like playwright Arthur Miller. And as with Miller, underneath Reed’s calm demeanor lies a fierce social critic.

“I like Miller,” Reed remarks, “not only for his supreme craft, but for how he takes the skin off society and examines it.” At the same time, though, Reed deflects any notion that he’s in the mold of Miller, whose politics have always been wedded to the values of telling a good yarn. “I’m not very good at telling straight-on stories. Actually, I’ve been told that I’m non-commercial, which nowadays I consider a compliment.”

A sign of the ferocity within Reed’s bent tales is the title of the novel he wrote simultaneously with “Lullabies”: “Shattered Lullabies.” Critic Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly praised the book as an “absorbing first novel . . . with style and passion.” Reed “astutely concentrates not on the turning wheels of justice but on the psyches of accusers and defenders alike.” His “intricately balanced tension and emotional pitch sustain the plot flawlessly.”

Like the play, the novel begins with what Reed calls a central metaphorical event--infant crib death. After that, he explains, both works veer off in different directions, with two different sets of characters. “I tend to do that. My new novel is titled ‘Bondage,’ and I’m writing a play that begins with the novel’s opening incident, then becomes quite different.”

For Reed, the metaphor behind the crib death in “Lullabies” is “how our society kills off innocence. Americans are committed to destroying innocence and illusions. Joseph Conrad stressed in his novels how we psychically need illusions in order to survive. Norman Rockwell’s America is gone. Now, we have 13-year-old crack dealers on our street corners.”

Yet doesn’t America cherish the kind of innocent romance of liberty that was the linchpin of Ronald Reagan’s political success? Aren’t Americans still “Innocents Abroad,” in Mark Twain’s phrase?

“I don’t think so,” Reed says, alluding to the wave of hope sweeping a Europe free of communism and on the verge of a common market. “We are the pessimists, and Europeans are the optimists.”

Growing up in a slum, fighting in Korea, writing his doctoral dissertation on children who commit murder and practicing for a decade as a forensic psychiatrist, determining a defendant’s mental state before trial, Reed, at 59, feels that he has viewed the country at its best and its worst. “And now, it’s in enormous trouble. One of the best ways to measure this trouble is looking at attitudes toward women, and it’s these attitudes we explore in the play.

“Women are demeaned all the time, and it’s so pervasive that women themselves take it in, generating low self-esteem. ‘Lullabies’ addresses how we have made women into participatory victims.”

As she stands trial for murder, the mother at the center of “Lullabies” gradually discovers, with the aid of her psychiatrist, that she has become part of what Reed terms “the system of degrading women. Her journey isn’t from non-awareness to self-consciousness, but from an almost total denial of her capabilities to an acceptance of them. All the other characters, by the way, take this same journey, only in one case it’s the reverse: from awareness to denial.”

Reed is referring to his attorney character but denies that he’s setting up a convenient whipping boy: “No, in fact, I think he’s better off that way, because he loses his own cynicism, and his connection with the legal system’s cynicism.”

Once Reed dives into a subject, he doesn’t seem to want to come up for air until he feels satisfied that he’s fully articulated his ideas. So when he mentions the legal system, he immediately expresses his specific outrage regarding it.

“In this corner of prison, you have Charles Manson, still an incredibly dangerous man who committed outrageous murders. And in the other corner, there are women who committed the ‘crime’ of murdering their abusive husbands. And these two utterly different sets of people are equated with each other.”

Then, he shifts back to “Lullabies”: “I’m dealing with lies and liars here, but because it’s a drama, the lies can be made to stop. Unlike what we witnessed in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, theater can tell the truth, and show it.”

One confusion that Reed wants to clear up is a tendency to view his writing as some kind of autobiography; after all, any play by a former forensic psychiatrist involving a forensic psychiatrist might be viewed that way.

“I know that’s easy to do,” he says, “but since my narratives tend not to follow a literal docudrama format--remember, this is not Morton Reed the television writer speaking--they don’t recount my own experiences. The play’s psychiatrist isn’t me at all, since she starts playing investigative cop and drops her professional role to determine the mother’s ability to stand trial. I never did, and never could, do something like that. It’s a serious violation of ethics. But, again, she’s a metaphor, not a stand-in for all shrinks.”

Reed himself retired from his practice “to become that full-time artist I always wanted to be but didn’t have the guts to be.” It actually marked a return to a kind of former life: In 1950, a radio play by the 18-year-old Reed was produced and aired.

Gutsier still, perhaps, is Reed’s decision to direct “Lullabies”--something he says he’s never done, and always felt was a little unwise for a playwright.

But after a heartening reading of the play at the Cast Theatre, producer Mitch Stein (who also has an onstage assignment as the attorney) persuaded Reed to take the helm. “He had faith in me that, frankly, I didn’t have in myself,” Reed confesses. “He saw things in me that I didn’t see in myself. I’m grateful for that, and, so far, I’m pleased with the results.

“Of course, we’ll know if Mitch’s faith was justified once audiences file in and have their say.”

“Lullabies” plays 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays at the Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets: $16. Call (213) 478-0897.