About a dog

Alone on stage during Chesapeake, actor Charlie Flynn-McIver has a few questions to answer: Why is the National Endowment for the Arts the Right’s perennial whipping boy? Where do we go when we die? And more importantly, what do dogs really want?

Dogged by the Right: In Chesapeake, a beleaguered performance artist struggles against a Strom Thurmond clone … and his sanctimonius pup.

Flynn-McIver is well-equipped to deliver some answers. Since 2001, when he and his wife Angie founded Asheville’s North Carolina Stage Company, he’s held innumerable roles at the Walnut Street venue. In the 90-minute Chesapeake, Flynn-McIver uses his talents to give shape to a sprawling monologue about art, bigotry and political power. Angie Flynn-McIver directs the play. (“I didn’t have to sleep with anyone to get this role,” Charlie insists.)

Written by Lee Blessing, Chesapeake is told from the standpoint of Kerr, a performance artist whose major iniquity is having worked up a piece where an audience removes his clothes as he reads passages from “Song of Solomon.” Provocative, yes, but a complication arises during Kerr’s performance that’s too lurid to mention here, with the result of making things considerably worse for his reputation.

In the scandal that ensues, Kerr is dogged by Therm Pooley, a leading congressman from the very same, albeit unnamed, Southern state the artist hails from. Pooley is making a determined run for the U.S. Senate, and the steely planks of his conservative platform are—what else?—moral values.

Pooley’s Senate run doesn’t amount to Kerr’s first dealings with him; in fact, it was the congressman’s earlier string of political victories, anchored by a lily-white message (including the notion that homosexuality should be taxed because it is a “high risk” lifestyle) that sent the artist packing for New York.

“That sort of thing won him several landslides in his home state,” explains Charlie Flynn-McIver. “It also brought [Kerr] to the realization that it was time to move.”

The would-be senator has a secret weapon in his bid for the Senate—namely, a dog. “Lucky” is a Chesapeake Bay retriever who Pooley presses into service for television commercials to bolster his run.

“He’s like Petey in the Our Gang comics,” says Flynn-McIver. “When he sees something questionable, he covers his eyes with his paws. So here is Pooley, attributing moral values to his dog, which, needless to say, drives Kerr wild.”

During his campaign, Pooley takes aim at an easy target: the National Endowment for the Arts. Audience members may be forgiven if Pooley’s crusade calls to mind other influential senators from Dixie: our own Jesse Helms, for one, or Strom Thurmond, the late senator whose name shared the same plumbing-fixture consonance of Chesapeake‘s antagonist-in-chief.

Kerr’s fix, and Pooley’s crusade, resonate in the same way that other artists’ struggles have: Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” from 1989, or Robert Mapplethorpe’s provocative photographs. “There’s an inherent interest in the play regarding what art is and what it means,” says Charlie Flynn-McIver.

The play’s second act is full of twists, whimsy and fantastical departures, off-setting Chesapeake‘s static tendencies.

And while questions of what is acceptable in art may seem quaint in a country whose national dialogue has been circumscribed by issues of terrorism and war for half a decade (readers may recall that art, along with humor, was delivered a fatal blow by 9-11), Angie Flynn-McIver says the complex message of Chesapeake is evergreen.

“It’s not polemical. It’s nuanced,” she says. “And it’s ultimately about relationships. It’s about the journey of two characters, and the recognition of their humanity across the divide. That’s something that seems less and less possible in America, but to see it onstage here is a hopeful thing.”

Chesapeake stars Charlie Flynn-McIver and is directed by Angie Flynn-McIver. Multimedia developer G. Craig Hobbs provides the play’s backdrop of streaming images. Performances run through Sunday, May 20. (Wednesday-through-Saturday shows begin at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday’s show starts at 2 p.m.) Tickets are $15-$23, except Wednesday, which is “Pay-What-You-Can Night,” $5 minimum. North Carolina Stage Company is located at 15 Stage Lane, off Walnut Street. 350-9090.