`Our American Friend' -- Play Traces Life Of Writer Who Placed Herself At The Center Of History

She talked radical politics with John Reed and Emma Goldman. She served time in jail for handing out illegal birth-control information.

As a journalist in Berlin she had a ringside view of Adolf Hitler's rise. She marched with China's Red Army and taught the top revolutionary generals how to square dance.

Taught Mao how to do-si-do? Who was this person?

She was Agnes Smedley, an idealistic American writer who gravitated to hot spots of social upheaval. She led a remarkable life and authored seven well-regarded books before her death in 1950. Yet today her name rings few bells.

Los Angeles playwright Doris Baizley would like to change that. Her new play "Agnes Smedley: Our American Friend," premiering Thursday at A Contemporary Theatre, pays homage to a woman Baizley sees as an unsung heroine.

"I'm amazed by her," declares the playwright, in Seattle to work with the show's director, Steve Alter, and a four-member cast led by Susan Barnes.

"The fact that Agnes was in all the central places during the 20th century - Greenwich Village in 1917, Berlin in the 1920s, China in the '30s - just blows me away. She was the kind of person who felt at home wherever she went, and there was no border in her life between the personal and political. She was in sync with history in a way I find terribly exciting."

Baizley grew fascinated by Smedley in 1989 when she read the biography, "Agnes Smedley: Life and Times of An American Radical." What snagged her attention first were the photos: "One really got me. Here was Agnes, so small and delicate looking, wearing a Red Army uniform, and sitting right there at the table with Mao."

Another image that hooked her was a recollection by Edgar Snow, author of "Red Star Over China." "When Snow was in Yenan with the Red Army, he'd see Smedley play American songs like `Red River Valley' and `On Top of Old Smokey' on her gramophone, and teach the generals how to square dance. I thought, oh man! I want this in a play!"

The author of two works seen earlier at ACT ("Mrs. California" and "Tears of Rage"), Baizley has found it hard to telescope her subject's action-packed life into a couple of hours. First, there was the drama of Smedley's hardscrabble early years, described in her autobiography, "Daughter of Earth."

"She really came from nothing," Baizley notes. "She started out on a dirt farm in Missouri, lived in a poor mining town in Arizona. Her sympathy with the poor and oppressed came directly from her own life."

Then there was Smedley's active and liberated love life. Married and divorced early, she went on to affairs with many charismatic political figures, including a leader in India's independence movement.

Says Baizley,"Agnes was very romantic person, who felt an immediate connection with men engaged in the political causes she believed in. Unfortunately she suffered a double standard. As soon she tried to introduce feminist ideas to these socialist guys, she made enemies."

Conferring with Alter, who directed a 1991 workshop of the play in Big Fork, Mont., Baizley chose to anchor her script in Smedley's China years and close friendship with revolutionary leader Chu Teh.

"Some of the most beautiful parts of her writing describe Chu," she says. "He had such enthusiasm for Western democracy, and a spirit much like her own."

The play also flashes back to scenes from Smedley's youth, and imagines an interrogation of her by the congressional House Un-American Activities Committee.

Though Smedley never did testify before HUAC, Baizley contends she was "buried by the 1950s, the FBI and the anti-communist witch hunts. It was silly, because Agnes didn't toe anybody's party line. She hated Stalin. And she was way ahead of her time in predicting what would happen in China, Korea, Vietnam, if U.S. policies didn't change."

In 1950, at age 56, Smedley tried to return to China. But the U.S. government would only grant her a six-month passport. Physically weak and dispirited, she died in London during an ulcer operation.

While Smedley could be seen as a victim of her own romanticism and naivete, Baizley views her more generously: "Agnes stood up for what she believed even when it wasn't trendy. She really believed in creating a better world, and wanted others to believe in it too."