"People stopped caring. Votes weren't counted. Elections were lost. We assumed we had a say. Then one day we woke up and realized it had all gone away."

-- "The Female Terrorist Project" by Ken Urban

*******

In his 2001 book, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software, Feed co-founder Steven Johnson writes of the power of decentralized organization, linking insects, urban development and cyber-technology in such a way that demonstrates that -- through either instinct, happenstance or pure necessity-- the sum of the parts can indeed be greater than the whole.

New Jersey playwright Ken Urban's new play, "The Female Terrorist Project" incorporates Johnson's theory of non-hierarchical, lateral organization and casts it like a dark web of foreboding over a determinedly oblivious America "a few years in the future." Forging the individual stories of five women terrorists through the crucible of Amelia, an academic researcher, "FTP" explores the physics of cause-and-effect in a world of imminent retribution made inevitable by a society bent on divisiveness and marginalization.

"I was interested in the idea of terrorism and I had been working on a series of history plays, plays about historical figures or events that had a huge impact on our culture, but for whatever reason, remained on the margins of the official record," says playwright Urban, who doubles as Artistic Director of The Committee, the theater company that is producing "FTP."

"I have always been fascinated by how large-scale events play themselves out on the level of the people. I stumbled upon the book, Shoot the Women First by Eileen MacDonald, a British journalist who interviewed a host of women terrorists from different countries, and the project took off from there."

While most of Urban's terrorist crew is comprised of women such as Palestinian and North Korean suicide bombers and airplane hijackers easily dismissed by Americans as foreign crackpots blowing one another up "over there," domestic terrorist Rachelle "Shelley" Shannon is driven to violence by a set of convictions chillingly in sync with those of a government most Americans now support.

Shannon, a housewife from Grants Pass, Oregon, was working in her garden one day when God suddenly spoke to her, informing her of her true mission in life: to bomb abortion clinics. Shannon is Urban's wild card, the terrorist-next-door who both strikes closest to home and most directly links "FTP"'s underpinning connections of religious fanaticism to terrorist action.

"While some of the terrorists in the play are immediately sympathetic to a New York audience, I wanted a character who was American, and someone who was harder for, say, a Kerry supporter to get behind," Urban says.

As "FTP" erupts in a kinetic succession of scenes that jump through time and place in an unsettling, slashingly cinematic style, domestic terrorism emerges not only as a theme but as the dominant plot element through an unlikely source, college professor Amelia. Fired from her university position after federal agents -- enabled by the "relaxed" eavesdropping restrictions of a nation perpetually at war -- seize her research on Middle Eastern terrorists in a raid, Amelia is ripped from the comfortable insulation of her ivory tower and propelled ultimately to an active role in a domestic terrorist cell, a sisterhood of the similarly disenfranchised determined to "bring the war home."

It is a scenario eerily reminiscent of the Weather Underground of the 1960s and 70s, when white, middleclass "coeds" of privilege such as Bernardine Dohrn, Kathy Boudin, Cathy Wilkerson and Diane Oughton were gradually transformed from complacency to activism to desperate urban terrorism by an oppressive society that attempted to marginalize them out of existence.

When he first came up with the idea of a domestic terrorist organization, Urban was concerned that it might be too improbable. "Chalk that up to growing up under Reagan, I guess, who made that kind of dissent seem impossible." Then he saw Sam Green and Bill Siegel's 2003 documentary, The Weather Underground, and, as he notes in a preface to his script, the idea of a viable domestic terrorist organization became "not so farfetched as to be unimaginable, especially given our country's present state."

*******

Developed by The Committee as an ensemble project and initially directed by Lear deBessonet in workshop form as part of the American Living Room series at SoHo's HERE Arts Center last summer, it fell upon Committee Artistic Associate Laramie Dennis to translate Urban's demandingly episodic vision into a fully-staged production.

"The script is made up of fifty scenes of varying lengths, each marked (in the text) with an icon by Ken to indicate 'real-time,' 'interview,' or 'chronicle,'" says Dennis, who faced the challenge of transposing Urban's textual road map into a dramatically cohesive whole.

"Amelia is the throughline," Dennis continues, "though as written she appears only in the real-time scenes. The interview and chronicle scenes, featuring the women she has written about, are functions of Amelia's elusive memory and nightmarish imagination."

To underscore this approach, Dennis keeps the character of Amelia onstage even when the focus is elsewhere, providing both a physical anchor and dramatic touchstone. This allows Dennis to "jump-cut from scene-to-scene throughout. The actors playing the figures in real-time life double as the female terrorists, and their transformations are instantaneous."

Dennis also credits lighting designer Beth Turomsha for adding extra gel, as it were, to the production's continuity.

"Beth and I settled on three very distinct looks, so that the shifts from real-time to interview to chronicle would be unmistakable, and these shifts too are immediate. I hope the overall effect is a steady crescendo, so that we feel events snowballing out of control along with Amelia."

*******

It is the "snowballing" effect of "FTP" -- the gradually accelerating momentum lurching towards paroxysms of inevitable domestic terrorism -- that gives Urban's play its overarching aura of dark prescience. A controlling political party that -- with a smoothly-marketed promotional shell game -- has effectively convinced a majority of Americans already with too little to voluntarily give themselves even less, so that an elite few already with too much may have even more, will inevitably spawn not only generations of new terrorists "over there," but quite possibly here within America's determinedly insular borders as well.

"The images that we associate with the antiglobalization protests are never those of an adoring crowd raising their fists in solidarity with an impassioned speaker at a podium," Steven Johnson writes in Emergence. "That is the iconography of an earlier model of protest. What we see again and again with the new wave are images of disparate groups: satirical puppets, black-clad anarchists, sit-ins and performance art -- but no leaders."

Terrorism has been called an army without borders, and America has been called a country without memory. Dreaming blissfully in its threadbare cocoon of "faith-based" denial, America continues to ignore "FTP"'s emergent subculture as it drifts towards a distopian future devoid of the stark lessons of its own recent history.

It is this blithe dismissal of history's lessons that may well be the most ironic link that connects middle America's decisive validation of a Christian fundamentalist crusade to what could well become an increasingly violent domestic subculture its very sheer ignorance has helped create.

"History can be a sickness," one of Amelia's terrorist cohorts explains to her at one point in "FTP." "It weighs you down, makes you think there's nothing left to do, there's nothing left to achieve.

"To move forward, you sometimes need to forget."