Cut and paste

A chicken on a string drops from the rafters. A pretty girl in a bathing suit glides out on roller skates. A bathtub on wheels gets rolled onstage. A derelict stumbles through.

So unfurl the first moments of Charles L. Mee's ``bobrauschenbergamerica," the opening salvo of the American Repertory Theatre's fall season. One image may have nothing to do with the next, but together on one stage, swiftly criss crossing over a giant American flag, they make a manic, dark yet perky American kind of sense -- the nation as artist Bob Rauschenberg might see it.

Mee put his play together the way Rauschenberg builds his art: wild collages made from scraps of trash, nutty antique store finds, and old posters. The disparate pieces, when put side by side, say big, surprising things.

``As a collagist, Rauschenberg brings material in from the real world, unedited, and arranges it," says Mee by phone from Brooklyn, where he lives. ``He has to stay honest to it, to deal with it without altering it, like a journalist or historian."

Mee knows the technique: He was a journalist and historian, writing several books, before he became an internationally produced playwright. After he graduated from Harvard in 1961, he became an editor at Horizon, an arts magazine, where he discovered Rauschenberg.

The artist, whose career soared in the 1950s and 1960s, does not actually appear in ``bobrauschenbergamerica." The play looks through his eyes at an all-American community: brash, raucous, funny, and as lively as it all is, limned with violence, loss, and darkness.

``He was small-D democratic and open and inclusive," Mee says of the artist. ``All of which is what we at one time thought we were, and perhaps will be again as Americans."

A Rauschenberg retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1997 inspired Mee to write the play. He pitched the idea to Anne Bogart, artistic director of New York's SITI Company , of which he's a member. The theater troupe premiered the show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003 and will perform it at the ART.

To begin with, Mee immersed himself in Rauschenberg's art.

``I went through his work and made a list of images. Then I made a list of texts they made me think of. Then movements," Mee says. He took those lists to a SITI Company workshop and asked cast members to take an item from each list and set to work.

``It's not improvising so much as assembling," explains Bogart by phone from her home in Manhattan.

``I came out of those workshops with a pile of stuff, not a theater piece. So I said, what would Rauschenberg do?" Mee recalls. ``He'd have taken what he loved."

Those things include a trucker, a backyard picnic, and a dangerous pizza delivery boy. ``It's quintessentially American," notes Bogart. ``The question is, how can an audience celebrate and be critical of the culture we live in? Chuck embraces both the glory and the assassinating violence of the last century."

He does it in an imagistic staccato, with characters that recur in a series of vignettes. ``His talent, like Rauschenberg's, is in juxtaposition," Bogart says.

``Life doesn't have a narrative line," Mee explains. ``It goes from moment to moment, some vivid, some ordinary. I don't think `I woke up, did this, did that, had lunch.' I just think of it as a collection of wonderful and horrifying moments."

But, he allows, ``there are stitchings of plotline in the piece. Boy meets girl, we all know that story. You don't have to lay out the narrative." Inevitably, audience members will pick up the threads and weave a story from it.

It's a fast-paced story that pulses with sensation. There's sexual fantasy, pop and country music, dancing, and a gustatory monologue that will make your mouth water. There's even a martini slip-and-slide. Toward the end of the play, one character launches lustily into a long passage from Walt Whitman, whose poetry shares the all-embracing spirit and, to some extent, the form of Mee's play.

As a playwright, Mee has made a career of incorporating and recycling plots, themes, and texts, from Freud to Euripides. He even invites visitors to his website (www.charlesmee.org), where his plays are archived, to pillage his works.

``If you want to steal stuff and rewrite it, go ahead," he says.

``From time to time someone will send something they've remade. It's fun to see," he says. ``It's a little bit like, if you're lucky and your work survives you, when you're long gone and the copyright runs out, you get to see what they do with it."

Earlier this summer, there was a short festival of plays in London, ``all pillages and remade pieces of mine," says Mee. It was called ``Who Stole Mee?"

Mee brought his Rauschenberg-inspired ethos of ``take what you love" to rehearsals. And Bogart says that working with him on ``bobrauschenbergamerica" changed her whole troupe for the better.

``My company is so disciplined," Bogart says. ``If it doesn't hurt enough, it's not good. Chuck taught us freedom and happiness. We'd turn to him and say, `How is this?' And he'd say, `It feels good.' "

``There's a freedom in that, and he learned that from Rauschenberg," Bogart says. ``Now we'll step back and say, this feels good. Now we relish it."

‘bobrauschenbergamerica’ runs Sept. 9-Oct. 7 at the American Repertory Theatre’s Loeb Drama Center. 617-547-8300, www.amrep.org