Backstage: ‘Reals’ and ‘Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo’

According to Gwydion ­Suilebhan, we have an obsession.

“We” is the entire planet. The obsession is with superheroes.

Suilebhan, a D.C.-based playwright, theater blogger and resident playwright for the Taffety Punk Theatre Company, represents Washington in the Dramatists Guild of America.

“Why do we want these stories so much? Why are we craving superhero mythology, as a world culture?” Suilebhan asked. “What is our obsession with masks, secret identities, vigilante justice, transformations, all the different things that come with superhero movies?”

He wanted to tackle these issues onstage, despite a peripheral awareness that the most famous previous attempt to do so was a critical failure (cough cough “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” cough). But he thought the nature of superhero stories — the elaborate costumes, the conflicting emotions, the duality of the characters — was inherently theatrical.

Searching for answers, he turned, as we all do, to Google.

“I happened to stumble into the world of the real-life superhero,” also known as Reals, he said, “real people who decide to put on costumes, assume secret identities [and] new personas, [and] train themselves for hours and hours.”

Suilebhan wanted to know: “Who are these people? There are many more than you realize across the country. And [there are] a lot of mixed feelings about what they do.”

In his resulting play, “Reals,” two Reals are looking for one more hero to join their team. While interviewing potential candidates, they come across a Real with a more radical crime-fighting philosophy: He doesn’t want to fight crime, he wants to fight criminals. “He doesn’t want to stop just one mugging,” Suilebhan said. “He wants to stop that one criminal from ever mugging again.”

His tactics are questionable, as are his motives. “It’s sort of like he wants to believe in things like powers, even though we all know they aren’t real,” Suilebhan said.

Suilebhan points out these more-than-mortals do walk among us. We just watched them during the Olympics. “Usain Bolt has super speed,” he said, just as Michael Phelps has super-swimming skills and McKayla Maroney has a super-scowl.

Four years ago, Suilebhan sat down with two questions in his head: What is the psychology behind our fixation on superheroes, and is there a dark side to that? With a completed script in his hands, he’s decided there is. “I think our love of superheroes, culturally, is partially because we identify with them and we want to be the one who gets to be all-powerful and make big, life-changing decisions, and fight whatever we identify as evil. ”

“I learned over the course of writing this play that I have many more mixed feelings about the genre than I ever did before. I think that our desire, even my interest, in things superheroic, comes from places in which I am equally inspired and vulnerable. . . . I think we want superheroes because we feel powerless in our day-to-day lives. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.”

Through Sept. 16, Theater Alliance at H Street Playhouse, 1365 H St. NE.
theateralliance.com, 202-241-2539.