'Antebellum' at Woolly Mammoth Theatre

Robert O'Hara has long been teased about his last name. It's one he shares with the fictional heroine Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind," the movie adaptation of which he says he loves and abhors with "the same amount of energy." So it was perhaps fitting that the 39-year-old playwright would eventually get around to writing something inspired, however indirectly, by that Civil War epic.

Not that "Antebellum," which will have its world premiere Monday at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, is set during slave times, as was the author's "Insurrection: Holding History." That 1996 script, which O'Hara wrote for his master's thesis at Columbia University, was about a contemporary man (like O'Hara, black and gay) who travels in time to the eve of the 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion, where he falls in love.

"Antebellum" is set in 1939 Atlanta, on the eve of a much more fabulous event: the premiere of "Gone With the Wind." The circuslike atmosphere at the time, O'Hara says, "shut down the city for three days." Well, half of the play takes place there. The set consists of two adjacent rooms: one depicting a comfortable Atlanta home, where preparations are under way to attend the movie premiere; the other a Nazi-era detention center.

Here's O'Hara's take: "I always describe it as a play about a woman who shows up at a house in Atlanta on the eve of 'Gone With the Wind' and a man who shows up at a detention center in Berlin. And we find out what the relationship between those two settings is. What is America's relationship to Berlin, and to ourselves?"

If the plot sounds like a bit of a mystery, it is. To say much more would give away some of the play's surprises (shocks, really). Like "Insurrection," it is a love story. And like that work, it concerns sexual orientation, power and race. The man and the woman who "show up" on either side of the stage are both black. Add religion to the mix -- the couple who own the Atlanta house are not just white, but Jewish -- and you've got a volatile and, yes, political, mix.

O'Hara is comfortable with the label of political playwright. "I have no problem with that," he says, before adding: "I don't know if the play is political. The play is really a romance set in a turbulent time."

The themes of "Antebellum," which was originally commissioned by Atlanta's Emory University for its Brave New Works Festival, began to take shape in the playwright's mind after a visit a few years ago to the Israeli-occupied territories. O'Hara was with a group of Western playwrights, including Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and Naomi Wallace ("In the Heart of America"), to see how theater was being produced under occupation. While there, O'Hara was shocked to see how easily he and his fellow American tourists "strolled past" the Israeli checkpoints, while Palestinians going to work were "lined up for miles."

"That got me thinking about a time when people were blockaded, when there were checkpoints," he says. "I was thinking, 'What was going on in the rest of the world while we were celebrating the antebellum South with 'Gone With the Wind?' Well, the Nazis were taking over the world. And we were sitting here, making movies about slavery and how wonderful these people's lives were, back then, in the 'good old days.' "

O'Hara says he hopes audiences will see not just parallels between 1930s America and Berlin, but connections between the detention center, which he likens to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and today's headlines. However, he says he also hopes that audiences will see something a bit more personal than his politics on stage. Even more so than with "Insurrection," O'Hara says, "my personal relationship to life and to love has, I think, leaked out onto this play."

Antebellum Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW. 202-393-3939. http://www.woollymammoth.net. Monday through April 26. $26-$60. Tickets to the show Monday and Tuesday are pay-what-you-can.