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Charlie Kaufman’s sound play, “Hope Leaves the Theater,” will be performed in R

Charlie Kaufman has written a play set in the present. The exact present. By the time you finish reading this sentence, the play’s setting will have passed. And come again. As only a Charlie Kaufman play could.

At the same time, Kaufman has written a play about the past. And the future. But not the present. As only a Charlie Kaufman play could.

Kaufman has written a play about going to see his play. The actors play themselves, the actors, and they also play the audience. The audience (the real audience) watches the audience (the fake audience), respond to the actors, the characters, played by the actors, the actors. As only a Charlie Kaufman play could.

If it doesn’t immediately make sense, it’s not supposed to. If it does, you probably don’t understand it. That’s the way Kaufman works, and in this case “works” doesn’t exclusively mean writes.

There has to be much more going on in that 46-year-old head of his than what appears on paper, and what appears on paper is complicated enough. He wrote a movie that assumes humans are puppets (“Being John Malkovich”), and another that assumes memory is erasable (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”). He read a book about orchids, and wrote a movie about himself (“Adaptation”).

In other words, Kaufman thinks much more than he writes, which means he writes only a fraction of what he thinks. He does them both with style, even if he doesn’t know it.

“I’d be hard-pressed to know what that style is,” he said. “I don’t consciously say, ‘I want to write a Charlie Kaufman movie.’ I always set out to do something I don’t know how to do.”

This time it was a play. The one set in the present. The exact present.

When thinking about Kaufman, you always end up going around in circles. You think about him, about his work, and you think you’re making progress. You think you’re beginning to understand, so you keep thinking, keep moving, until you realize you’re not moving forward, toward some conclusion, but around one.

Then you’re back where you started, and you don’t know how you got there. So you start over, and move in a different direction.

•••

Kaufman has written a play set in the present. It has no action, no stage directions, but lots of sound cues. It’s part of an experimental project developed by film composer Carter Burwell called Theater of the New Ear, in which Burwell produces plays as staged readings with live music that he composes and conducts.

In addition to the actors and musicians, a foley artist is also on stage, providing any necessary sound effects. The actors sit on stools, scripts in hand. The musicians sit in chairs, stands in front of them, watching their conductor. The foley artist has all of his props laid out in front of him.

Burwell and Kaufman call them “sound plays,” which sounds new and innovative, but also sounds like the good old-fashioned radio play of the past. Both are all talk with no visible action. Both rely on the ear over the eye.

“The challenge may be self-evident: There’s nothing to look at, so everything has to be conveyed with music and voices and sound effects,” Kaufman said.

Of course, when Kaufman says something is obvious, he’s probably thinking about how to make it less so. His play, which will be presented by UCLA Live with another one-act sound play from Sept. 14-16, is titled “Hope Leaves the Theater.” It’s a double play on words. Kaufman wouldn’t have it any other way.

First, he titled a play with no action with an action. Second, the hope in his title isn’t hope at all, but a Hope – a character named Hope Davis, played by Hope Davis.

It’s a bit like John Malkovich in “Being John Malkovich,” only Davis isn’t a pod but herself. Meryl Streep and Peter Dinklage (“The Station Agent”) will accompany her on stage and fill out the cast, playing various roles each, including themselves.

The play is about Davis literally leaving the theater, but of course Davis physically stays up on stage the whole time. It’s all even more difficult to wrap your head around when you remember the play is set in the present. The exact present.

•••

Kaufman has written a play set in the present. In the past, specifically in April, which used to be the present, it was performed for the first time in London’s Royal Festival Hall with another sound play written by Joel and Ethan Coen.

Both were hits, and played later at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York. There they were recorded for broadcast by SIRIUS Radio, essentially turning the sound plays into radio plays and adding another ironic twist to the whole experiment.

Royce Hall is the third place Burwell and company will perform Theater of the New Ear. The Coen brothers are no longer involved, and replacing them on the bill will be the world premiere of a new sound play called “Anomalisa.” It was written by Francis Fregoli and will star Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan (“Heat”) and David Thewlis (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”).

Even further in the past, the Royal Festival Hall asked Burwell to conduct performances of his film scores in concert. He didn’t like the idea because he wrote the scores to accompany images and dialogue, but he orchestrated the vision behind Theater of the New Ear instead.

Because it was a limited run, specifically designed to be three performances so it would feel like a weekend instead of four or more, which approaches work, Burwell was able to get all the talent he wanted, and the sound play was born.

“My original concept was not to be theatrical, but that’s what the Coens wanted to do,” Burwell said. “I thought we’d do a dozen little things, more like songs, instead of two big things.”

The pairing of two one-acts worked for everyone, in large part because of the informal and limited nature of the project. Burwell wrote the scores just before rehearsals started, which was a week before performances began.

He hasn’t finished the score for “Anomalisa” yet, but rehearsals don’t start until Sept. 6, so he has time. He very well may be composing right now, in the present. The exact present.

•••

Kaufman has written a play set in the present, which fits Theater of the New Ear perfectly. Sound plays are different from radio plays because their performances were created to be seen, not just heard, even if nothing happens on stage. The form delights in its own present state of being. “Hope Leaves the Theater” may not work if you can’t see Davis sitting on stage talking about her exit.

Additionally, the ragtag form is always changing. The Coen brothers’ play was dropped, another was picked up, and Kaufman immediately went into rewrite mode because the original draft of his play began with Davis, Streep and Dinklage playing audience members returning from intermission, talking about what they had just seen. Without the Coen brothers’ play preceding it, the lines wouldn’t make sense.

“If it’s not going to play, you can’t use it,” Kaufman said. “Cutting is the process of saving yourself from embarrassment.”

The point of “Hope Leaves the Theater” may be that it’s always changing because that’s the way life works. In a screenplay, the characters’ lives cannot change once they’ve been filmed. Here, they can.

That’s why Kaufman has written a play set in the present. The exact present. It’s impossible to live any other way.