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Orwell in America , a play by Joe Sutton that has its world premiere Saturday evening at Northern Stage in White River Junction, asks the audience to imagine what might have happened if one of the greatest writers and public intellectuals of the 20th century had crossed the pond to do a book tour.

The fact that Orwell, who died from tuberculosis in 1950 , at the age of 46, never made such a trip, gave Sutton, who teaches theater and playwrighting at Dartmouth College, the dramatic license he needed to give Orwell the kind of inner, emotional life that he rarely revealed in his books and essays.

We all toss around the word `Orwellian, but the audience doesnt know much about him, Sutton said in an interview at the Northern Stage rehearsal space in the old Miller garage building in White River Junction.

Orwell may have been one of the most famous public consciences of his time, but there is no public recording of his voice, so we dont know what he sounded like, Sutton said. And he was an intensely private, retiring person. When he got his great fame, he would absent himself from London (for weeks at a time), Sutton said.

Orwells fame as an essayist and novelist rests on the breadth of his subjects, the clarity of his prose style, and the singularity and conviction of his voice, which strikes one as being truthful and authentic, not falsely embellished or self-aggrandizing, and based in close, even-handed observation of people he met during his travels.

Some of the 20th centurys most celebrated authors most notably Hemingway and Fitzgerald were also celebrities who became trapped, to a degree, in their public images: Hemingway the bull fighter, hard drinker and war correspondent; Fitzgerald, the romantic alcoholic with the mad wife.

But Orwell, who was born Eric Blair and took the last name of his nom de plume from an English river, was a more shadowy figure. The immediacy of his voice, and the kinship he seemed to feel with his subjects, invites readers in. People may think they know him intimately when they read such classics as Down and Out in London and Paris , Homage to Catalonia , 1984 and Animal Farm .

S utton had read some Orwell, but hadnt delved deeply into his work until he read one of his most famous essays, Politics and the English Language , which Suttons wife had been urging him to read. Once he began, he fell into Orwells world. And the more he read, the more he saw an enigma at Orwells core that called for theatrical exploration.

Orwell was a prolific, prodigious writer whose mind seemed to be continually racing along from one topic of compelling interest to another, from the pull of Socialism and the dangers of Communism, to the pleasures of a good, old-fashioned English murder mystery and h is affection for the common toad. Audiences flock to hear public intellectuals because theyre exciting, often charismatic personalities unafraid to voice strong, frequently contrarian opinions, Sutton said.

Orwell was no exception. His mind was a universe of ideas, but where is he inside of that? Sutton said.

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A Writer Out of Place