Off Off Broadway: The Thrill of the Chase

(L-R) Ryan Barrentine, Kevin O'Callaghan and Jenna D'Angelo in THE THRILL OF THE CHASE. Photo Credit: Julia Kinnunen

In the program notes to The Thrill of the Chase, now playing at The Drilling Company Theatre, the play’s production company, Mad Dog Theatre Company, describes itself as “a group of artists who tell stories….that are funny, ferocious, unlikely, sexy, rough, inconvenient, loud, unsightly, and - ultimately – provoke questions.”  If so, Mad Dog partially fulfilled its mission in its production of The Thrill of the Chase – but only partially.  To be sure, the play is ferocious, unlikely, rough, inconvenient, loud and unsightly.  But it is not at all funny and you’re unlikely to find it sexy either (unless your sexual proclivities extend to the sadistic).  And the only question it provokes is: Why did Philip Gawthorne, the playwright, have to spend two and a half hours to tell a story that might easily have been told in an hour and a half?

Charlie (Kevin O’Callaghan) is a lazy, selfish, cruel, misogynistic womanizer in his late twenties.  His wealthy father has given him a penthouse apartment in which he can drink beer, shoot pool, smoke weed, do Johnnie Walker shots, snort coke, entertain his girlfriends and revel in the psychological pain he causes them when, inevitably, he ceremonially and sadistically dumps them.  He shares his luxurious bachelor pad with his childhood best friend, Nicky (Ryan Barrentine) who, unlike Charlie, holds down a full time job and is in a committed relationship with his somewhat eccentric vegetarian girlfriend, Izzy (Nicole Samsel).  Charlie dominates the more mild-mannered Nicky and, when Nicky announces that he plans to marry Izzy, which threatens to bring an end to the two roommates’ shared bachelorhood, Charlie determines to stop at nothing to derail Nicky’s and Izzy’s marriage plans.  To that end, he enlists the aid of Faith (Jenna D’Angelo), the fourth member of the play’s ensemble.

The play’s conceit is not an original one and it is not developed in any new, unusual or creative manner.  Admittedly, there are twists and turns but they are mostly anticipated (indeed, in some cases even telegraphed) and it’s doubtful that you’ll find them very surprising.  And all four principals come across more as caricatures than fully fleshed out individuals.

The play’s press release asserts that “Following in the tradition of David Mamet and Neil LaBute, The Thrill of the Chase is a brutal, uncompromising, and darkly comic exploration of masculinity and sexual politics,” and I guess there’s some truth to that: the play is brutal and uncompromising and it does, in a way, seek to explore the more depraved aspects of what sometimes passes for masculinity and sexual politics.  But, unfortunately, Gawthorne is not really in a class with Mamet or LaBute, both of whom are so adept at plot structure and character development and have such remarkable ears for language and dialogue that one is more than adequately rewarded for sitting through their otherwise disturbing works.  Hopefully, Gawthorne, who has been named one of the United Kingdom’s top ten writers under thirty by “Broadcast Magazine,” may make it into their company someday but, based on his The Thrill of the Chase, he’s not there yet.

Given the hands they were dealt, all four actors play their roles admirably and ought not be faulted for the play’s shortcomings.  

Off Broadway: Poetic License

Poetic License by Jack Canfora, a terrific new play that recently opened at 59E59 Theatres, explores the blurred line between plagiarism and mutual cooperation, the secrets that haunt our lives, and the relationships among husbands and wives, parents and children, and young lovers. The entire four person cast is outstanding and this is one play I wholeheartedly recommend.

John Greer (Geraint Wyn Davies) is a distinguished professor of literature at an elite university and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet to boot.  Moreover, PBS is about to do a piece on him and he is on the verge of being named Poet Laureate of the United States, a position with no power and of little remunerative value but one which would represent the capstone of his career.

A soft spoken, self-effacing gentleman, John is looking forward to celebrating his birthday at home with his wife, Diane (Liza Vann) and his daughter, Katherine (Natalie Kuhn).  Diane, a documentary producer, is a tough, controlling, manipulative, and acerbic woman who has played a large role in managing John’s successful academic career and, unbeknownst to John, is hoping to use the occasion of the family birthday gathering to further his career by tying it in with the PBS piece and Poet Laureate appointment.

Katherine, a  graduate student who aspires to be a poet in her own right, no longer lives with her parents but lives with her boyfriend, Edmund (Ari Butler).  She has come home for the occasion and has brought Edmund with her to meet her parents for the first time.  Katherine is clearly “Daddy’s little girl” and her relationship with her mother is strained as mother-daughter relationships often are.  She has warned Edmund at great length to be wary of her mother’s “charm offensive” but is unconcerned over how things might go between him and her father.  As she sees it, her father is “so unintimidating, it’s astounding.”

Edmund, a graduate teaching assistant in literature himself, doesn’t quite see it that way.  He claims to be more nervous about meeting John than about meeting Diane (not surprising as young men traditionally are nervous when meeting their girlfriends’ fathers for the first time – especially when it involves informing them that they are living with their daughters). Moreover, Edmund’s trepidation has been compounded by the fact that, as he puts it: “none of my other girlfriends’ fathers’ had a Pulitzer on the mantle.”

But as it turns out, there is much more that enters into Edmund’s anxiety than first meets the eye: Edmund believes that John’s entire life is based on a lie and that his poetic works have all been plagiarized.  And once he makes that accusation, the questions come fast and furious.

What would lead Edmund to hurl such a charge at so esteemed an individual as John?  Is there really any basis to his accusation and if so, what might it be?  Or is there something about Edmund that we don’t know; might he be mentally unbalanced and his charges totally groundless?

If Jack Canfora, in writing Poetic License, had limited himself only to answering those questions, this still would have been an enjoyable play, if nothing more than a good mystery story.  But Canfora has gone much further than that and has used the issue of plagiarism as a skeletal framework on which to layer issues of much deeper import.  And, as a result, this is not merely a good play but a terrific one.

For starters, Canfora has taken on the whole issue of what constitutes “plagiarism” in the first place.  Is it “plagiarism” to accept someone else’s words or phrases and construct a poem from them?  As John puts it, saying that “is like saying the workman who hauled the block of stone Michelangelo used was really the one who made the statue of David.”  But if that is so, where would one draw the line?

Moreover, what are the implications of all this for the inter-relationships among all the characters?  Has John been dishonest with his daughter in leading her to see him as something more than he is?  Has Diane been honest with anyone?  Has Edmund been honest in affirming his love for Katherine or has he merely used her to get to her father?

The four actors in this production are all absolutely superb in their respective roles.  Butler plays the role of Edmund just enough off-kilter to suggest that all might not be quite what it seems with him, without giving anything away – a fine line to walk.  Kuhn is wonderful as Katherine, capturing the essences of three different relationships in one character: a young woman infatuated with her new boyfriend, Daddy’s little girl who still idolizes her father, and the ever-rebellious daughter whose mother will never cease setting her teeth on edge.  Vann has perhaps the juiciest role of all and what are probably the best lines in the play – and she plays them for all they’re worth.  And the range of emotions and character shifts exhibited by Davies are extraordinary; if anyone comes close to stealing the show, it is he.

Try not to miss it.

Off Broadway: The Threepenny Opera

Joy Franz in The Threepenny Opera.  Photo by Jill Usdan

I have long been of two minds about The Threepenny Opera.  On the one hand, I love the music.  I am enthralled by Kurt Weill’s blend of folk, jazz and avant-garde melodies which is largely responsible for the play’s popular appeal.  (Indeed, the play's most popular song, “Mack the Knife,” has become a jazz classic having been performed by everyone from Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald to Bobby Darin.)  And when the play is performed in one of its softer renditions (e.g. in the Mark Blitzstein translation staged in New York in 1954-61) wherein Macheath is portrayed as more of a lovable scoundrel, a seducer, a rogue, and the kind of bad boy good girls can’t resist, rather than as a vicious serial killer, then the play itself can be lots of fun.

Moreover, this is unquestionably and deservedly Bertolt Brecht’s best known work, an early example of what he considered to be his "epic theater" through which he sought to arouse his audience to social action (as opposed to what he considered to be the “theater of illusions” in which audiences were merely entertained.)  In attempting this, he was remarkably successful: the play was a sensation at its 1928 premiere in Berlin and, by 1933, by which time the rise of Hitler had forced Brecht and Weill to leave Germany, it already had been translated into 18 languages and been performed more than 10,000 times.

But therein lies the rub.  Brecht’s Marxist and anti-capitalist sentiments at the core of this show are anathema to me.  His belief that the least productive dregs of society - murderers and thieves, beggars and whores - ought not be held responsible for their actions; that it is capitalism, the free market and bad luck which have made them what they are; that they, themselves, therefore, bear no responsibility for their behavior, and that their salvation depends only upon some deus ex machina in the form of some sort of governmental magical largesse – all that is, to my mind, not merely preposterous but deeply immoral.

Which means that when the play is performed in one of its grittier translations, such as the one by Michael Feingold that Marvel Rep has chosen to use for this production, I don’t find the play nearly as entertaining as when it is performed in one of its softer and more fun-loving translations.

Of course, one must assume that the decision by Marvell Rep to use the Feingold rather than the Blitzstein translation was completely intentional.  When Marvell elected to include The Threepenny Opera as one of the six plays in its 2012 series of “Banned and Burned” plays in the first place, it was prompted to do so at least in part by its empathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement.  As Lenny Liebowitz, the director has stated: “While searching for a musical for our 2012 season, Occupy Wall Street began to capture national and international attention.  We realized, if there ever has been a time for Brecht, and particularly for Threepenny, it’s now.  The Threepenny Opera is just as radical today as it was when the Nazis banned it, and it still astonishes with its combination of filth and grandeur, savagery and charm.”

And I can readily understand that.  While few if any of the participants in Occupy Wall Street may be murderers and thieves, whores and beggars, they are certainly parasites, willing to accept monetary support, food, medical attention, sanitary facilities, and whatever else they can get from the productive members of society while doing nothing productive themselves.  And their mantra appears to be one of resentment against the “haves,” not because of anything illegal or immoral that the “haves” might have done to acquire their favored positions but simply because they “have” and the occupiers “have not.”  And, like the characters in The Threepenny Opera, the “occupiers” believe that that is simply a matter of luck or the consequence of an evil capitalist system which can and should only be redressed through some magical redistribution of wealth facilitated by the government.

In the Marvell Rep production of The Threepenny Opera now being staged at TBG Theatre, Macheath, aka Mack the Knife (Matt Faucher) is portrayed as a charming scalawag with inordinate sexual appeal to the ladies but, even more than that, as a gang leader, pimp, murderer and thief. A Casanova, to be sure, but a vicious lowlife to boot.  His latest conquest is Polly Peachum (Emma Rosenthal) who has married Mack (or at least believes she has).  Polly is the daughter of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum (Angus Hepburn), who effectively controls all the beggars of London, and his wife, Celia Peachum (Joy Franz), both of whom are dismayed by the marriage and plot to get Mack arrested and hanged.

That is something of a complicated venture since Mack is a close friend of the constable Tiger Brown (Chad Jennings).  Mack and Tiger were at one time army comrades-in-arms and they have remained friends as Tiger provides Mack with protection from the police in exchange for a portion of Mack’s ill-gotten gains.  To complicate matters further, Mack is also carrying on an affair with Tiger’s daughter, (Kelly Pekar), who exhibits signs of carrying his child.  Nor has Mack completely severed his relationship with Jenny Diver (Ariela Morgenstern), the whore to whom he had been both lover and pimp nor, for that matter, his relationships with Jenny’s many associates.

As the play continues, Mr. and Mrs. Peachum seek to prevail upon both Tiger and the whores of London, including Jenny, to betray Mack, leading to his ultimate arrest.  To discover what happens next, you’ll have to see the show.

Despite my misgivings regarding the play’s underlying Marxist philosophy and the decision to use the Feingold translation, I must say that I still enjoyed the production.  Admittedly, it took a bit of a suspension of disbelief on my part and, to a degree, a measure of suspension of moral judgment as well – but isn’t that what theatre is all about anyway?

The performances, after all, were wonderful.  Emma Rosenthal’s voice was outstanding in the role of Polly Peachem but I also was taken with the singing of Matt Faucher (Macheath), Joy Franz (Celia Peachum), Ariela Morgenstern (Jenny Diver) and Kelly Pekar (Lucy Brown).  And Angus Hepburn was terrific in the role of Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum.

So, all told, I did enjoy the play and I imagine you will too.  And indeed, if if should turn out that you share the play’s philosophical, moral, economic and social values more than I do, you may well enjoy it even more than I did.

Off Broadway: Professor Bernhardi

Sam Tsoutsouvas as Professor Bernhardi.  Photo by Jill Usdan.

We saw Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler at TBG Theatre last Saturday night and very much enjoyed it.  First produced in Berlin in 1912, this was one of the seminal plays written in German initially to confront the issue of anti-Semitism.  Schnitzler, an Austrian doctor, novelist and playwright, had sought to produce the play in Vienna but was not permitted to do so: it was banned by the Austrian authorities for being “polemically anti-clerical,” because it “betrayed Austria,” and for its “distorted depiction of Austrian public life.”  Hence, its ironic opening in Germany, that ultimate hotbed of anti-Semitism, where it (together with Schnitzler’s other works, described by Hitler as “Jewish filth”) subsequently was blacklisted and burned by the Nazis.

The play then was not fully translated into English until 1936, five years after Schnitzler’s death, when it premiered in London in a production directed by Schnitzler’s son Heinrich.  And not until now, 100 years after it was first written, has an English-language production of this work been mounted in New York.  This production, by Marvell Repertory Theatre is being presented as the first in its 2012 series of “Burned & Banned” works, which Marvell describes as “the plays you were warned about” and as “six incendiary, provocative, theatrical firestorms – masterworks that have been burned, banned, caused riots, and gotten their casts thrown in jail.”  (The other five are scheduled to be The Threepenny Opera, Night Games, God of Vengeance, Exorcism and Spring’s Awakening.)

We owe Marvell a big debt of gratitude for bringing this long neglected play to our shores in a terrific production now running at TBG Theatre.  The large and very talented cast of 18, led by Sam Tsoutsouvas as Professor Bernhardi, brings a verve, dynamism and theatricality to this production which one seldom finds in off Broadway productions.  Costumes and scenic design are first rate and the play’s director, Lenny Leibowitz, is to be especially commended for maintaining just the right balance among the play’s multitude of personalities.

The play is set primarily in the Elisabethinum, a private teaching medical clinic in fin de siècle Vienna.  Eighty-five percent of its patients are Catholic (in predominately Catholic Austria) but eighty percent of its doctors are Jewish.  Doctor Bernardi, a Jew, is attending to a young Catholic woman who is dying from a septic infection resulting from a backstreet abortion gone awry.  She is, however, unaware of her condition and is in a state of euphoria due to the camphor injection administered by her doctor to alleviate her end-of-life suffering.  When the Reverend Franz Reder, a Roman Catholic priest (Markus Potter) arrives at the request of the patient’s nurse, Sister Ludmilla (Jill Usdan), to perform the last rites, Professor Bernhardi bars his entry to his patient and she dies without ever having received them.

A variety of crises ensue involving the investigation of Professor Bernhardi, charges of anti-clerical behavior and counter charges of anti-Semitism, the continued viability of the Elisabethinum is put in doubt, loyalties and alliances are strained.  And the deepest philosophical and theological questions of right and wrong are raised.  Are the rights of individuals and concerns for the “truth” absolutes, trumping all other considerations, or are there circumstances (and if so, what might they be) when the individual or the truth ought be sacrificed for the greater good?  Should Bernhardi have violated his commitment to just one individual (his patient) as he saw it, in order to avoid jeopardizing the continued existence of the Elisabethinum and his ability to save the lives of many more future patients?  Or should he have acceded to the appointment of a Catholic doctor rather than a Jewish one as a new department head in order to avoid trouble?  Was Reder justified in telling less than the whole truth, at Bernhardi’s expense, for the “greater good” of preserving the reputation of the Church? Was Professor Dr. Flint, Minister of Education (Jonathan Cantor) justified in effectively betraying Bernhardi for the “public good”?

This is a long play (just under three hours) and one that is long on exposition but all that time and all those speeches, monologues and dialogues are used to great advantage.  It's a shame that it took 100 years for this play to make it here but if you see it (and I hope you do) I think you'll be glad that it finally did. 

Off Broadway: The Fall to Earth

Daughters’ impatient appraisals of their mothers may be expressed in a simple rolling of their eyes. ’’Can you believe what she just said?”   Mothers are clueless, they just don’t get it, and it is remarkable that they even manage to survive in the modern world.  And mothers’ attitudes toward their daughters?  Often not much better.  Daughters are unappreciative, unaware of the sacrifices their parents made for them, and living in some high tech dystopia disconnected from traditional values.  “After all I did for her, this is the thanks I get.”

In the opening minutes of Joel Drake Johnson’s terrific play, The Fall to Earth, now playing at 59E59 Theaters, we are treated to a quintessential manifestation of that mother-daughter dynamic in the relationship that exists between Fay Schorsch (Deborah Hedwall) and her adult daughter Rachel Browney (Jolie Curtsinger), who have just checked in together to share a room in a run-of-the-mill motel.  Fay, a low class, loquacious, unsophisticated, parochial, fiftyish matron, lives with her couch potato husband (a Vietnam War veteran and Rachel’s father) in a world of home cooked meals and land lines.  Rachel, on the other hand, is a successful, well-traveled, thirtyish, divorced single mother and business woman, now residing in Chicago and completely comfortable in today’s more modern world of restaurants, room service, frequent flyer miles and cell phones.

Fay is quite taken with the size of their room and the size of the king size bed they will have to share, the motel having mis-handled their reservation and having failed to provide the separate beds that Rachel had requested.  Fay also is impressed with the view from the motel window of trees and mountains beyond the parking lot, with the writing desk in their room and the motel’s lovely stationery, with their rental car’s unlimited mileage, and with having flown business class and having being catered to by the airline’s flight attendant en route.  Rachel could not be more blasé about it all and would have much preferred separate beds.  What is of great import to her mother is mundane and trivial to her.  In short, this mother-daughter outing would appear to have all the earmarks of a typical dysfunctional mother-daughter experience.

But there is much more to this play than first meets the eye.  Fay and Rachel are not just off seeking to bond through some shared “girls’ night out” experience.  On the contrary, they are engaged in fulfilling the unpleasant duty of identifying and claiming the body of Kenny, Fay’s son and Rachel’s brother who, as we quickly learn, committed suicide.

And as the play unfolds, we learn a great deal more.  Why did Kenny kill himself?  Why did Fay arrive without Kenny’s father?  What were Kenny’s relationships to his sister and his parents and how, if at all, did those relationships bear on his suicide?  How is one to explain Fay’s aberrant behavior and what is Rachel’s real relationship with her parents?   Eventually we do discover all the answers in a play which, as it turns out, is much more than just another take on familial dysfunctional relationships.

In addition to Fay and Rachel, there is just one other character in the play, Terry Reed (Amelia Campbell), the police officer who found Kenny’s body, who now is attempting to assist Fay and Rachel in  coming to terms with his death, and who has issues of her own which may or may not cast some light on just what has transpired.

Johnson has constructed an intricate, intelligent play that captures your attention at the outset and never lets go.  And his ear for dialogue is first rate.  Curtsinger (who is also the co-founder of InProximity Theatre Company which is presenting this New York City premiere production of The Fall to Earth) does an absolutely brilliant job in her role as Rachel.  And Hedwall is just incredible in the multi-faceted role of Fay. 

Off Broadway: Neighbourhood Watch

If it is true that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions,” then it is more than likely that, on its way there, it must pass through The Blueberry Hill Development, an imaginary dystopia envisioned by Alan Ayckbourn as the setting for his 75th play, Neighbourhood Watch.  Produced by the acclaimed Stephen Joseph Theatre of Scarborough, UK, Neighbourhood Watch is currently making its US premiere at Brits Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters and is the fourth of Ayckbourn’s plays to do so.

The Blueberry Hill Development is a British, middle class, suburban community, overlooking he Councillor Mountjoy Estate which is a lower class community, perhaps even a slum, at the foot of the hill below it.  The Mountjoy Estate may be home to any number of thieves and ne’er-do-wells but the denizens of Blueberry Hill are no bargains themselves.  Rather, Blueberry Hill appears to house a motley assortment of saints and sinners, victims and victimizers, paranoids, sociopaths, thugs, arsonists, and sexual deviants who, somehow, someway, have managed to hold it all together and maintain a viable community (albeit one suffering from the typical ills of modern suburban living such as petty crime and vandalism).  Or at least the residents of Blueberry Hill have managed to hold it all together until the arrival of Martin Massie, a God-fearing messianic Christian (Matthew Cottle) and his adoring and equally God-fearing Christian sister, Hilda (Alexandra Mathie).

Shortly after the Massies’ arrival at Blueberry Hill, on the day of their housewarming party, Martin encounters a trespasser on his property, a young man who appears to be making a getaway with goods stolen from the home of Martin’s next door neighbors, Bradley Luther (Phil Cheadle) and his young wife Magda (Amy Loughton).  Martin manages to retrieve the goods and returns home to co-host his housewarming party with Hilda, while the youth escapes and continues on his way, presumably to his home in the Councillor Mountjoy Estate.

Upon returning home, Martin meets and greets his neighbors as they arrive for the party: Rod Trusser, a paranoid personality seemingly obsessed with guns, police and security (Terence Booth); Dorothy Doggett, a mousy, fearful widow and the neighborhood gossip (Eileen Battye); Gareth Janner, a strange little man, cuckolded by his wife and intrigued by medieval and colonial instruments of punishment and torture devices (Richard Derrington); Amy, Gareth’s promiscuous, adulterous and alcoholic wife (Frances Grey); and Magda, a music teacher, who arrives alone, without her husband Luther.  (Several other residents of the development who we hear about fail to show up and we never actually get to meet them.  They include Lee Wrigley and his sons, Dirk and Duggie who are thugs and arsonists, as well as Cissy and Sindy, a lesbian couple,  but, although we never actually meet any of them we do get to feel as if we know them and they come to play significant roles in the play.)

As the party gets underway, talk turns to issues of community safety and security, the desirability of building a protective fence around the development, whether or not residents should acquire guard dogs, and the establishment of a community neighborhood watch group.  All reasonable concerns and questions to be sure – until matters get way out of hand.

Ayckbourn’s morality play goes on to chronicle the history of the devolution of this once rather ordinary suburban community as a consequence of its residents implementation of these various safety and security concerns, through to its apocalyptic end.  And one is left to ponder just how much of the blame for causing that apocalypse should be placed on the paranoid, thuggish and sociopathic members of the community and how much more justifiably might be attributed to the supposedly well-meaning efforts of those good God-fearing Christian folk, Martin and Hilda Massie.

Ayckbourn is a highly talented writer and virtually all of his plays, including this one, are well worth seeing   But having said that, this play does fall a bit short of what one has come to expect of him.  It is heavy-handed to a fault – did he really have to name three of his principal characters Martin, Luther and Magda to get his point across? – and it is overburdened with excessive convoluted secondary stories of child and spousal abuse, sado-masochism and repressed lesbianism.  The play is good but it could have been better.

Ayckbourn not only wrote the play but directs it as well and he does a fine job of that.  The entire cast performs more than competently but the true standouts are Alexandra Mathie as Hilda and Matthew Cottle as Martin.  They are both superb.

Lincoln Center: Blood and Gifts

Bernard White as Abdullah Khan in Blood and Gifts.  Photo by T. Charles Erickson

Blood and Gifts by J.T. Rogers, now being staged at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, is the first play we’ve seen since returning home from Africa and it was terrific.  If there are a lot more shows like this in town right now, we might even become more reluctant to travel out of New York.  Indeed, I usually attempt not to review plays before their official openings but I thought that Blood and Gifts was so good that I’m making an exception in this case.  Opening night is not until November 21st but I just wouldn’t want you to miss it.

Set in 1981-91, the play tells the story of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan which culminated in the Russians being forced out of the country by the mujahideen, Afghanistan’s poorly armed but determined resistance fighters.  The play deals with the convoluted relationships that existed throughout the period between the US intelligence community and its counterparts in Britain (MI6) and the Soviet Union (the KGB), as well as with the relationships between the CIA and the US Senate, the United States and the mujahideen, America and Pakistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and on and on.  It is a tale of of international espionage, diplomacy and foreign policy run amok, of promises and lies, assurances and betrayals, crosses and double crosses, and Rogers has told it brilliantly.

On another level, of course, the play can be seen as a metaphor for what is happening in Afghanistan today, with some of the principal actors having assumed slightly altered roles.  Is the US now playing the role that was so disastrously played by the Soviet Union twenty years ago while the Russians have left the stage entirely (although Pakistan is still being Pakistan, Great Britain still Great Britain, and Afghanistan still Afghanistan)?  Has America learned nothing from its past mistakes in Iran and Vietnam so that it is now doomed to repeat them?  Whether you are a mainstream Republican who supported George Bush’s initial decision to invade Afghanistan in the wake of Al Qaeda’s attack on the US on 9/11, or a Democrat who now supports Barack Obama’s “surge,” or a libertarian who agrees with Ron Paul that we never should have gotten into Afghanistan in the first place and that we now should just get out - wherever you might position yourself along the political spectrum - it would be worth your while to see this play if only to enable you to see things in better perspective.  And it should go without saying that for our elected representatives, this play should be required viewing.

Moreover, on yet another level (and perhaps this is the most important of all), this is a story of human relationships, of husbands and wives, parents and children, and especially of fathers and sons and how man’s evolutionary imperative to carry on his line may trump all other considerations.  Indeed, I believe that the “Gifts” of the title does not refer to the military, political or financial aid given to the Afghans by the United States, Great Britain, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia but rather to the players’ children and particularly to their sons as being “gifts from God.”  It is no coincidence, I think, that during the course of the play, Judy, the wife of James Warnock, the CIA station chief in Pakistan, is pregnant with their first child; that Gemma, the wife of Simon Craig, Warnock’s British counterpart, is pregnant as well; and that the wife of Dmitri Gromov, Warnock’s Russian counterpart, while not pregnant, is having her hands full raising the Gromov’s rebellious daughter Masha on her own in Dmitri’s absence.  And it is not until the play’s very climax that we learn of the son of Abdullah Khan, the mujahideen leader, and suddenly the entire play takes on new meaning.

Rogers, as I already have noted, has written a terrific play.  But the play’s success is not just due to him.  It is also a credit to its director, Bartlett Sher, who has maintained the play’s momentum through an immense number of scene changes from Washington, DC to Islamabad to the mountains of Afghanistan, without missing a beat.  And, of course, to the play’s superb cast led by Jeremy Davidson as James Warnock, the CIA agent who must negotiate the delicate and dangerous lines between his British, Soviet and Pakistani counterparts, America’s own political leadership, and the Afghan mujahideen, while battling his own demons; Michael Aronov as Dmitri Gromov, Warnock’s Russian nemesis in Pakistan, whose personal life also ends up impinging on his political persona; Jefferson Mays as Simon Craig, Britain’s MI6 agent in Pakistan (and a Jew to boot!) who comes closest to stealing the show; Gabriel Ruiz as Colonel Afridi, the head of Pakistan intelligence (ISI) in Islamabad (who has his own agenda); and Bernard White as Abdullah Khan, the Afghan leader who has secrets of his own.  Kudos to them all.