Call it the Theater of Suspicion: a long tradition of exposing corruption in high places. It started 2,500 years ago when Aeschylus, in the Agamemnon, treated the ancient Greeks to the spectacle of a queen cohabiting with a man not her husband and then killing that husband when he returned home from the Trojan War.
Theater of Suspicion was still going strong 400 years ago in Hamlet, when that muckraker William Shakespeare gave us a king who attained his high office via murder, and a court in which even the Prince's school friends were spies. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, it was the institution of the family that had to be exposed, as Ibsen did in 1881 in his still-shocking Ghosts; a decade or so later, George Bernard Shaw, in Mrs. Warren's Profession, revealed that a clean-thinking, intelligent young capitalist had been funded all her life by the proceeds from a string of brothels.
Lest anyone think that some corner of society was untouched by scandal, the 20th century brought us dramas by Brecht, Genet, Hochhuth and Dürrenmatt, all attesting to the crime and degeneracy lurking behind every respectable appearance. And as the new century dawned, at least one thing was certain: Wherever anyone laid claim to a life of probity, some playwright was bound to find sin and squalor.
Which brings us to 2006, and Men of Tortuga. This tautly written new play by Jason Wells follows in the footsteps of its venerable forebears by showing us the homicidal mania behind the glass and steel of the modern corporation. Of course, after thousands of years of theatrical exposés, we're hardly surprised by yet another revelation of human evil (and in the Enron era, corporations may seem too easy a target). But Wells is a virtuoso writer whose distinction is stylistic: Using cryptic, circuitous dialogue, he makes his case without ever telling us the name of the corporation, the motives of the conspirators or the offense that the object of their murderous hatred committed.
With a reticence that owes something to Pinter and Kafka, Wells tantalizes us with brief clues and fleeting allusions, so that the experience of the play becomes an exercise in problem-solving. Who are these suits, and why are they so set on committing a murder? Who is the young man to whom one of them speaks, and what sort of "compromise" lies in his four-hundred-page "summary." Why does the killing have to occur on a particular day and at a specific place, even if it endangers a roomful of innocents? And why does a key character say, apropos of nothing, "People are dying. There are people whose lives depend upon … depend … "?
Wells' play clearly fits within the Theater of Suspicion — we're supposed to be shocked that these executives are plotting murder — but it succeeds because it's more ambiguous than we expect, more modernist, more abstract. It's Oedipus Rex as rewritten by Gertrude Stein. It's Rigoletto as re-orchestrated by Philip Glass.
Which is not to say that there's no plot. As the play begins, we meet three execs who are discussing with a fourth man how best to carry out a murder. They are Avery, Kling and Maxwell, and they discuss with weapons expert Taggart the benefits of guns and rocket launchers, and agree that the victim has to be killed by a certain date. One of the conspirators offers to do the killing himself, to hide a weapon in his briefcase and to execute the unwary victim just before a missile comes through the window and erases everyone else, attacker included.
As the play progresses, we meet another man, Fletcher, who seems to think he has a way out of whatever impasse has led to the murder plot. But no one is much interested in Fletcher's "compromise," and the murderers proceed to choose the likeliest of weapons.
Then one of the conspirators does something unexpected, an important secret is spilled, and matters come to a crisis. By the end of the evening, we pretty much know what has happened, even if we still don't know why, or, in one important case, to whom. If we're half-mystified, well, we're also half-satisfied.
We're only half-satisfied with the acting in the show, too, since one of the effects of Wells' otherwise impressive style is to make it difficult to determine just what individualizes each character. So Douglas Jones is fine as Avery and David Breitbarth is solid as Kling, but one feels they could switch roles without any gain or loss. James Clarke as the weapons dealer Taggart at least dresses differently from the others — costumer Michele Macadaeg has him in casual clothes while the rest are dressed for business — but, like the others, he too seems to be playing himself, as if Wells' style doesn't give him any pegs on which to hang a character.
Paul Molnar as Fletcher does a good job of playing supplicant in his first scene and then transforming into an indignant injured party later in the play, but Eb Thomas as Maxwell seems just a little too distracted to be entirely credible.
Director Greg Leaming highlights everything humorous in the script — it's often very funny — and designer Marjorie Bradley Kellogg places the actors amid a few modern furnishings on a set backed by a gray metallic matrix reaching from floor to ceiling. It may be that Kellogg captures the basic feeling of Wells' play — cold and complex — better than any other artist involved in the production.
Still, the artist whose work in the show is most intriguing is Wells himself. After all, this playwright understands that the Theatre of Suspicion has reached a climax — what's left to expose? — and that there's nothing to do now but experiment with form. Mysterious or not, there's a certain purity to Men of Tortuga, as if a familiar body has been X-rayed for the first time and we're finally seeing its bony essence.
That's what one comes away from the play remembering: its unusual style, its clean language and rhythms. If this play were only about corporate skullduggery, it would already be obsolete. But Wells has something rare in a world of dramatic realism, and that, simply, is an original way with spoken English. I understand that Tortuga is his first play (he's mostly been an actor). I can only guess where he'll go with his next experiment.
And I hope to be there when it reaches the stage.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2006.