Review: Men of Tortuga by Street Corner Arts
by Michael Meigs
Where is Tortuga and whom are these conspirators targeting?
Tortuga is Spanish for "turtle" and there are Tortugas all over the place. Lots of islands, for example -- a former pirates' haven off the northern coast of Haiti, an island off Venezuela, others off Costa Rica, in the Gallapagos and down in the Florida Keys. There's an unincorporated community in California close to the border with Mexico. My brother, in town for a visit, misremembered the title as Men of Tortuga Street, since the ancient reptile is honored in many another California community.
I had no difficulty imagining that these conservative suits and their hired expert in kinetic kills might be studying someone like charismatic ideologue Hugo Chávez, elected president of Venezuela in 1998. Chávez is still in office today despite economic mismanagement, audacious grandstanding and the hammering that he has given the wealthy elites and middle class. In another life I was the State Department officer waiting at the bottom of the ramp to welcome him upon his first visit to Washington.
The timing corresponds, as well. This script was one of about a thousand unsolicited manuscripts mailed to the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 2004. They produced it as part of their new plays series in the converted space in the parking garage. Cast member in this production Rommel Sulit saw it during that first run.
Jason Wells was earlier an actor; now he's a playwright, having received the 2010 Elizabeth Osborn New Play Award from the American Theatre Critics Association, recognizing his second play Perfect Mendacity. The Osborn award "honors the work of a playwright who has not yet achieved national stature – has not had a significant New York production, been produced widely in regional theaters or received other major national awards."
The audience at the Hyde Park Theatre didn't get that background. Actors' bios were inserted in "Eyes Only" files meant to mimic confidential briefers, passed from hand to hand. The playwright was not named and therefore, by inadvertent omission, his background was compartmentalized secret information. Programs built around that clever concept arrived for later performances, suitably downgrading playwright data into information available to the audiences.
So the where of Tortuga is nowhere, a relatively well developed large city where an important meeting is scheduled soon in a skyscraper as an effort to negotiate a compromise -- why or about what, we don't know. Our glimpse of conspiracy begins in a ramshackle warehouse where the suits inhabited by a super cast of Austin actors are discussing the logistics of an assassination.
Joe Penrod, Rommel Sulit and Garry Peters evince not the slightest doubt of the necessity of the operation. Kenneth Wayne Bradley as Taggart the consultant gives them a fine paramilitary tutorial in velocity, weapons, kill percentages and collateral damage. It's always a pleasure to see Bradley as Mr. Menace. It's eerie to hear an apparent CEO (Peters) and some accountant types (Penrod and Sulit) working to apply cool business logic to explosions, hidden weapons, defeating security and cutting a throat. This is the stuff of George Clooney crime film capers, humor at its blackest because it's played with deadpan seriousness.
Gary Peters as the grimly determined CEO Kit Maxwell rises above this absurdity. His character despises the unnamed man in the unnamed capacity who's the target, to the extent that he's willing to die in that meeting room to make sure the assassination succeeds. The playwright toys with that certainity, however, afflicting Maxwell with an earnest young man named Allan Fletcher, who's trying to broker a compromise based on a three-inch-thick proposal that no one wants to read. Maxwell learns that the younger man has gotten an invitation to the crucial meeting. Collateral damage now has a face: that of Benjamin Summers, well known to Austin Playhouse subscribers.
With a series of reversals and mistakes, in the second act the conspirators find themselves back in the warehouse, perhaps betrayed, holding young Allan Fletcher prisoner. First-act abstract discussions of assassination become second-act specific debates on whether, when and how to execute Fletcher.
As you could expect with a cast of this quality, the intrigue runs fast and the tension is finely calibrated. Credit goes both to director Andrea Skola Summers and to her intelligent ensemble. After the furious build, playwright Wells' dénouement is less satisfying than everything that went before. But the ride is such an entertaining one that we can forgive him that -- and anticipate that perhaps this or another Austin theatre company will work on getting the rights for Wells' Perfect Mendacity.
Comments by Adam Roberts in the Austin Chronicle, December 15
Review by Elena Passarello at austinist.com, December 15
Review by Ryan E. Johnson at examiner.com, December 17 (last day of the run)
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EXTRA
Click to view the 'confidential' program dossier for Men of Tortuga
Men of Tortuga
by Jason Wells
Street Corner Arts
