Gabe Bettio (Bathug), Ryan Tramont (Tom Blander) and Brad Fryman (Dr. Fine). Credit: Ann Bartek" />
Christopher Boal begins Order with an intriguing gambit: a man seeks to do and be good in a world inclined to do evil. However, about halfway through the play, Mr. Boal loses trust in the possibilities of this promising dramatic situation, and Order declines into a mash-up of farce and pop psychology.
The aptly named Tom Blander (Ryan Tramont), whose life is indeed growing blander and blander by the moment, is searching for a way to live a meaningful life. A failed professor of philosophy, forced out of academia by campus politics, Tom has purposely taken a lowly job as the administrative assistant of sales manager Adam Jacobi (Mac Brydon) because he believes that he can change how people behave by giving them a living example of a humble man doing the best he can to keep life courteous and orderly.
It doesn't work, at least with Jacobi, who abuses Tom without mercy, calling him an incompetent fag whose only purpose in life is to answer the phone, make him coffee, and lick his boots. It doesn't work with the local homeless man (James Washington), who cows Tom every day into giving him a dollar. It doesn't work with his wife Maisy (Amanda Plant), who hates Tom for losing his academic job and distances herself by endless re-readings of the Harry Potter novels. It doesn't work with his best friend Joe Davis (James Edward Becton), who gently chides Tom for moral posturing. And it doesn't work with Dr. Fine (Brad Fryman), Tom's incompetent therapist, who is more interested in having Tom fill his own needs for control than in helping Tom overcome his troubles.
And Tom does have his troubles, very deep troubles: at night, in his sleep, he speaks in tongues with a rough-hewn gravelly voice and has visions of dismemberment and violence or of himself as a giant striding the earth. In short, despite his Buddhist efforts to rein in what he sees as his lower nature, he is one angry man who doesn't know what to do with his anger.
Until he meets Bathug (Gabe Bettio), an otherwordly creature (perhaps demon, perhaps guardian angel) who says he has been with Tom all his life as his protector and who now, in this moment of existential crisis, with Tom consumed by his unexpressed rage, has come to give Tom what Tom really craves: power, permission, release. It is as if the Buddha were given the chance to become Charles Bronson in order to deal with all the sleazy bastards of the world.
But instead of allowing this promising dramatic and moral conflict to take itself to whatever lengths it wants to go, Mr. Boal seems to lose trust in the powerful situation he's created and instead opts for shtick and standardized narrative that undercuts everything he sets up.
Tom's philosophical struggle gets psychologized down to his alcoholic mother abandoning him at the age of four. Tom's boss, the fag-hating Jacobi, turns out to be a fag himself, willing to submit to Tom's seductive air of authority. Bathug's gift of power, of the permission to speak the truth, devolves into penny-ante corruption, expressed in Tom working for an evil drug firm and killing off everyone who threatens to expose him, including his therapist, his best friend, and his wife. He's eventually captured by Detective Atlow (William Laney), who himself, we find out, is a corrupt cop -- of course. And as if such a rotation of clichés were not enough, Mr. Boal makes Tom a cannibal.
This falling-apart of the story is also reflected in the play's structure. Austin Pendleton directs the first half of the play briskly as Tom moves from abject goodness to assertive pleasure under Bathug's tutoring. But once Tom accepts Bathug's gift, the structure gets muddled, and Mr. Pendleton struggles, with mixed success, to keep the action focused and the momentum intact. A long mid-play blackout covers a costume change by Tom, quick scene shifts substitute for dramatic tension, and the exposition feels offered up just to get the story done.
Which is a shame because Mr. Boal has a great cast working his words for him, each actor delivering a distinct and grounded character, and it would be exciting to see them wrestle with more challenging material in the second half of the play. And Mr. Boal seems capable of providing that. He packages the philosophical ideas at the heart of the play into credible dialogue that carries some voltage, and it's exciting to see a writer have his characters struggle to make sense of these large ideas within the confines of their smaller lives.
Order left me wanting more, but more of what Mr. Boal offered at the beginning of the play, not at the end. It's an enjoyable enough theatrical experience -- but only just enough.
(June 2010)