OUR MAN IN SANTIAGO
by Mark Wilding
Directed by Charlie Mount
The AMT Theater
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
You kind of sense trouble from the title: Our Man in Santiago. The title is a riff on—no, that gives it too much credit—rather a way of capitalizing on (I bet you thought I was going to say a rip off of) the title trope set by novelist Graham Greene’s classic 1958 satire of the spy game Our Man in Havana. “Our Man [in]…” wherever has become shorthand for a lighthearted treatment of espionage. So that knocks the originality quotient down a few pegs right off the bat.
The new play by Mark Wilding purports to be a satire as well: “a raucous political farce,” reads the boilerplate, “inspired by the true story of the spectacularly failed U.S, attempt to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected leader” in 1973. Taking place mostly in a hotel room, its characters are a young, idealistic agent who wants to play by the rules (Nick McDow Musleh), a veteran agent who doesn’t (George Tovar), a Chilean maid who turns out to be working with the veteran as an “asset”…and, by phone, when the back wall opens up to reveal the President’s desk in the Oval Office, Richard Nixon (Steve Nevil) and Henry Kissinger (Michael Van Duzer).
As the spy-savvy of you can already see, the characters are all familiar tropes too, and Wilding does nothing to subvert our expectations of them, so once the dynamics are in place, nothing much is surprising. The earliest tell is the maid, meeting the young agent before the veteran arrives. At first she’s all broken, accented English, but once they start talking in earnest, her English sentence structure slips into fluidity that shouldn’t fool anyone (it certainly wouldn’t fool you, though it’s supposed to, because it also fools the young agent, yawn) and the rest of the game, which I won’t particularize here, is fairly schematic.
Charlie Mount’s direction adds injury upon injury by being stylistically chaotic. How much to blame him for the hotel scenes one can’t conclusively say: the play as a whole seems to aspire toward an American version of Joe Orton-ish noir farce, but it hasn’t the POV originality or the plot machinations to get there; so how far can the director push it there artificially? But he directs the Nixon-Kissinger stuff like a Saturday Night Live sketch in a bad year (and the less said about the actors cast in those roles, the kinder), so whatever patina of verisimilitude he achieves gets blasted to smithereens fairly decisively. After that it’s really about your stamina as you watch actors working very hard to keep the leaden balloon aloft.
The distance from Santiago to Havana is about 542 miles. The distance between Our Man in Santiago and the likes of Our Man in Havana is roughly the same. And let’s leave it at that.