Fringe 2015: 'Alias Ellis Mackenzie' by Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental

The crew, speaking only Spanish, work with the English-speaking actors, move the sets around, and call “Cut” (or whatever the Spanish word for “cut” is) at critical moments. It is like being on a soundstage during the shooting of an actual show. The actors play to the camera rather than to the audience. After a while, the device becomes less obvious, and the show moves on, still out of order, but with fewer distractions.

The audience keeps track of the scenes by reading script pages projected on the sides of the stage. The first time the dates go backward, there is puzzlement, then we settle in for the fun. The script also sets the scene for us, so we know whether we are in Miami, Colombia, or D.C., the office of the CIA or the DEA.

Family man and double agent

The story is based on the adventures of Barry Seal (Thaddeus Phillips), a real-life pilot and drug smuggler whose alias was Ellis Mackenzie. Seal was involved with the CIA, Colombian drug lords, and American politics in the 1980s. In this show, he is portrayed as a double agent and a family man — he talks to his wife and son on the phone, trying to navigate family life and his drug-smuggling career. To avoid charges from the DEA, he makes a deal to run a sting operation for them, but it turns out it’s not that simple. The DEA wants to get drugs off the streets of Miami, while the CIA wants to mastermind a political coup. The result can only be disastrous.

The show gives us snatches of Seal’s life and his smuggling operations but keeps it lighthearted, so that the final outcome comes as a surprise, although one of the more startling scenes had been Seal’s death in a hail of silent bullets.

The sets are versatile and surprising. The trunk of a deconstructed Cadillac Fleetwood holds Seal’s insurance — tapes of all his conversations. It also doubles as a limo for a meeting with a drug kingpin called Griselda. High above the stage, two wings with propellers and seats in the center represents Seal’s plane. He and his copilots climb into the seats and pretend to fly the plane.

The importance of the ensemble

While the show is fun to watch, it has moments that don’t quite work. Misunderstandings resulting from language barriers are amusing but clichéd. A scene with drug lord Carlos goes on far too long, and Carlos’s voice can barely be heard, making it seem even longer. The nonchronological order keeps us from getting too involved with the characters. And the practice of not identifying who plays what in the program means that the entity of the play takes over any individual performances. Perhaps that is what is intended.

That we can follow the disorder shows us just how much mass media techniques have invaded our lives and how we make sense of nonsense, like those sentences with the words all misspelled that we can nevertheless understand.