InterAct's 'Skin in Flames'

Nothing to the imagination

ROBERT ZALLER

I’ve never understood why political theater receives a bum rap. Oedipus Rex is not an inestimable play, nor is Julius Caesar. Bertolt Brecht and Edward Bond, two of the 20th Century’s greatest playwrights, wrote nothing but political plays, and even Chekhov’s pathos is finally inseparable from his politics. It might stretch the point to say that theater is political in its essence, but not perhaps by much. Yet political theater as such generally has a bad name.

That’s why Seth Rozin’s InterAct Theatre Company performs such a valuable service to the Philadelphia stage. It deliberately seeks work that directly addresses political issues. Absent much meaningful dialogue in our very nominal national democracy (not to mention our very corrupt local one), such theater is about as close as most of us can come to a public forum.

Political theater does run the risk of didacticism, which means taking a superior attitude toward one’s audience rather than inviting it to debate. This is the case with the Catalan playwright Guillem Clua’s Skin in Flames, the InterAct’s final season production.

Symbolic baptism

Frederick Salomon (Buck Schirner) is invited back to the unnamed but quite generic Third-World country where, 20 years earlier, he had taken his world-famous photograph of a child in flames. A spurious regime, American and U.N.-certified, is now about to take power, and Salomon’s presence will symbolically baptize it. His handler is a certain Dr. Brown (Joe Guzman), a physician by trade but in fact a sinister go-between for various mercantile and imperial interests.

While we see Salomon being interviewed by Hanna (Leah Walton), a reporter of equally dubious credentials, we also see Brown sexually brutalizing Ida (Charlotte Northeast), a distracted young mother desperate for medical assistance for her comatose child. Much of the latter action takes place behind a drawn curtain, but enough of it is visible (and audible), including full nudity for both participants, to leave us in no doubt of what a thoroughly bad dude our doctor is.

The automatic guilt of Westerners

Hanna, meanwhile, is berating a sweaty and hapless Salomon (dictatorships being generically tropical, too) for failing to rescue or locate the girl whose suffering had made him famous. This seems a trifle harsh, given that Salomon himself had been concussed by the blast he photographed; but in Mr. Clua’s ultra-correct world, Westerners are given only the choice between accepting an immitigable guilt, or, like Brown, expressively acting out a radical evil.

As it begins to dawn on us who Hanna may actually be, she threatens Salomon with a revolver that (to take any possible suspense out of the scene) has earlier been brandished at his back. There follows one of the longest 15-minute stretches in recent stage memory, as Hanna goes through a sublime inventory of emotions while failing to carry out the principal duty of anyone showing a gun onstage. Would I have been the only member of the audience to involuntarily channel Ralph and Alice on “The Honeymooners”?

Struggling with lamentable material

All participants do their best with this lamentable material. Buck Schirner’s native dignity as an actor fights for purchase in a role that is essentially a single protracted apology. Joe Guzman gets to strut through the Ugly American role (Mr. Clua seems to regard the U.S. and the U.N. as interchangeable entities). Both the ladies struggle with accents that fit them about as well as false mustaches. No director, and no actress, could credibly negotiate the gun scene. Charlotte Northeast’s Ida might have been better left contemplating her next step at the play’s end rather than taking it, but that would not be Mr. Clua’s way. In leaving nothing to the imagination, he fails at any point to evoke it.

Praise is due for Matt Saunders’s shrewd set and Peter Whinnery’s effective lighting. Christopher Colucci’s sound did its best to gin up Clua’s script, but could give it no aid. All talents were worthy of a better project. May next year bring it.