Lee Blessing's "When We Go Upon the Sea'

Now, honestly, who could resist a play about George W. Bush arriving at the The Hague to stand trial for war crimes before the International Criminal Court of Justice? It had to be a chief fantasy of those on the left who supported Barack Obama in the hope that he would restore the rule of law, prosecute the culprits of the previous administration, and provide accountability for America's ultimate war of aggression.

Of course, W. was never going to The Hague in any case (unless on an international warrant executed outside American soil), since the U.S. has never recognized the International Criminal Court. But a guy can dream, can't he? That is precisely what Lee Blessing has done in When We Go Upon the Sea, now in its premiere performances by the InterAct Theatre Company.

The play takes place on the eve of what is supposed to be Bush's first appearance before the Hague tribunal. W.'s name is never actually pronounced (the script identifies him as "George"), but he's an ex-U.S. president with a Texas drawl, a wife named Laura and two daughters. Just how he got into the toils of The Hague is never explained, or why he is traveling alone.

George does remark offhandedly that Laura's not with him because, presumably, it will be unpleasant for her to see her husband in the dock (although, according to reports, she doesn't see much of him on the ranch, either). But you will take this play amiss if you interpret it in naturalistic terms, or expect something along the lines of Frost/Nixon or Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy.

Land of Kafka and Beckett

Supposedly, W. is on Dutch soil, and much is made of this fact in the script. Really, though, he is in Limbo, a concept discarded by Catholic theology but handily appropriated for literature by Kafka, Beckett and their heirs and assigns.

The manifest setting of the play is a hotel suite, where W. (Conan McCarty) is attended by a somewhat mysterious Dutch manservant, Piet (Peter Schmitz), who describes himself as a hotel employee. His job, as he states it, is to make its guest of dishonor as comfortable as possible, especially in view of the fact that his pending accommodations will be considerably less agreeable.

It seems that Piet is detailed to handle all high-profile prisoners in a similar way. Why they should receive such luxurious treatment— including the services of a high-class prostitute, Anna-Lisa (Kim Carson)— isn't made clear.

Piet is, at first, the soul of discretion. He does let fall a provocative observation or two about W.'s tenure as president, but quickly recovers his sober Dutch mien. Perhaps he is a warder of sorts? In Kafka, too, the role of minor functionaries is often ambiguous.

The Dutch paradox

What we do learn is that Piet has worked in the castle— uh, the hotel— for a long time, and that he seeks neither other employment nor another home. The hotel, he explains, is his real country, and although he waxes eloquent on the subject of the Dutch Golden Age once his tongue is suitably loosened (W., as it seems, has fallen off the wagon with a vengeance, and Piet joins him with shots of bourbon and even stronger stimulants), Piet is suitably modest about today's Netherlands, a small state paradoxically best known for the surprising stature of its citizens: a nation of Gullivers in a Lilliputian land.

W. himself is particularly incensed at being tried in Europe, getting off a couple of sexually-tinged jokes about its withdrawal syndrome in a fight; the modern Dutch boy, he cracks, would not put his finger in the dike, but leave a note instead.

The evening progresses toward its figurative and literal climax when Piet suggests that W. might like some female company to relieve the tension of his situation; it is a service, he says, that the hotel provides willingly to former heads of state, and is of course perfectly legal in the Netherlands. W. suspects a trap; but then he is already in a much larger one. (Kafka, too, sometimes doles out furtive sex to his victims.) Enter Anna-Lisa.

Reader, I will draw my own veil of discretion over what takes place next, except to assure any Republicans who read this that the presidential equipment is still in working order. Piet makes good on his role, and the much darker personal history hinted at between him and Anna-Lisa apparently goes over W.'s head. Instead, like errant husbands everywhere, George makes sure to leave a message for Laura with the ex-presidential cell phone before embarking on his new day.

Rumsfeld's "'Old Europe'

If this plot seems a slender reed and its action almost hieratically static, the true interest of the play lies in the subtly entwined strands of shared history and guilt that Blessing weaves between America's imperial present and the past of what Donald Rumsfeld famously called "old Europe."

By the standards of the Nuremberg Code, George W. Bush should certainly stand indicted for war crimes; but that was victors' justice, and no one has yet vanquished the U.S. except itself. The Hague court is fit only to deal with the likes of America's leavings (a Slobodan Milosevic, a Charles Taylor), thereby advertising only its own impotence and the absence of any international law worthy of the name.

The larger question the play raises, however, is whose hands are clean enough to judge? The Dutch were an empire, as we are now. America sat in judgment at Nuremberg in the ruins of a city it had bombed to rubble, and there were dozens of other cities like it in Germany and Japan, including the ones we had just atom-bombed. The ashes of millions of Jews still hung in the air, and few European nations were innocent of collaboration in history's worst crime.

George W. Bush may not be the man to say it, but hands less clean would be hard to find. If Blessing's mysterious hotel is to be regarded as the anteroom to judgment, then what it finally represents is the moral limbo we all inhabit, the impossibility of judgment itself.

Who elected Bush?

Piet slyly suggests at one point than in condemning our fallen leaders we seek to rehabilitate ourselves, not to truly reform but to sin anew. W. makes the same point in his homelier way. The American people, he reminds Piet, did elect him, if not twice then at least once. True indeed. So we did.

Conan McCarty's "George" is both a dead-on imitation and a satire of our 43rd president, although in the case of George W. Bush imitation and satire are almost indistinguishable. Peter Schmitz's Piet, at once deadpan and provocative, makes a genuine character out of an enigmatic symbol, and Kim Carson is a businesslike temptress whose personal trauma is revealed only as a self-alienated, third-person soliloquy that makes her the most mysterious presence of all.

Between these slick European types, W.'s transparent foibles seem almost winning. He was, in retrospect, the perfect American dictator.

Director Paul Meshejian keeps the proceedings going as well as their static framework allows; set, lighting and sound all contribute to the ambivalent, subtly menacing mood the play evokes.

When We Go Upon the Sea is New-York bound after its Philadelphia run. It's well worth seeing here, a play whose invitation to mock our last president lets none of us off the hook.♦


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