Lost at Sea

So many words, so few ideas. In his tedious satire Was He Anyone?, playwright N.F. Simpson tries so hard to bite into the red tape surrounding governmental “charity” that he chokes on it. Not even the Hunger Artists Ensemble’s talented cast can do more than give this sociopolitical spoof a good crack on the back, when what it really needs is the Heimlich maneuver.

The action unfolds on a serene aqua-and-white set. The actors, all clad in various shades of white, change roles as they change the furniture around, donning different coats, accessories and accents to create new characters. Mrs. Whitebrace (stylishly played by Kelly Jo Little) wants her husband rescued from the deep blue sea–the poor fellow fell overboard, and his life jacket is getting waterlogged. She applies to various agencies, which make her fill out endless forms. Others want to exploit her husband for publicity. She is interviewed, interrogated and quizzed by government officials, professional philanthropists and the press. All of them make promises, but no one comes through with a solution. Everyone is oh-so-concerned, but nobody does anything to rescue the drowning man.

In the best scene of the evening, Mrs. Whitebrace answers a battery of questions from one agency that wants to know if her husband is using his time in the water to some advantage–learning a fall-back trade like bricklaying, perhaps. Or improving himself with the arts–after all, commercial concerns aren’t everything. When she replies no, that it’s all he can do to stay afloat and yell for help, the committee clucks over the situation and votes to send him a grand piano–one adapted, of course, to the demands of floating in the ocean.

As the months pass, Mr. Whitebrace can be heard first playing “Chopsticks” and finally a Rachmaninoff concerto. He has been lionized in the press, his wife has been made famous and his plight has become a cause celebre. And still no one does anything to get the guy out of the water. We never meet him, and the only time we hear him is from off the bow of a luxury liner whose passengers discuss how annoying his cries for help are and how dull philanthropy can get if you’re not careful.

In another scene, which has no visible connection to the rest of the play, the founder of Universal Well Wishers outlines her principles of giving to those who need it–as she once did single-handedly for the entire Chinese nation when its first Five Year Plan folded.

But none of the scenes makes a lot of sense–not even as theater of the absurd. Simpson isn’t witty enough or skilled enough to make us laugh very often. And even those few titters can’t alleviate the strain of the play’s heavy-handed diatribe: The government wastes time and energy when it comes to helping people in trouble; people posing as philanthropists are often hypocrites who really care about nothing but themselves; sympathy is cheap–even when it’s expensive. One can appreciate that Simpson works out certain questions about bureaucratic inertia. But in the end, he drowns his outrage in redundancies–along with his unseen protagonist.

A fine cast that includes Chuck Muller and Paula M. Harvey tries so hard to coax interesting characterizations from this vapid material that you can practically see the wheels turning. The fact that the show does have a few funny moments is all owing to their skill and not to the playwright’s insights.

Yes, it is hard to do good. Yet many people do it daily. Yes, all governments are inefficient, and bureaucrats are frequently self-serving. Yet belaboring those issues via the pseudo-intellectual convolutions we see here only makes them seem unsolvable and inevitable; Simpson joins the very forces he is trying to expose, and he bores the audience in the process. He may wannabe absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco, but he’s only N.F. Simpson.

–Mason

Was He Anyone?, through December 21 at the University of Denver’s Margery Reed Hall, on the DU campus, 893-5438.