by Chris Jones, theater critic
published January 24, 2007
Brett Neveu -- surely the most interesting young playwright living and working in this town -- is getting better and better at cryptic little plays.
In "Harmless," his latest such effort for the TimeLine Theatre, Neveu takes us to the office of a nervously authoritative college president (played by John Jenkins), where an adjunct professor of composition (played by David Parkes) is wriggling on the couch. It seems one of the members of the fiction-writing class has turned in a disturbing little assignment, penned in the first person and containing -- maybe even threatening -- much brutality and violence.
The president is worried about the danger to his college, a personal fiefdom. The squirrelly adjunct doesn't know whether to stand tall for creative freedom or stand small for the sake of his paycheck. You think you're about to see a play about artistic license and educational responsibility.
But then a military psychologist shows up (played by Juliet Hart). It turns out the student has been stationed in Iraq. What he is now saying and doing is thus of broader national interest, maybe even a matter of national security. But then isn't the student just writing fiction? And isn't freedom of speech one of the things he was just fighting for in Iraq?
And thus the play suddenly twists to the issue of how an educational institution assimilates (or fails to assimilate) someone who has witnessed rather more than the typical undergraduate.
"Harmless" takes a risk in that the actual student under discussion never appears in the play (Rebecca Gilman's "Spinning Into Butter," which this play slightly resembles, did much the same thing and caught some flak). And indeed, there are times when "Harmless" feels as if it dances around its main theme, afraid to show us the man at its heart. Spend too much time discussing someone who is not there, and audiences start to rebel. So if he were to revise this thing, Neveu should probably spend more time with the issues of those in the play and a little less describing the unseen.
But I suspect Neveu's main intent here was to show us three different authority figures with three selfish agendas -- even the liberal writing teacher is self-serving and slightly pathetic -- as a kind of metaphor for the many inadequate and oft-ignorant responses to the Iraq muddle, many of which leave the military with insufficient support. And in that regard, this strikingly Mametian play offers a powerful jolt to one's head.
"Harmless,' which is given a simple but pleasingly cryptic and elliptical premiere from director Edward Sobel, is only about an hour long. And the stakes aren't always high enough. Still, an hour proves sufficient duration for Parkes to paint a strikingly rich picture of a teacher whose insecurity threatens his craft, and for Jenkins to spin some notably malevolent (and shrewdly counter-intuitive) silver-haired charm.
You're not ready for the play to end: Its climax feels uncomfortably premature. In some ways, that indicates a dramatic theme that could and should be expanded and deepened.
In other ways, it cleverly makes Neveu's point that people in power rarely like to look too deeply at something -- or someone -- that might threaten their position.
