The Internationalist

Viewed from one angle, what Anne Washburn is getting at in her new play, The Internationalist, is clear — primarily because she’s dealing with familiar attitudes towards the naïveté of Americans abroad. (Hey there, Henry James!) Nevertheless, throughout most of the confusing script, it’s a challenge to figure out what Washburn thinks she’s saying, in part, because a large percentage of the dialogue — too large a percentage, if you ask me — is in a manufactured language meant to serve the play’s feeble purpose.

The wisp of a plot plunks Lowell (Zak Orth), a well-meaning businessman, into a Central or Eastern European city on an unstated assignment. (Set designer Andromache Chalfant imagines that the locale has deteriorating walls and arches the color of dried blood.) We then watch him flounder around for 34 hours at an office where accounts of an unspecified sort play a crucial role.

At the airport, he’s met by Sara (Annie Parisse), who describes herself as a colleague, and the pair quickly end up in bed. When he gets to the office the next morning, he learns she’s actually an in-house flunky ordered around by staffers Nicol (Gibson Frazier), Irene (Nina Hellman), James (Liam Craig), and boss Simon (Ken Marks). Another co-worker, Paul (also played by Marks), isn’t on the premises much — Lowell encounters him at a local bar — but he seems to have done something criminal with those accounts.

Sometime after wrestling with the consonant-plagued native tongue and the inexplicable goings-on, Lowell shouts something about his experiences being akin to living in an underwater fantasy. Who could blame him? Watching Washburn’s piece brings on the same feeling, a response that the playwright apparently intends. She’s trying to create sympathy — more than that, empathy — for Lowell by putting audience members in as like a frame of addled mind as he’s in. But just as you wouldn’t write a boring play to depict characters living boring lives, you don’t want to write a frustrating play aimed at depicting a terminally frustrated figure.

The people to thank for being such good sports on this non-momentous occasion are the intrepid players. Frazier, Craig, Hellman, and Parisse practically deserve combat pay for having to learn many, often very long speeches in Washburn’s imaginary language. Marks, in his two roles, gets off more easily. So does the wonderful Orth, who ran away with Rope last season and who makes Lowell a likeable shlub against formidable odds. Director Ken Rus Schmoll does his best to keep the traffic moving.

The truly upsetting aspect of Washburn’s offering is the vast opportunity that she’s missed. Showing today’s American abroad merely as someone flummoxed by the unintelligibility of a foreign tongue is a cop-out of major proportions. Americans abroad in the contemporary geopolitical climate face a much more daunting obstacle: growing anti-U.S. sentiment. While this disturbing attitude may not always be directed at the individual, it’s palpable nonetheless. Therefore, artists should realize that it’s incumbent on them to take the situation into consideration.

Over the last few weeks, this has been done by film director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu in Babel and in the latest Cracker episode, which was broadcast on BBC-America. How mistrust of U.S. foreign policy has complicated the lives of Americans airing their passports is at the crux of both these entries. It’s a sad day when theater lags so embarrassingly behind the rest of popular culture in tackling such an important topic.