On The Stage Series: Travels with a Masked Man

Travels with a Masked Man, by John Hadden, is a play about deception, “the game” (espionage) and rough filial love. It is a fifty-minute, two-character, solo performance based on his book, Conversations with a Masked Man: My Father, the CIA, and Me.

Haunted by unanswered questions about his childhood overseas, a man confronts his father, an ex-CIA chief who ruminates darkly on the American Empire, the human animal, and himself. Alternately horrifying, hilarious, and poignant, their verbal contest covers Cold War material from Vietnam to the Middle East and the Bomb, from abstract art to James Bond films––but the real conversation, the subtext, is about what they mean to each other.

John Hadden has worked as a theater-maker in the Berkshires and abroad for 40 years. He was a founding member and Associate Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Co. in Lenox, MA, Artistic Director of the Hubbard Hall Theater Company in Cambridge, NY, and more.