Also this issue: Momma Drama David Wise channels his grandmas into a show with everything and the kitchen sink. -Debra Auspitz Jazz It Up -Juliet Fletcher Trio with Brio -David Shengold Get Lost -Toby Zinman Street Smart -David Anthony Fox Q&A with Merián Soto -Interview by Deni Kasrel PROK -David Anthony Fox Tied with Strings Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim ponder music’s place in the world. -Andrew Ervin

January 23-29, 2003

theater

Cry Havoc

by Toby Zinman

The first time I was in Egypt, I was astonished and thrilled by the life on the streets: the teeming mass of people, the colors of the flowing clothes, the smells, the filth, the sounds, the intensity of life lived in such crowds and such heat. Nick Rye, sound designer for Cry Havoc, suggests all that world coming through the little window of a squalid room in Cairo, from the wail of the muezzin to the barking wild dogs.

Unfortunately, good sound design cannot sustain a play through two hours. And a play which has claimed to be "eerily prescient," at that. Written before 9/11, Tom Coash's play attempts to dramatically demonstrate the making of a terrorist, to reveal what we are desperate to understand, the mystifying logic that makes an intelligent person decide to destroy himself and others as an act of religious faith.

The goal, at least as it appears from Seth Rozin's direction of this new script, is to make the terrorist a sympathetic figure. But this gambit is hedged: The victims of his terroristic suicide are not people Coash and Rozin apparently identify with or expect us to identify with, but the Egyptian police -- easy, faceless bad guys, whose cruelty is the trigger for the play and for Muhammed's conversion to fundamentalism and suicidal violence. Terrorism does not choose its victims with such cause-and-effect vengeance: Randomness is what makes terrorism terrifying. Mingled into the play's compromised reasoning is that Muhammed is a victim of torture and, as a homosexual in Egypt, a sexual pariah.

And since Muhammed (Piter Amal Fattouche) has been tortured before the play begins, we never meet the man his English lover Nicholas knew; he is now withdrawn and angry, and thus we never see a glimpse of the relationship as it presumably was, especially since neither actor conveys any intimacy through touch or glance. "Pain is the evidence of love." That premise pretty much contains the adolescent notions governing this play.

"What's your relationship to this man?" This question is asked over and over again, and it's a good question. It is hard to believe that Nicholas loves Muhammed in any kind of substantial, longtime way since he has no knowledge of him: what his relationships are with his parents, that he was a political cartoonist before he entered the university, his views on religion and government and patriotism and sexuality. It sounds as if they've just met. Coash seems to despise the British; Nicholas (Tom Byrn) is self-absorbed, helpless in an emergency, incapable of anything other than nostalgia for an England that is all infantilized memories of food and place names (much of the tedious dialogue is made up of lists); his only forceful expression is, "Too bloody right!" (Byrn's very fake accent doesn't help either), and the character is incapable of the dialectic energy the play needs to sustain a political argument. The caricatures of homosexuals and colonials are summed up in Nicholas' term of endearment for Muhammed: "Little One."

Maureen Torsney-Weir does a splendid turn as the British embassy clerk who functions as the agent of self-discovery for Nicholas; it is a funny and surreal device in a play that cannot accommodate comedy or surreality.

There are other smaller puzzles. For example, why would a person who had just brought a basket of fruit to his injured friend then lob that fruit, piece by piece, out the window at barking dogs? Why would a poor person insist on burning rather than washing sheets he had wet in the night? There are, of course, possible explanations for such behavior, but like the bigger questions, Cry Havoc doesn't provide the answers it pretends to offer.

Through Feb. 9, InterAct Theatre Co., The Adrienne, 2030 Sansom St., 215-568-8079