Theatre review: In A Garden

When I was a theatre critic in New York, I saw a lot of plays. A lot. Many of them were good, but many more of them were bad. I mean baaaaaaad. One of the things I learned by seeing all those bad plays was that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, see a play which features the words "Israeli-Palestinian conflict" in the press release. Last night I saw In A Garden by Howard Korder at South Coast Rep, and I can honestly say this is the first play I've ever seen that's even vaguely about the Middle East that didn't make me want to stab myself in the eye with a fork.

I know it doesn't sound like high praise, but writing about the Middle East is tricky. You run the risk of alienating part of the audience and boring another part to tears. It's very difficult to write about objectively--everyone has an opinion on this topic--and so it's very difficult to end up with a play that's not delivered from the top of a soapbox. Plus, who keeps up with the news these days? Even in New York, audiences aren't really on top of either current events, or the intricate and tortured histories that led up to current Middle Eastern events.

So In A Garden was surprisingly...adept, for lack of a better word. An American architect is summoned to a fictional Middle East country by the Minister of Culture, who wants to commission a small private summer house. The Minister is worldly, sophisticated, diplomatic, and seems to have his country's best interests at heart. In true political fashion, he seems unable (or unwilling) to answer a question directly, and so their conversations, which begin in 1989 and range up to 2004, are fascinatingly oblique. As they both dance around the design for the summer house, current events, the history of the country, and the country's current leader, the architect is gradually exposed to a wealth of secrets. The last scene of the play, as one might expect given the subject matter, is conducted between the architect and an American soldier in 2004, in the bombed-out former Ministry of Culture.

Perhaps because the two main characters never address "The Middle East and Its Issues" directly, the play never descends into pedantry. The audience is presented with the same tantalizing bits of information as the architect, and so we are free to draw our own conclusions. It's a great way to back into the subject matter, and because the play's country is fictional (although an obvious amalgamation of real countries), it doesn't run the risk of offending anyone or becoming immediately outdated.

The scene transistions were a little long for my taste, but whatever. I really enjoyed getting out of the house and getting some culture. Who would have thought I had to move to California to finally see a good play about the Middle East?