THEATER REVIEW: DEVIL'S ADVOCATE

Just say No-riega

By Ed RampelL

In most bourgeois plays the dramatic tension arises out of individuals’ interactions. For example, think of Tennessee Williams: There are electric sparks a-flying from family dynamics in, say, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, between Brick and Big Daddy; Or in A Streetcar Named Desire and Eccentricities of a Nightingale (currently in repertory at Glendale’s A Noise Within,), there’s the psycho-sexual frisson between Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois or between John Buchanan and Alma Winemiller, respectively. Yes, one can argue that Williams and his dramatis personae reflect and are even extensions of Deep South society, but for the most part his drama emerges from the collisions of the characters’ psyches.

Not so in Donald Freed’s Devil’s Advocate, which, alas, is entering its final weekend at LATC. To be sure, there are plenty of interpersonal fireworks exploding between the two characters who bring this two-act work alive. But the biggest explosions -- vividly suggested by scenic designer Tesshi Kakagawa and sound designer John Zalewski, along with some blaring rock music -- are reserved for the U.S. military, as this production is set during the Yanqui invasion of Panama in 1989, the so-called “Operation Just Cause.”

That duo of aforementioned characters is Archbishop Jose Sebastian Laboa (veteran actor Tom Fitzpatrick) and General Manuel Antonio Noriega (Robert Beltran). If father-son angst animates the action in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof or smoldering sexuality ignites the relationships of Stanley and Blanche in Streetcar or John and Alma in Eccentricities (and of Brick and Maggie the Cat in Tin Roof), the main force generating conflict in Devil’s Advocate is none other than politics.

Imperialism, covert actions, narco-trafficking, gun running, terrorism, torture, psyops, money laundering, the Panama Canal, the Contras, Fidel, George H.W. Bush (hell’s hottest seat is reserved for this evil genius of mediocrity and his satanic son), et al, form the complex backdrop to a fairly simple plot. During Bush’s invasion of Panama, Noriega flees to the Papal Nuncio, the archbishop’s residence, to seek – in the immortal words of Quasimodo – sanctuary. There, “Pineapple Face” (as the pockmarked Noriega was derisively called) confesses his “sins” to Laboa, who -- as the Vatican’s Grand Inquisitor -- served, literally, as the eponymous “Devil’s Advocate.” 

(Beltran coincidentally portrayed “El Diablo” in a 1990 movie with that name, and his Noriega runs the gamut of emotions, from the defiant to the penitent, the pious to the pagan, the boastful to the bashful. As it turns out, Laboa – a Basque who lived in Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain – knows something about nationalism and resistance.)

And there’s more to Noriega than the “strongman” that met the American eye. Was he devilish dictator or nationalist saint? Feature filmmakers such as Oliver Stone have tried (so far) unsuccessfully to bring the enigmatic Panamanian leader to the screen, but Freed has succeeded where Stone failed to dramatize Noriega. Barbara Trent’s trenchant 1992 The Panama Deception won a well-deserved Best Documentary Oscar, which gave Trent a not-to-be-missed opportunity to use the live Academy Awards telecast as a megaphone to deliver an anti-Bush message to a vast audience. Like Trent, Freed tells us another side of the story, and what may have really motivated the elusive Noriega. Operation Just Cause is reduced to a drug bust on an epic scale -- an imperial invasion of an entire country to arrest a single narco-trafficker. Up against the wall, motherfuckers, indeed.

During Pineapple Face’s confession at the Papal Nuncio, we get a compelling look at those henchmen of imperialism like Noriega and Saddam Hussein, who played footsy with Washington, were on the CIA’s payroll and so on, but eventually stepped out of line and lost favor with the “free world” colossus of the north. Jose Luis Valenzuela, the Artistic Director of the Latino Theater Company, who did such a superb job helming La Victima at LATC, walks a taut tightrope here directing a piece that’s both a personal drama between two men, but at the same time, a play about big ideas. In the process, Valenzuela elicits wrenching performances and thought provoking notions about the true nature of U.S. foreign intervention and more. 

Devil’s Advocate is experiencing its U.S. premiere at LATC, and I advocate that fans of political theatre catch one of its last performances. On Friday April 22 and Sunday April 24 Freed will participate in an after-play discussion with the actors and director Valenzuela. If you want it, here it is, come and get; but you better hurry ’cause Devil’s Advocate’s going fast (the next stop according to Freed is England’s York Theatre Royal in 2012 with Beltran). You’ll have a devil of a time.

Devil’s Advocate runs through April 24 at the Los Angeles Theatre Centre, 514 S. Spring St., CA 90013. For more info: 866/811-4111; Devil.