THEATER REVIEW: THE INDIANS ARE COMING

Woo (Peter Chen) in The Indians are Coming.

Rowland out the punches

By Ed Rampell

There is a saying that “the personal is political,” and playwright Jennifer Rowland does a skillful job interweaving private lives with public service in The Indians Are Coming To Dinner. The Indians in the title refers to people from India, not America’s indigenous people.

Rowland’s tragicomedy is set during the Reagan era, wherein stage and big and little screen veteran Michael Rothhaar plays Harold Blackburn, an archetypal WASPy upper class Republican. Harold laments having been pushed as a young man by his domineering late father (whose portrait dominates Tom Buderwitz’s set and which lighting designer Leigh Allen highlights throughout the action) to abandoned an alluring State Department career to go into the family business. After years of running this reasonably prosperous if dull company, Harold receives intimations that the reelected Ronald Reagan is considering tapping Harold to become Our Man in India. Following Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination, it’s believed that the Reagan regime requires an extremely talented diplomat to represent Washington at New Delhi.

Harold gets it into his head that he’s just the man for the job, and his youthful dreams of diplomacy and a life abroad in the Foreign Service return and reanimate him. So being a Reaganite, Harold sets out to secure his overseas sinecure by, naturally, politicking, and schemes to make a good impression on his old friend Anil (Kevin Vavasseur), who is visiting the States with his family. Harold believes this distant relation of the Gandhis is extremely influential in India, and a kingmaker vis-avis vetting Harold for the post he’s now yearning for.

To make his ambassadorial aspirations come true, the whiskered, rotund Harold buffoonishly garbs himself in an outrageous outfit befitting a maharajah, conjured up by costume designer by whimsical Audrey Eisner. The man who would be ambassador impresses his family and servant into service in order to create a feast designed to impress Anil. Of course, this would-be banquet provides the play’s comic pratfalls. Along the way, Harold – who prides himself on being considered not just a good, but “a great guy” – reveals his true stripes as a petty tyrant. He coerces dutiful Nora-like wife Lynn (Sara Newman-Martins) and faithful servant Woo (the droll Peter Chen) into concocting cuisine with an Indian flare in order to literally curry favor. Hippy dippy son Christopher (Justin Preston), a high school student who has been, shall we say, Bogarting that joint, my friends, is imposed upon to attend the repast.

So is daughter Alexandra (the gifted Thea Rubley), who has flown home to San Francisco from her college to pursue her dream of becoming an opera singer by trying out at a hard to get into audition, which could lead to going to Italy and the launching of her singing career. Operatic music is a recurring theme in Indians; Harold is a big fan of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto, the first opera Harold shared with Alexandra when she was a little girl.

But the monomaniacal Harold selfishly believes that his daughter has crossed the continent solely to partake of the all important dinner aimed at buttering Anil up so that he’ll give the nod to Reagan to send the Blackburns globetrotting off to India. Does Harold subvert Alexandra’s dreams, just as his patriarch had done to him? Does Harold do to Alexandra what the hunchbacked Rigoletto inadvertently did to his daughter, Gilda?

Rowland has written a clever, resonant, sly script. When Harold finally gets down to brass tacks and confronts Anil about the ambassadorial endorsement he’s seeking, Anil’s reaction is a plot twist this reviewer didn’t see coming. The stuff that dreams are made of!

Julia Fletcher ably directs this world premiere production that deserves life beyond a small Venice playhouse. Burderwitz’s split level set is imaginative as it divides the spatial – and emotional – spaces of the play up. Chen subtly spoofs “Oriental” screen and stage stereotypes, just as Vavasseur and Rikin Vasani (as Anil’s son Deepok) provide some instant comic karma by poking fun at the “enlightened” spirituality of Eastern religion. When, like Ibsen’s Nora, Newman-Martins at long last has her Doll’s House moment, she too shakes off the caricature of the long suffering wife who silently suffers as a mere extension of her husband. There’s more to Lynn, after all, than being mere comic relief.    

Rubley is a real standout; not only is the recent USC grad a fine actress with promise, but she has the lovely singing voice her character requires in order to convey the role’s authenticity. As Harold, Rothhaar convincingly portrays a man who is a needy, bundle of contradictions, who -- with youthful dreams thwarted -- grasps once more for that elusive brass ring as old age approaches. Rothhaar’s Harold has an air not unlike that other salesman, Arthur Miller’s immortal, yet all too human, Willy Loman. Alas, as Harold seeks to have attention paid to him, Harold is the low man on these Indians’ totem pole. But he should not despair: If New Delhi eludes him, there will always be a role for Harold as one of Reagan’s mass murderers in his Central American Contra war. Beside, as we see in this comedy drama about foiled fantasies of what one could have been had he/she remained true unto his/her own self, there are more ways to kill sopranos than with bullets.


The Indians Are Coming To Dinner runs through March 25 at Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice, CA 90291. For info: call (310)822-8392 or see www.PacificResidentTheatre.com.