STAGE REVIEW : Dangerous Truth in Mark Lee’s ‘Rebel Armies’

SAN DIEGO —  Though the pen may be mightier than the sword, sometimes they work in conjunction with each other. One word, casually inserted into a foreign correspondent’s story, can kill.

Neal Bateman (Jim Phipps), a wire service stringer who has just been expelled from Uganda, is afraid that one of his words has--ever so indirectly--slaughtered an entire village.

In “Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad,” at the Old Globe’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, playwright Mark Lee amplifies Neal’s anxiety into an examination of the importance, the difficulty and the danger of truth-telling.

It’s an evergreen subject for playwrights, but Lee’s specifics are fairly fresh, and he handles his chosen themes with considerable agility. This play is likely to get a buzz going in the brain.

But it’s not as likely to set the heart pumping. Neal’s story is told--or revealed--in retrospect, after he has been expelled from Uganda, in the relative safety of the home (lots of barbed wire and beer bottles, designed by Kent Dorsey) of the wire service’s Nairobi correspondent (Richard Kneeland). A Ugandan refugee, Christina (Cheryl Francis Harrington), hired by the correspondent as a prostitute for Neal, is the character who gets him to divulge what happened.

For a moment, when Christina recalls her own reason for leaving Uganda and then realizes the potential peril of being seen with Neal, we begin to feel the heat of the situation. Harrington has the presence and the inner fire to make the most of this moment.

Generally, though, this is a reflective play, an inquiry into events of the recent past--events that are not re-enacted on stage.

As such, an undue burden is placed on the actor playing Neal to carry us along on Neal’s mental journey--or at least so it appears in Adrian Hall’s staging. Actor Phipps has mastered Neal’s nervous demeanor--the correspondent describes him as a gazelle--but he hasn’t visibly opened himself up to the fuller dimensions of the role. We don’t see him progressively inching closer to the truth, or finally acknowledging it in his gut.

Also, Lee has written a couple of lines for Neal that simply don’t ring true; would this gun-shy young man really ask two prostitutes to chant “om” in order to give him the time to say something to his host? Well, maybe so; Lee was there--he was himself a wire service stringer expelled from Uganda.

To a lesser extent, the play also follows the older correspondent’s journey from being the completely detached observer into acceptance of his own share of responsibility for what happened. But while Lee paints the first part of this journey almost to excess, establishing this man as an observer and interrogator--and loner--of the first order, his eventual acceptance of responsibility feels like an afterthought.

Regardless, Kneeland has a convincingly scruffy, devil-may-care air about him, marred only by occasional swallowed lines, sacrificed to the dictates of arena-style blocking (the blocking is also a problem for the “freeze frame” that ends the first act; those of us on one side of the theater literally couldn’t see it).

The correspondent’s jaded sensibility is shared by the older of the two prostitutes, well portrayed by Rose Weaver. Lee has drawn interesting generational parallels here between two very different classes of people.

One of Lee’s points is that the editors of Western publications aren’t very interested in Africa and the daily events there--unless it can be dressed up in highly dramatic imagery or in thumb-sucking pieces about “the big picture.” Neal began his job with fantasies of writing dispatches under sweeping headlines like “Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad,” but he has found that the reality is more complicated--involving many little murders instead of massive military ventures--and that not many of his editors care about such things.

So it’s ironic that Lee’s play really isn’t about the many little murders among Africans either; it’s about the ethical quandaries faced by Western journalists within Africa. Of course that’s probably what Lee felt most qualified to write about. Still, it’s as if he assumed that the people who select plays, even at enlightened theaters like the Old Globe, would be no more interested than Neal’s editors if he focused on the Ugandans rather than the Westerners.

This assumption may be incorrect. At least in this production, when Christina recounts what happened to her in Uganda, it’s more gripping than anything that Neal has to say. Neal’s story is important--this play is essential viewing for journalists. But like the correspondent in the play who missed an assassination because he was busy with his own affairs, Lee may have missed the best story in Uganda.

In Balboa Park, San Diego, Tuesdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m. , (March 28-29 and April 10 at 7 p.m.), Sundays at 7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m., through April 15. Tickets: $20-27.50; (619) 239-2255.

REBEL ARMIES DEEP INTO CHAD

By Mark Lee. Directed by Adrian Hall. Sets by Kent Dorsey. Costumes by Christina Haatainen. Lights by Chris Parry. Sound by Jeff Ladman. Dramaturg Mark Hofflund. Stage manager Robert Drake. With Richard Kneeland, Jim Phipps, Rose Weaver, Cheryl Francis Harrington.