''Permanent Whole Life," which refers to a kind of insurance annuity, starts out in David Mamet territory, with one older fellow, Mort Golman, lecturing his young associate, Henry Kohl, about the treachery of women and the beauty of an insurance industry that allows agents to so easily withhold money that people think is coming to them.
If you thought Mamet could be glib, though, he has nothing on Dohrn, whose indictment of insurance companies rests on stereotypes about the sleaziness of insurance salesmen. Mamet, at least, earns his satirical stripes with the outrageousness of his dialogue or the development of his themes.
Mort, who is even sleazier than Mamet's salesmen in ''Glengarry Glen Ross," is passionate about Jewish tradition, congratulating Henry on marrying a member of the tribe. Mort's marriage with an Italian woman failed, at least in his mind, when she had no idea how many Jews died in the Holocaust.
What's Dohrn getting at here? Is Mort a hypocrite for looking to Judaism for moral grounding even though he's an utterly rotten human being? Or does Dohrn think that Judeo-centrism is part of that rotten-ness? Or is everything merely undifferentiated grist for Dohrn's mill?
Ken Baltin has a knack for playing these big, loud, over-the-top types, and he's certainly the center of attention in this stylish production under Wesley Savick's direction. Whether he's obnoxiously hectoring Henry (Gabriel Kuttner) or putting the moves on a client by pretending that his wife is dead, Mort is the prototypical dirty rotten scoundrel you love to hate.
