Suspense cultivates a showdown in ‘The Farm’

STAGE REVIEW

October 04, 2011|By Don Aucoin, Globe Staff

Lindsey McWhorter as Parker and Dale Place as Finn in Boston Playwrights… (BOSTON PLAYWRIGHTS’…)

THE FARM

Play by Walt McGough

Directed by David R. Gammons

Sets, Jon Savage. Lights, Karen Perlow. Costumes, Gail Astrid Buckley. Sound, David Remedios.

At: Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, Boston. Through Oct. 23. Tickets $30. 866-811-4111, www.bostonplaywrights.org

To be a spy, to quite literally live a lie, inevitably forces you into some morally murky territory.

In “The Farm,’’ Walt McGough’s taut and absorbing new play at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, a CIA agent named Finn is forced to confront the reality that he lost his moral compass - and quite possibly his sanity - in that murk.

“The Farm,’’ directed by David R. Gammons, signals that the 27-year-old McGough is well on his way to fulfilling the significant promise he’s shown for some time. A Brookline resident and a graduate of the MFA playwriting program at Boston University who works as an administrative assistant at SpeakEasy Stage Company, McGough won this year’s Capital Fringe Festival Audience Award in Washington, D.C., for best comedy for “Priscilla Dreams the Answer.’’

With its ambitious blend of John le Carré and Franz Kafka, “The Farm’’ is anything but comic. Gammons and his creative team, especially sound designer David Remedios and lighting designer Karen Perlow, conjure a brooding atmosphere, including several minutes at the beginning of the play that unfold in complete darkness.

Dale Place, so memorable as a supernatural postman in New Repertory Theatre’s production of Steve Yockey’s “afterlife: a ghost story,’’ delivers a mesmerizing performance in “The Farm’’ as another kind of spook.

After 24 years in the field, a time during which his marriage dissolved and he grew estranged from his son, this spy is looking to retire and finally come in from the cold. But there’s one big question that needs to be cleared up first: Why, exactly, did a young man named Khalil, whom Finn was training in Paris, end up dead?

Khalil, played by Nael Nacer (“The Aliens’’), prowls the stage or stands offstage, a shoeless wraith, his eyes never leaving Finn’s face. Sometimes he speaks, but only Finn can see and hear Khalil, and only he can see and hear another character (also played by Nacer) who figured prominently in Finn’s past.

Finn’s self-protective, near-feral instincts are evident from the moment he first enters the office of a coldly businesslike CIA analyst named Parker, who is played with compellingly intense focus and control by Lindsey McWhorter (Elizabeth in SpeakEasy’s “In the Next Room, or the vibrator play’’).