IF YOU GO
What:The Mission by Jules TascaWhere: New Theatre, 4120 Laguna St., Coral Gables, through May 4When: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 1 p.m. Sunday (additional shows 5:30 p.m. last three Sundays in April)Cost: $40 Friday-Saturday and Sunday matinee, $35 other shows ($15 student rush tickets)Info: 305-443-5909 or www.new-theatre.orgDuring his long life, Jules Tasca has written more than 100 plays, taught playwriting at Oxford University, acted with a commedia dell'arte troupe in Italy, won a number of awards for his work. An admirable résumé, however, is no guarantee of a profound or even engaging result after a playwright turns out one more script.
The Mission, a Tasca play getting its world premiere at New Theatre, offers ample proof that even the most seasoned playwright (Tasca is 69) can fail to fulfill his play's intention -- its mission, if you prefer.
In a program note, Tasca explains that he wanted to explore ''gender'' as a tragic flaw. What he actually means is sexual orientation, though he points to being straight, gay or bisexual as complicating factors in categorizing people as male or female, an ''. . . ontological module in human behavior that can be as damning as pride or jealousy or an outworn social code.'' That notion isn't likely to go over well in the GLBT community, nor should it.
Tasca sets up what he intends as a classic, tragic struggle between good and evil in The Mission. The ''good'' guy is Father James Corcorran, a young Catholic priest who has decided it is his mission to minister to prison inmates.
Joe Conte, the reluctant recipient of his counsel, represents the darker colors of human behavior. Intelligent and intense, Joe wound up in prison just a semester shy of earning his bachelor's degree in history.
His crime? Trying to kill the man who murdered his younger brother -- or so Joe says, with certainty.
Tasca likens Father James and Joe to Othello and Iago. Joe, who conveniently (for the purposes of the play's intellectual and thematic underpinnings) idolizes the corrupt Borgias and the deft manipulations of Machiavelli, manages within the confines of the prison's meeting room to take the priest to a ruinous -- if personally liberating -- place.
Throughout the script, Tasca doles out facts and sudden twists that rarely ring true.
We can believe that two educated young men could know the things that become debate fodder for Joe and Father James. That they would discuss those things as they do in The Mission seldom seems credible.
Stylistically, the production's simple design wisely keeps the focus on the tumultuous struggle between the two men. Micheal Foster's lighting and Ozzie Quintana's sound design contribute to the mood in artful, crucial ways.
Some of the sporadic tentative quality at Saturday's opening performance was doubtless due to director Ricky J. Martinez's decision to have the two actors switch roles at each performance. The opening night crowd saw an intense and magnetic Ricky Waugh as Joe, a bland William Gressman as Father James; Friday's audience saw Gressman as Joe, Waugh as the priest.
This isn't, in fact, the first time New Theatre has tried such role-swapping. Bill Hindman (my late father) and Bill Yule did it in a 1995 production of The Value of Names.
Martinez says he wanted to challenge the actors and demonstrate their versatility.He certainly did the former, but to prove the latter, you'd have to see each actor in both roles. No thanks.
