Playwright: Edward Bond.At: Theatre Mir at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: 773-975-8150; www.theaterwit.org; $25. Runs through: April 15
Rarely have Americans experienced the omnipresent foreboding that pervades villages on the southeastern coast of England, where church choirs sing "Eternal Father, Strong To Save" (aka "The Seafarer's Hymn"), drama clubs re-enact Orpheus ferrying the Styx, and the daily test-fire of cannons remind the denizens of their island kingdom's vulnerability to attack by foreign powers or cruel nature herself. Add the potential threat posed by an arms race between the British and German navies, and it's no wonder that eccentric behaviors sometimes emerge.
In the unnamed seaside town depicted by Edward Bond, this malaise finds expression in the local draper's conviction that creatures from outer space are infecting the countryside (before you scoff, recall the panic induced in our own country once by a radio play proposing a similar invasion). Thus, when a shipwrecked stranger washes up on the shore during a storm, volunteer coast-guard sentry Hatch suspects an extraterrestrial plot and refuses the distraught mariner's plea for assistance in rescuing his missing companion. Fortunately, the dowager Mrs. Rafi extends hospitality to the castaway, seeing in him a confederate to her own schemes.
Hindsight vision tells us that World War I will break out a few years hence, with heavy damages forever altering society as it existed during the reign of Edward VII. How its citizens respond to their imminent extinction is the focus of Bond's allegory: Mrs. Rafi stubbornly adheres to protocol, while secretly plotting her daughter's escape. Hatch succumbs to paranoia and despair. Old Captain Evens accepts universal upheaval as an inevitable part of evolution. In the end, the young survivor and the drowning victim's fiancée depart to ensure the continuation of their species in more propitious surroundings.
Theatre Mir's non-representational aesthetic is evidenced in Magritte-like motifs: characters are ensconced in pews before filing onstage in drill-formation. Thomas Dixon's soundscape begins by locating us in a hurricane so realistic that we can almost feel the salt spray, only to send us home two hours later with a merry march played on the kazoo. A funeral is reduced to slapstick chaos, with mourners hurling the deceased's ashes at one another in playground-sandbox fury.
Director Jonathan Berry anchors Bond's slippery tonal ambience with exemplary tag-team turns from Rachel Slavick and Patrice Egleston as the formidable Mrs. Rafi and her meek sidekick, flanked by Patrick Blashill's genially phlegmatic sea-dog/philosopher.