Men of Tortuga at Hyde Park Theatre [Review]

One weekend when I was in grad school, my father visited and insisted that we spend Friday night like I would were he not there. I took him to see a show, but the only performance in my little college town that weekend was a poetry slam in which a guy read pervy poems in front of projections of men cleaning windows with their soaped-up junk. Dad and I agree this was not the best daddy-daughter outing in history.

Too bad he isn't visiting Austin this month. We could've seen Street Corner Arts' local premiere of Jason Wells' Men of Tortuga at Hyde Park Theatre. The play is a lightning-fast series of scenes about the worst possible outcomes of politics. Dad would have loved it—ninety minutes of rapid-fire jokes, scheming, philosophizing, and a James Bond-style briefcase rigged for homicide.

In a Chicago warehouse, three suits of very different personality types meet with a sniper assassin to plan the murder of a bigwig member of the other team (whoever they are). We don't learn much about the man who is about to be killed, nor the reasons that the conspirators have their panties in a twist. We just know that these men are willing to take the initiative to end his life. Pretty soon, and without much prompting, they become equally game to kill innocent bystanders in the process.

The play finds dark humor in the machinations of these men, and the actors handle the bounces between black musings and broad satire very well. Rommel Sulit plays the most anxious suit with bleary eyes and a staccato urgency. As the top suit, Garry Peters brings a slow, glittering energy that blows over the heated discussions of the ensemble like an icy wind. Joe Penrod has the strangest arc of the play, and he moves deftly from hand-wringing middle manager to the orchestrator of the coldest arm of the plan. But Kenneth Wayne Bradley steals the show as the weapons expert. He looks the part, with his shaved head and cargo pants, but delivers some of his most sinister missives with a great loose-jawed bewilderment.

The tiny Hyde Park Theater works well for Andrea Skola Summers' cinematic direction: it amplifies the tiny takes and close cuts that the ensemble doles out. My only quibble is in the moments of prop-centric farce at the end. The bits and stage combat were a little off, and it seems they needed a heavier outside hand to mine the big ending moments for their comedy.

But that's small potatoes in the grand scheme of the evening. Men of Tortuga is weird and crass and funny. It ain't Pinter at the Barbican, but that would piss my dad off, too.