Culture Shock

By T.E. Kalem

MECCA by Ted Whitehead

Oppressive heat. Scalding sunlight. Not a whisper of a breeze. The place is a vacation resort near Marrakesh in Morocco, but the guests' garden patio might almost be a military compound under siege. Its protective wall is topped with shards of implanted glass and barbed wire. Palm fronds are silhouettes against an implacably blue sky, and in the distance one hears the eerie, insinuative call of the muezzin, summoning the faithful of Islam to prayer.

If one wants guidelines to the cross-cultural resonances in Mecca, currently at Manhattan's Quaigh Theater, ample hints may be found in E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the works of Paul Bowles and Graham Greene. Conflicting cultures are perhaps less Playwright Whitehead's concern than conflicted lives. All but one of the six Britons who have come to Morocco for a holiday are in perturbed states of sexual disarray, which they tend to cloak in mocking humor and racy banter.

The exception is Sandy (Shelby Brammer), an innocent of 20, who trustingly leaves the compound with an Arab boy. She is raped and sodomized, detonating the melodramatic climax of the play. For Andrew (Joseph Daly), a doctor, and his taut, prim and principled wife Eunice (Mila Burnette), sex is parsed in the past tense. Andrew does make a halfhearted pass at Sandy, but one feels that it is intercepted by his conscience. Martin (Stephen D. Newman), a bisexual member of the diplomatic corps who vastly prefers men, delivers his sardonic lines with Wildean brio. He describes his forays among the local boys as "doing my bit for Anglo-Arab relations." Martin's frustrated wife Jill (Holly Barren), a sensualist with an unbridled tongue, tries to get a bit of her own back in a horizontal frolic with Ian (Christopher Curry), a soccer star. But hot as he is for Jill, Ian proves dismayingly un-proficient off the playing field.

Despite certain obvious contrivances, Mecca is a richly entertaining and captivating drama. Whitehead does not believe in low-profile characterization. Whether spiky or spicy, each of his people, including the Arab resort manager (Arnaldo Santana), has a clear personality. They may not elicit affection, but what they choose to do or not do is never boring.

The actors are a finely tuned collection of theatrical instruments, and, in his directorial debut, Actor Kevin Conway conducts the ensemble with symphonic finesse. He varies the tempos of wit, irony, lust, menace and shock deftly, and inter-culturally speaking, he certainly knows his oud from his oboe. --T.E. Kalem

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