Corporate Punishment

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THREE HOTELS

AUTHOR: JON ROBIN BAITZ

WHERE: OFF-BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: America's most promising playwright is promising no more; with harrowing work, he arrives.

An amiably hard-nosed international businessman describes how he faced down a moralizing junior, then recalls that his wife asked, "Did you have to do your Bugsy Siegel routine?" The wife, a no-longer-loyal corporate helpmeet, recounts warning other corporate wives of what they may face on duty abroad -- a child murdered in a random robbery, a marriage ruined by loneliness, a spouse corrupted by the demands of the bottom line. The husband, alone and adrift in a forced retirement brought on by his wife's untimely candor, muses on what he lost and why he ever wanted it in the first place.

These three monologues are delivered in three identically antiseptic hotel rooms served by three identically silent dark-skinned waiters -- symbolizing the West's detached distance from the underprivileged terrain regarded as a "market." With these speeches Jon Robin Baitz, 31, vaults into the top rank of U.S. dramatists. He first came into view in 1987 with The Film Society, set in South Africa, where he spent his youth as an American businessman's son. The Substance of Fire pitted a father against his children for control of a New York City publishing firm. The End of the Day mocked the morality of success in tradition-bound London and parvenu Los Angeles. The new work, drawing on themes from its predecessors, depicts rootless, placeless people connected only to corporate life.

Baitz's awareness of the clash between cash and conscience is hardly novel; ! and his main target, infant formula, has been pilloried for more than a decade. What makes Three Hotels so memorable, in an impeccable production, is Baitz's ability to render people specific and real. He savors the businessman's skill at infighting and pride in the art of firing failed subordinates even as the character edges toward a moral quandary. He evokes the wife's protectiveness and pragmatic respect toward her husband's labor even as she lashes out to end it. The play implies in each partner a hint of madness, then suggests how hard it is to distinguish between madness and vision. Ron Rifkin, who had a career-transforming success in The Substance of Fire, is even better in Three Hotels. Christine Lahti gives the less nuanced role of the wife an eerie blend of wit, charm and detachment.

Hovering over their quarrels about the outer world is domestic grief: the death of their 16-year-old son in Brazil, just before they were to return home, because he made the fatal error of wearing a shiny new watch to the beach. The parents realize that much of their high-minded shame about unknown babies malnourished by infant formula is really self-absorbed rage at the company for somehow causing the death of their son. This self-knowledge pervades the stunning finale. The husband has retreated to the Mexican inn where the couple spent their honeymoon. As he waits, on the traditional Day of the Dead, hoping his wife will come to him, she appears behind the haze of a scrim and lights a candle for her son and all the victims of her husband's ambition. But she does not come in. Instead, two sides of a wall close slowly, slowly, and cut her off -- perhaps for now, perhaps forever.