When is it okay to lie? When it spares another’s feelings? When it means betraying a friend to save your own hide? When it saves your job, your reputation and, perhaps, your marriage? All of these scenarios are put to the test in Perfect Mendacity, a thought-provoking play by Jason Wells. It opens Next Act Theater’s 2013-2014 season in Milwaukee.
In this tension-filled play, broken periodically by bursts of humor, a microbiologist fears that he may have played a role in releasing a classified document to the press. The document outlines some immoral and criminal behavior on the part of the microbiologist’s company, a subcontractor to the U.S. government.
Walter Kreutzer (nicely played by Mark Ulrich) is a mild-manner scientist who is far more comfortable in a lab than in the public eye. Yet he cannot stomach recent choices made by his bosses. He takes home a classified document and shows it to his wife, so they can discuss it. The situation is eerily familiar to what’s currently appearing in national headlines (i.e. Edward Snowdon and Wiki-leaks). However, instead of owning up to his involvement in this situation, Walter hires a polygraph expert to help beat a polygraph test that he already knows he must take.
This is where the play begins – in the expert’s office. The interaction between the two men – the nervous scientist and the know-it-all polygraph expert (Lee Palmer) – is great fun to watch. Lee Palmer’s humor ranges from droll to deliciously wicked, and he almost instantly wins the audience over. Ulrich, however, has a much more difficult challenge as the milquetoast Walter. He must make a choice: either he “throws his wife to the wolves,” as the expert suggests, or tries to vindicate them both by taking lessons on how-to-beat-a-polygraph test.
After his unsettling afternoon in the expert’s office, Walter wearily returns home. He wants to forget the ordeal. However, his wife starts asking a lot of questions about his behavior, both past and present. They get into a spat, especially when Walter’s wife (Marti Gobel) wants to know more details about his past.
The scenes between Walter and his wife are riveting, with Gobel understated as the Moroccan-born wife. In a scene reminiscent of All My Sons, Walter confesses his (slight) involvement in some anthrax attacks while working in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). As it turns out, this is only one of the skeletons in his closet.
The couple’s argument is interrupted by Roger, one of Walter’s old friends and current co-worker. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Roger admits to wearing a wire that has recorded every bit of their conversation. Walter practically goes berserk when Roger (played by David Cescarini) pulls out the hidden recording device. We discover that Roger, too, has multiple skeletons in his closet.
Until the play’s final scenes, the talented cast has made this an enjoyable – and thought-provoking – evening. However, the arrival of the company’s research and development manager (Edward Marion) throws off the play’s rhythm to the point where it never recovers. For some odd reason, the r&d manager goes to absurdist lengths to prove Walter’s guilt. He is neither funny nor credible. Saying more would give away the play’s ending. Suffice to say that the play’s last 20 minutes detract from an otherwise engaging theater piece.
