Maria Troncoso (Presciliana Esparolini) comes between CIA agents Jack Wilson (George Tovar) and Daniel Baker (Nick McDow Musleh) in Our Man in Santiago (photo by Charlie Mount)
OUR MAN IN SANTIAGO
ATM Theater
354 West Forty-Fifth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Wednesday – Sunday through October 28, $49-$79
ourmaninsantiago.com
Making its New York City debut through October 28 at ATM Theater, two-time Emmy nominee Mark Wilding’s Our Man in Santiago is a good-natured spy thriller spoof of the US government’s possible involvement in the death of Chilean president Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, but it ends up missing its target.
The play is framed by testimony by CIA agent Daniel Baker (Nick McDow Musleh) to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, one year after Allende’s short tenue came to an end. He takes Sen. Harry Rubin back to that fateful day, as the inexperienced Baker and his boss, Jack Wilson (George Tovar), plot to assassinate the democratically elected Allende, who had been president since November 3, 1970. The eager Baker and the self-satisfied Wilson are staying in a room with a balcony at the Carrera Hotel in the Chilean capital of Santiago, across the street from the president’s Moneda Palace. (The effective set is by Jeff G. Rack.) There’s marching in the street as a violent coup is expected at any moment. Baker, a functionary who was previously stationed in New Zealand, has not exactly trained to be an assassin; he fumbles when trying to load his gun, the bullets falling to the floor, a scene witnessed by the maid, Maria Troncoso (Presciliana Esparolini), who had walked into the room but, seeing the gun, backed out.
“How many times . . . You don’t drop bullets, Baker,” he says to himself. “Bullets can’t help you when they’re outside the gun. They need to be inside the gun. Doesn’t matter how fast you pick them up. You’re already dead. The enemy has shot you.”
Maria knocks and then enters despite Baker telling her not to. She shares details of the widespread poverty in Santiago as they try to find a better time for her to come clean the room. “Five is good. I will miss my only meal of the day but it is worth it for you to have a new bar of soap,” she says snidely in broken English. When Wilson shows up, he treats Maria with disdain, ordering her to get out; he then warns Baker that anyone could be a foreign operative and that he should trust no one. The young agent has no idea how true that will soon be.
President Richard Nixon (Steve Nevil) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Michael Van Duzer) supply comic relief in spy thriller spoof (photo by Charlie Mount)
Wilson sees himself on a path to become the next deputy director of the CIA, a carrot dangled by President Richard Nixon (Steve Nevil) and his loyal secretary of state, Henry Kissinger (Michael Van Duzer), who appear as a back wall slides open to reveal them on the phone at the White House. “Number two man at the agency. That’s a pretty good promotion, wouldn’t you say?” Nixon tells Wilson, who is not about to let Baker ruin this opportunity for him.
Soon Baker, armed with a gun, a press pass, and a camera — for proof that he carried out his mission — heads across the street to kill Allende as the coup gets underway.
Baker has a handgun, but in order for the play to work, director Charlie Mount needs the action and dialogue to be like a rapid-fire machine gun; unfortunately, the pacing is too slow, especially when things get hectic. Mount and Wilding, who has produced and/or written for such television shows as Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, Good Girls, Charmed, and Promised Land, should have injected far more fast slapstick. There were numerous moments when I wanted to be rolling around the floor laughing but instead let out a mere chuckle. The setup is fine, slowly revealing several fun plot twists, but ultimately there are just too many holes in the story, more sitcom than play.
Individually, Musleh is sweetly nervous as the beleaguered Baker, Esparolini is bewitching as the complicated Maria, and Tovar is cool and collected as the calm but not so honorable Wilson, but they don’t light sparks together enough. Nevil and Van Duzer are there to supply comic relief as Kissinger and Nixon, respectively, but they go too far over the top. Wilding, who was inspired to write Our Man in Santiago by the 1974 Harper’s article “The Death of Salvador Allende” by Gabriela García Márquez, about a botched 1970 CIA attempt to oust Allende — the title of the play itself recalls the late-1950s Graham Greene novel and Carol Reed film Our Man in Havana — does cleverly lampoon crass commercialism, US imperialism, and dirty politics. It all makes for a pleasant but underwhelming experience that falls short of what it could have been.