May 21–28, 1998

reviews|theater

To Die For

An engrossing play about the last hours of an American patriot, staged in a venue that couldn't be more apt.

by Toby Zinman

The Interrogation of Nathan Hale

Iron Age Theatre Co. at Fort Mifflin (on the Delaware River, just off I-95 and Island Ave.), May 28-31, June 4-7 & 11-13, Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 p.m., Sun. at 4 p.m., 685-4192

		One life to give: Mason Kardon as Nathan Hale

It's dramatic before the play even starts. Tires crunch down a dirt road, planes from the airport rise at radical angles overhead, and beyond the runway construction, the oil tanks, the refrigeration plants, suddenly it's peaceful. Canadian geese strut in the dusk, gigantic foliage looms up silhouetted against the sky, and old brick walls, solid with centuries, suddenly appear beyond a moat choked with huge water lilies.

Who knew about Fort Mifflin? This was the site of the worst bombardment during the Revolutionary War (Gen. Washington ordered it be "held to the last extremity") and is the oldest fortification in continuous use in the United States (it became an historic site in 1954). Fort Mifflin was built by the engineer who, as an officer in the British army, then had to destroy it when the Continental Army occupied it. In a play about contradictions and terrible ironies, what better location? This suitability by paradox grows with the information that "Fort Mud" (built on what was once Mud Island in the middle of the Delaware, now landfilled) was renamed Fort Mifflin to honor Maj. Gen. Thomas Mifflin, "The Fighting Quaker." Talk about oxymorons.

Randall Wise, producer of site-sensational shows (remember Tunnel at Eastern State Penitentiary?), found a fascinating script by David Stanley Ford and then found the perfect venue for it. One of the fort's superb buildings, an 18th-century garrison, complete with roaring fire and authentic bunk beds, is the stage. Sets don't get any more "realistic" than this. We sit on chairs (maximum audience is 50) and watch a debate between captured colonial patriot Nathan Hale and Capt. John Montresor, the same British officer who designed and destroyed the place.

		It's a genuine political debate, not a diatribe: We are asked to examine the idea of America with ruthless hindsight.

They have less than two hours before Hale will be hanged. The play is in "real" time, no intermissions, and their tension grows as time grows short, measured by occasional glances out the window to see the progress of the floggings of seven rapists whose punishments precede Hale's. It is hard to believe, sitting there, hearing the occasional muffled drumroll, that those men, dead for 200 years, are not just outside. (Somehow the roar of planes landing and taking off doesn't make a dent in the effect—partly because the actors have taken the noise into account, pausing at just the right moment.)

Apparently nobody knows anything much about Nathan Hale except that he said, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Nobody even knows what he looked like. He was 21, in love with both God and Freedom (another paradox) and chose a spy mission despite his friends telling him his honest nature disqualified him from spying. They were right, he was caught, and it is historical fact that he spent time with Montresor before his execution; it was Montresor who reported his famous last words, and from whom historians know that Hale read the Bible and wrote two letters.

The playwright's task is to flesh out these facts, to do what Montresor's black slave/wife did, "take the confusion of life and turn it into a wonderful story." Ford gives us a wild and passionate debate about human nature, about freedom, slavery, sexual desire, men, women, parents, children, and, yes, inevitably, the American Way. The Interrogation of Nathan Hale has Hale and Montresor reveal themselves to each other, to us, and ultimately to themselves. If it is a bit overlong (there is a feeling of repetition in the last 20 minutes), it is completely engrossing, and thought-provoking. It's also witty ("I won't sit with my enemies," says priggish Hale; "How upstanding of you," replies ironical Montresor). It's also a genuine political debate, not a diatribe: We are asked to examine the idea of America with ruthless hindsight, a retrospective view that Ford uses to provide his characters with prophetic indictments of their future and our present.

Under Randall Wise's skillful direction, we watch Hale discover the truth of his short life ("you were so frightened by your own passion that you took a suicide mission") and discover his own hypocrisy and self-righteousness, as Montresor confronts his own, far more complex demons.

Ray Saraceni plays Montresor with all stops out: Hungry, huge, sweaty and loud, blindingly articulate and manipulatively honest, he gives a spectacular performance (not surprising if you saw Saraceni as Roy Cohn in Villanova's Angels in America). Mason Kardon plays Hale with less success—he is so stiff an actor that you can't quite tell what's Kardon's dis-ease (clichéd gestures, enunciating too too clearly, unconvincing and disappearing accent) and what is appropriately Hale's dis-ease (inhibited, repressed, guilt-ridden). Of course, it is not easy to play a character who is, as Montresor says (in a line Saraceni boldly throws away), "banality made flesh."

The Interrogation of Nathan Hale leaves us with important questions lingering in our minds as we walk across the straw-strewn stone path, through the Fort's ironclad door, into the dark night, the modern America Nathan Hale gave his one life for. Worth the trip in a number of ways.

(The Fort offers tours from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, although the grounds are open and the fascinating model of Mud Island, surrounded by tiny ships, is on view all the time.)