Judging by his first commercially produced play, “On the Head of a Pin,” Frank Winters is a promising playwright — especially for a 24-year-old.
All he really needs is a good editor.
This complex political thriller interweaves two compelling storylines. The first — shades of “Zero Dark Thirty”— concerns Sarah Kennedy (Emily Fleischer), a 20-something with a degree in classical language who gets a job as a translator for a firm running a military prison in Iraq.
Only later does she find her responsibilities include interrogating the prisoners, a task for which she’s completely unprepared.
“I must have skipped intro to interrogation,” she tells her unsympathetic boss (Jen Tullock).
The second storyline involves an intrepid newspaper reporter, Lily Strauss (Sofia Lauwers), who gets hold of incriminating photos documenting the prison’s abusive treatment of its inmates. Complicating things is the fact that her career wound up in tatters after she blew a story involving the same company several years earlier.
So far, so good as the play deftly cuts back and forth between the two plotlines, one of which depicts Sarah’s reluctant descent into condoning torture in an effort to save her job.
“It’s called ‘intimidation tactics,’ ” explains the young soldier (Marcus Callender) trying to help her out.
Unfortunately, the play’s undeniable strengths are undercut by its excessive length — it runs nearly three hours — and far too much cutesy comic dialogue straining for Aaron Sorkin-style wit. More than a few of the many subplots, including a romance between two main characters, could easily be excised. Another problem is the uneven acting and occasionally odd casting: The editor (James Ortiz) of Lily’s newspaper, supposedly a major NYC daily, looks freshly plucked from journalism school.
Winters, the playwright, made the unfortunate decision to direct his own work, and he’s far too indulgent with it. He also has a problem with blocking the multiple locations on the theater’s tiny stage: Often, the actors rush in and out of doors to make room for the next scene.
That said, this is an admirably ambitious effort, one that avoids the navel-gazing to which so many young playwrights fall prey. If only this “Pin” were a lot sharper.