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Louis Ozawa Changchien plays an aspiring political candidate in “Warrior Class.”
A restaurant in Baltimore or a sleek New York apartment: It’s all one big back room, where political horse trading is conducted with ruthless intensity and oily smiles in “Warrior Class,” an absorbing new play by Kenneth Lin that opened on Monday night at the McGinn/Cazale Theater as part of the Second Stage’s Uptown season.
Mr. Lin’s streamlined, three-character drama, highlighted by a superb performance from David Rasche as a Republican Party operator, focuses on the vetting process being undertaken on behalf of a potentially hot new politician from New York. Assemblyman Julius Lee (Louis Ozawa Changchien) has exploded onto the scene with a big speech that has caused a sensation and has the party apparatchiks excited about putting him forward as a congressional candidate.
Young and attractive, he’s got a lot of marketable angles. He’s both a practicing Christian and a former Marine, with a Harvard Law Review credit on his ample résumé. “The Republican Obama,” he’s been called by Sean Hannity, and the party senses an opportunity to take back a seat in the House of Representatives, which has long been Democratic.
Mr. Rasche’s Nathan Berkshire has befriended the young tyro and is informally involved in the inevitable process of shaking out any skeletons that may be hiding in his closet. When Nathan heads down to Baltimore to interview Julius’s old college girlfriend, a skeleton comes tumbling forth pretty quickly.
Holly Eames (Katharine Powell) at first responds with cordially noncommittal replies to Nathan’s questions about their relationship. But when he pulls out a daunting stack of papers for her to sign, attesting that they had “a relationship typical of the relationships that many young people have,” she grows restive and refuses.
When she is pressed, her poise cracks open, and she reveals that Julius didn’t take kindly to her decision to end the relationship, that in fact he became a menace.
“He scared the hell out of us,” she says. “My family. My dorm. We didn’t know what he was going to do. It was the worst time of my entire life.”
Suddenly the eminently upstanding politician seems a more dubious quantity — unless Holly can be persuaded to keep quiet about the episode, which has apparently been expunged from the college records and never became a matter for the police.
Mr. Lin is clearly a political addict who has been watching the increasingly cutthroat intersection of politics, media and morality with an interested eye. His dialogue sometimes dives a little too deeply into the machinations of state party politics — Nathan and Julius conduct a long back-and-forth about which committees it will behoove him to serve on, and which big-money players he will be obliged to get in bed with — but the dialogue throughout crackles with authenticity.
In the character of Nathan, Mr. Lin has created a professionally cynical but nevertheless sympathetic figure. As portrayed with great finesse by Mr. Rasche, Nathan oozes sincere interest in Julius as both a man and a politician, but establishes a comfortable rapport with the prickly Holly almost as quickly, trying to convince her that it will be in nobody’s interest for her to reveal the story of Julius’s threatening behavior.
It seems slightly out of character when we learn that the seemingly honorable Holly has decided to work her own angle, asking that Nathan arrange a New York job for her husband in exchange for her silence. But later Mr. Lin makes us understand how deeply Holly has felt her life to be damaged by her early experience with sexual harassment.
“I was the one that was supposed to move to New York or D.C.,” she tells Julius when a meeting between the two is arranged. “I was the one who had dreams that were going to turn into something.”
Ms. Powell’s quietly charged performance renders her character’s somewhat obscure motivations believable. Mr. Changchien exudes the telegenic charm of a potential political star while at the same time emphasizing Julius’s reluctance to get his hands dirty by entering into the kind of quid pro quo deal making that he is realizing even a budding political career requires.
But there are also hints of a steely ruthlessness that suggest that he is willing to bend as far as his Christian principles will allow to make his way: When Nathan suggests that they play hardball with Holly, ferreting out her own secrets so that they have some leverage in their negotiations with her, Julius coolly agrees.
“Warrior Class,” skillfully directed by Evan Cabnet (“Outside People” at the Vineyard), will be most enjoyed by close watchers of the political scene. The title refers to a line of Nathan’s in which he confesses that he’s neglected his personal life — he has a troubled daughter who will barely speak to him — because he’s so comfortably at home in the trenches, where hardball politics are played. The blood sport has gotten into his bloodstream, and he recognizes in Julius a fellow member of the “warrior class” who will not give up the war just because a battle has been lost.
Mr. Lin’s incisive drama seems to suggest that American politics has become a game that has as its ends not so much the improvement of the civic sphere but the vicious thrill of the sport itself. Its players have withdrawn into their own virtual world, not unlike teenagers hunched over video game consoles mowing down their enemies by the dozens, gleefully racking up kills with little thought of the world outside the digital battlefield.
Warrior Class
By Kenneth Lin; directed by Evan Cabnet; sets by Andromache Chalfant; costumes by Jessica Pabst; lighting by Japhy Weideman; sound by Jill B C Du Boff; production stage manager, Lori Ann Zepp; stage manager, Ashley J. Nelson; associate artistic director, Christopher Burney; production manager, Robert G. Mahon III; general manager, Dean Carpenter. Presented by Second Stage Theater Uptown, Carole Rothman, artistic director; Casey Reitz, executive director. At the McGinn/Cazale Theater, 2162 Broadway, at 76th Street, (212) 246-4422, 2st.com. Through Aug. 11. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
WITH: Louis Ozawa Changchien (Julius), Katharine Powell (Holly) and David Rasche (Nathan).
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/07/2...ml?ref=theater
http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/07/2...ml?ref=theater