First, if you’re doing the Fringe this year, try to see something in the Annex Theatre. Monday was the first time I’d seen anything in this venue before, and it’s just a really gorgeous space.
Should the show you see at the Annex be Poison the Well? That’s a tough one.
Poison the Well is about a fictional terrorist hostage-taking in Russia by Chechen rebels. For dramatic reasons that I’m not entirely sure that I buy, the Russians send a single lawyer from an oil company, which has interests in the region and employees among the hostages, to negotiate the release of an arena full of people with a journalist that the terrorists regularly use as their mouthpiece. As if that weren’t enough, the journalist and oil company lawyer were childhood friends; they were separated by the Chechan war, when the lawyer, James (Andrew Connor, also the playwright and director), went back to live in America and the journalist, Maya (Elison Zasko), stayed behind, not knowing whether or not James was alive or dead. They negotiate for the release of the hostages, they renew acquaintances, and try to reconcile how glad they are to see each other with being adversaries in the negotiation. Demands from both sides get personal, the tension builds, and then it’s over.
Does it work that well? Well…no, to be honest. The plot is certainly interesting in broad strokes, and it’s well-paced and builds nicely to a climax. There’s some little twists in it that you’ll enjoy if you’re a thriller novel junkie or a conspiracy theorist who believes strongly in corporate evil and greed. One of the conditions the oil company asks for is if they can add a dozen people to the hostages so that the terrorists can dispose of them, for instance. I rather like the idea of high-stakes hostage negotiation as theatre; I think there is a solid, dramatic idea in here.
Some of the plot elements don’t really hold up to close scrutiny, however, and rely too much on coincidence, like the big reveal that Maya’s brother is mixed up in all this too, a fact James from the oil company is all too aware of. The fact that the rebels are Chechen feels a bit tacked on; there’s not much in the play about the larger geopolitical context, and the Chechen-Russian tensions feels like it could be anything, like Colombia vs. FARQ or Basque separatists vs. Spain or what have you. This causes some problems when, after the show’s climax, a video projector shows images of what I can only guess is devastation in Chechnya on the far wall. After making the terrorism a bit generic, except for a quick aside about how all the hostage-takers are women because all the men in their region were killed, now there’s a statement about the plight of Chechnya at the very end? And why do the two characters come back to slow dance on the table in the dark while these images are playing after they’d ended the penultimate scene with one of them leaving the stage?
It’s an unsatisfying ending that’s a bit strange. There’s a good script in here somewhere, and the acting is fine, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
