by Geoff Hoff~

Everyone is watching someone and in turn being watched by someone. This isn’t paranoia, it is simple fact. It has been so for some time, but more so now, with the interconnectedness that the Internet brings us. The play Puzzler, now in its world premier at Sacred Fools, begins in a brightly lit, orderly room containing a desk and chair and several bags of shredded documents.  These are documents gathered by the Stasi, the Ministry for State Security, in pre-reunification East Germany.

The paper, the documents, were compiled on every citizen in East Germany. It was estimated that every 10th person was a Stasi informant, so most people’s lives were very well documented. When the Wall fell, the people wanted to read their files, which had all been shredded. The new government gave 24 federal employees the task of reconstructing the documents.

An old man sits at the desk, peering through a magnifying glass, piecing together the shreds, trying to reconstruct the documents.  He seems to be looking for something specific.

In the crawlspace above him, he is being watched by an old woman, who has orders to observe him, note every time he says the name Sara, and, if ever she hears him utter a specific phrase, a “password”, to then take him away and keep him safe. The people watched each other. The government watched the people. This old man is watching what that government did. The woman in the crawlspace is watching him. And, she is quick to remind us, we, the audience, are watching her.

The script for Puzzler, by Padraic Duffy, is tight and compelling. It is a satisfying mixture of ultra realism, surrealism, suspense, political thriller and a bit of the mystical.  We find out early that Niklas Keller (the amazing Mark Bramhall) is looking for a very specific document, a transcript of a very specific conversation. We follow him through one very long night that begins when he finds one small shred from that document and must end the next morning, when computers are brought in to replace him at his task.  There are things that seem innocuous that turn out not to be, things that seem innocent that aren’t, things that seem dire or foreboding that are actually innocent. Every moment we get a new shred of information that makes the entire story become something new, until the end, when we get the one piece that has been hidden and it all becomes clear.  This is very deft writing.

There are a few things that rely overly much on coincidence, which is acknowledged but not quite satisfactorily. A young American college student shows up working on her thesis. That she shows up on the very night when 1) the one bag of shreds Mr. Keller has been looking for for fifteen years finally shows up and 2) the last night that it will be possible for Keller to go through the paper is at hand, is a bit of a jump, but the twists and turns, the changing meaning of words spoken, the slow revelation of the conversation, then of the many layers and meanings of that conversation, more than make up for that reliance on coincidence.

There are a couple of amazing performances. As mentioned, Mark Bramhall is Mr. Keller, a lonely, driven, curmudgeonly man desperate to pull together the final threads of his life before it’s too late. To praise an actor’s accent seems a completely inappropriate way to express his talent. Any good actor will have done his homework, the accent being just a small part of that. However, Mr. Bramhall didn’t just do a German accent. He completely embodied an aging German man. There was never a moment when we were aware that it was any kind of craft or in any way something other than the way he spoke and was. This was true of every aspect of his performance. (Special mention to Nike Doukas, the dialect coach.)

Ian Patrick Williams plays Fischer, Keller’s boss, and was also completely German, a solicitous bureaucrat. Again, though, as with everything in this play, Fischer may not be what he seems, and Mr. Williams brings us along with these new circumstances as they are presented quite pleasantly.

The woman in the crawlspace is played by Ruth Silveira. She is narrator, observer, participant and interpreter.  She seems sometimes almost omniscient, then completely puzzled or frightened by what transpires or might transpire.  It is a challenging role, she must spend the entire two acts sitting in a very small space, but we are compelled by her performance and she is able to keep us grounded as we puzzle through it.

The two people who had that conversion Mr. Keller is so keen on finding are played by Jessica Sherman and Jacob Sidney. We see the conversation and hear it via tape, film and memory, each time with new meaning that we bring to it and what seems, perhaps, a flat performance the first time becomes, by the end, so rich and layered as to be daunting, and both actors bring us through that seamlessly.

The final actor is Jeanne Syquia as Robin, the college student. She is a good actress, but not quite up to the depth of experience required of her.

Mr. Duffy also directed the play and did so with a sure hand. At the beginning, when nothing seems to make much sense, he keeps us riveted while new information falls into place and new mysteries are revealed. The set, by Tifanie McQueen, was simple and very effective. The lighting by Douglas Gabrielle was subtle and very good. Sound was by Jaime Robledo and was very well thought out and executed although at times interfered with the dialogue.  The props and costumes were both by Matt Valle and were both excellent.

Puzzler plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm through February 19th, 2011.

Sacred Fools is located at 660 N. Heliotrope in Hollywood, 90004, just south of Melrose and a couple blocks west of Vermont.

Tickets: $20

Reservations online at www.sacredfools.org or by phone at 310 281-8337