Even the gobbledegook was witty

The Internationalist at The Gate Theatre, 25th April 2008
Written by Anne Washburn
Directed by Natalie Abrahami

Ever considered how many ways there are to misunderstand someone? If you don’t speak the lingo you’ve already got that going against you, but to add to that you can misread their body language, misinterpret cultural nuances, have different expectations of your relationship or just not get what‘s going on. In The Internationalist, written by Anne Washburn, the characters misunderstand each other on all of these levels and probably some deeper ones I didn’t get either because I was soundless-laughing too hard at how clever she is.

Witty dialogue set up characters and scenes quickly and distinctively, speedily immersing the audience in the story as Lowell (Elliot Cowan), the internationalist of the title, gropes his way, almost drunkenly, through a foreign business trip.  Washburn makes it clear that  the characters and their relationships are the focus by leaving other details slightly blurry.  We don’t know what kind of business Lowell is in, which country he’s visiting (though it’s definitely European) or what kind of person Lowell is at home.

Arriving at the airport after a disastrous flight he ineptly meets Sara (Jennifer Higham), a company colleague, who begins to guide him along the garden path of unexplainable distractions which is her country, leading him into an exotic, romantic situation where he’s suddenly cast as the Hollywood heartthrob.  Their relationship is only just recovering from the problematic meeting before it goes awry again at the office where it turns out that Sara isn’t what she’d seemed (a colleague) but his junior in the company.  Brilliant use of a second language, Washburn’s own creation, which hovers somewhere around Latin (a hybrid of Germany and Scandinavia in sound), has the other four actors (who play the rest of the characters) slipping in and out of understanding.  When Lowell’s in the room they speak Washburnian, when he’s not they’re understandable to the audience.  One of the funniest touches is their differing grasps of English and the delicate but cleverly logical ways they misuse it as they welcome Lowell.  Taking on the Hollywood heartthrob role Sara has ascribed to him, Lowell starts looking for more adventure but only ends up in confusing situations without a guide or a phrasebook.

There are a couple of great stories and monologues thrown into the mix by the ’other’ characters which are a bit like divertissements in a play so closely focused on the character’s relationships.  One was mostly told in Washburnian but escalated my silent chuckling appreciation of cleverness to proper laughing-out-loud-‘cause-its-funny (all I really know is that it had something to do with a naked man wearing flippers but the body language of the cast made it contagious).  They also offered their observations about Americans from an international perspective, some quite philosophical, expressing not just an interest in what Americans do and don’t know but also in the relationship between their isolation and power “America hasn’t lost in the same way other countries have, hasn’t had our own people killed on home soil.”.  An interesting glance at international cultural hierarchy was presented alongside some feverish un-packaging of cultural clichés.

My companion found the ending slightly ambiguous (some of it was spoken in Washburnian) but for me it summed up the whole play.  It also resonated with my twenty-something’s need to be understood but difficulty in knowing how best to make that happen.  More importantly it made me smile and think.

Logistically The Gate Theatre is a challenging space.  Small, with only one possible exit the director, Natalie Abrahami, chose to have everyone on stage all the time – but the acting had me totally focused on what I was supposed to be looking at so this was a far less distracting choice than it could have been.  She used a couple of nice movement moments and some clever backlighting to smooth out the scene changes but all these touches complimented the writing so well that I’m only really noticing them in hindsight.  The actors warmed into their roles and could have been more naturalistic in such an intimate space but now I’m just in the realms of constructive criticism ‘cause I pretty much wish I had written this play myself.