Spook

"Spook brings us into a prison cell in a collapsing Germany, 1945, where the head of Nazi Intelligence for the eastern front, General Herbert Schneider has surrendered under a false name, hoping to hide away. His presence is intuited by an American Intelligence officer, Captain Steven Wallace, eager to ferret out Schneider's extensive knowledge of our then-ally, the USSR. We expect a game of feints and shifts, and yep, we get it. The American can't be as dumb as he looks. He's not. We consider the Nazi in the trap, and slowly, grudgingly come to a sympathy for him. But what really sharpens this play are the parallels and insights to our own times. Says Schneider coolly, "We Germans like cowboys." World War II is over, and the Cold War just beginning, Commies, agree the Nazi and the American, are the true enemy. And the real ticket to winning is manipulating fear, "terrorizing the citizens into paying for protection."

"Spook" is playwright John O'Keefe's last installment in his trilogy concerning various slivers and shards of WWII in America and Germany: small, hidden events that gradually mirror the whole. All are loosely based on real people. The character of Schneider is modeled on Reinhardt Gehlen, the German spy chief "who knew more than anyone in the world about the Soviet Union," notes O'Keefe. The ambitious Captain Wallace is John Boker, graduate of Yale. As Wallace, he yearns to be a member of the infamous Skull and Bones Club, where money, power and cronyism met and merged into a power behind the American throne-and sometimes the throne itself. (The George Bushes, past and present, were Skull and Bones boys.) Soon after WWII, the Nazi Gehlen rose to a critical role in U.S./Russian intelligence operations.

John O'Keefe's style in sharp and pared to essentials, favoring quick blackouts and sliced scenes, the nuance instead of the obvious. He has great fun playing the edges, the mirror shards. His General Schneider says "I can do what I do because I am a faceless man"-not a bad definition for a playwright/diirector combo. Delightfully O'Keefe earns his reputation anew.

The real honor goes to Cinnabar for bucking the odds of contemporary arts funding to host a first-class, month-long run, at least, Cinnabar has made our own North Bay the cutting edge of the nation's theater scene. Get your butt in those seats and savor it. "