By Zach Dunkin
There’s a line in the stage thriller “Miranda,” where the main character is asked what her mother knows about the work she does in the CIA. Miranda answers, “There’s so little you can talk about without talking about too much of it, you know?”
And so it goes with playwright James Still’s haunting play, which opens on Indiana Repertory Theatre’s Upperstage on March 28 for a run through April 25.
“Miranda” is a mind-bending, existential crisis of a CIA operative who goes by many names. Who is she? What keeps her working in the Middle East after all these years? Why can’t she leave? Whose war is she fighting, and who is the enemy? And how does she find herself directing a production of “Othello” in Yemen with teenagers?
“There really is so little you can talk about without talking about too much of it,” said Still, IRT’s 20-year playwright-in-residency.
Why the CIA? Why a woman? Why Yemen? Why “Othello?” The answers, perhaps, are in another line in the play: “If all else fails, lie truthfully.”
“There’s a thin line that separates the play and the writer, but it’s in that mysterious place where the work happens, where the story emerges, where the characters seem more real to myself than myself,” Still said.
Although written in 2014, director Henry Godinez said what is happening on stage is similar to what is going on in the world today.
“We live at a time in our country when inflammatory rhetoric about foreigners in general, and Muslims in particular, is charged with suspicion and fear,” Godinez said. “A lot is being said that questions the integrity and motives of our intelligence operatives.
“Any opportunity we can be afforded to view our shared humanity is a rare and much needed thing. That is exactly what James has given us with his hauntingly beautiful play.”
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