Margin of Error (Or, the Unassailable Wisdom of the Mouse and the Scorpion)

Or, yet: Caesar’s Laurel

In such a farcical year as this it would be difficult to premiere a play about elections and the people who run them, the ghostly king makers who smear and stab their way through each other, without it being tainted by the ridiculousness of the times. Yet Eric Coble, recipient of the BCT River Prize, has created an elegant story that both nets us up in the excitement of four, thankfully fictional, campaigns and at the same time eloquently strikes at the heart of our rabid culture of winner take all.

Harold Carver (Richard Klautsch) is a legend. Or, as he likes to describe himself, a myth. He is most brilliant and intuitive political consultants in the business, oiling the wheels of the system and making senators, governors, even presidents. But now he finds himself grounded at Gate B16 in foggy Boise, Idaho, about the last place he wants to be, juggling four impossible campaigns from four different phones and training up his new assistant Daphne Anderson (Veronica Von Tobel), a rookie with considerable insight, ingenuity, and passion but an unfortunately possessed of a conscience. What’s worse for Harold, something is stirring at home, something that might shake his kingdom down around his ears.

Scenic designer Will Ledbetter has captured the Boise Airport in loving detail: diffident green tiles, the mottled carpet, the quaintly un-sitable chairs, even the permeant construction. It’s a touch of verisimilitude in what isn’t quite a heightened play. The concerns are all real, the truths touched on, universal. But the language Coble proffers is the language of storytellers and rhetoricians. The leaps and dives of the plot, the running commentary on the four campaigns and human nature in general, the coupled with Harold’s long shots and slam dunks and Daphne’s increasingly confident interjections (sometimes working in stereo with her would be mentor) create a sense of modern day Shaw, with a side helping of Conan Doyle for taste. There are times when Coble simply seems too good, his carefully crafted plot bounding with us just ahead of the threshold of revelation (“Ah, this is the part where …” “Oh I bet that phone’s going to…” “Sweet Mother of Joads! Don’t let him …”). But then often as not, we’re jerked in a completely new direction, down an unforeseen path.

Director Mathew Cameron Clark has kept up with the non-stop action required of the play, though he has gifted us some moments where Harold stops to watch at the rolling fog or, lizard-like, balm his lips. Klautsch dances across the stage, his incredible vocal energy swimming from war cries to devastatingly curt and off-hand razors. It’s a part that seems tailored to his skills and he exercises all of them, with great relish, to our great delight.

 If Margin of Error has a weakness it’s that Daphne gets fairly short shrift as a character. While she gets many flashes of lime line she’s mostly there to listen and increasingly, challenge, and the climax of the play grounds her on an all too unwelcome shoal. Fortunately Von Toble is able to bring more to the part, the mirror to Klautsch’s candle, always Listening but never “reacting.” When Daphne gets her own foot in the door Von Tobel is quiet, polite, and devastating, with a low but dangerous emphasis like an electrified fence.

If the the worst poison came from the ambition injected from Caesar’s Laurel crown, that is the venom that Margin of Error captures. Not the desire to make the world better by ruling it, but simply to win and keep on winning (our the greatest flaw as a nation, perhaps as a species together). By ingesting that venom the play makes itself radiantly witty and depressively scary, a mile a minute, splendidly scripted ride leaves us hammered in out seats. But like every call Harold puts out to his impossible campaigns, we can salute the show with a rousing, “Victory!”