STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Hospitality’ a Shallow Look at INS Harassment

You expect hospitality from U.S. immigration agents? Forget it. You’re likelier to end up hospital ized .

Or so Allan Havis would have us believe in his intriguing but ultimately shallow “Hospitality,” at the Odyssey Theatre.

The immigration agents here are not low-level border guards. Happy (Kenneth Ryan) and Fuller (Frantz Turner) work in a New York detention center, interrogating minor political celebrities before they ship them back to where they came from. The detainees du jour are a Colombian journalist (Joan Stuart Morris) and an Israeli-American rightist (Mark Margolis), both suspected of having links to terrorists.

Fuller is the good cop, Happy the bad. The play is really Happy’s--which is problematic, considering that we never sympathize with him. He’s ridiculous, then menacing, then pathetic. One thing Happy’s not is happy--Havis betrays a weakness for heavy-handed irony in the name of the character, as well as in the name of the play.

For a while, Ryan’s Happy is well worth watching. His face-offs with the coolly indignant journalist and the irascible Israeli give us a chance to engage in that favorite American pastime--laughing at Neanderthal government agents. Havis has written some mind-tickling, virtually surreal exchanges.

Even in this first part of the play, however, there are a few minor credibility problems: Would even Happy refer favorably to “Sen. McCarthy” (and we don’t mean Eugene) in the course of an official interrogation?

Then the abuse intensifies. Happy takes away the Israeli’s insulin and eventually beats him (in between scenes). The Colombian is hit with food poisoning. They begin to crack, physically as well as mentally.

Because these are relatively famous people, their failure to make their appointments is widely noticed. So is the Israeli’s Happy-induced stroke. Happy and Frantz are called on the carpet. A canny higher-up (William Dennis Hunt) interrogates the cops. He’s a pro. He gets his man.

Happy’s behavior is ultimately attributed to severe personal problems at home, more than to any pressure from above. In fact, Fuller reminds his partner that their training included talk of civil liberties--”no one mentioned cracking to the breaking point.” It eventually looks as if the abuse was caused by one individual, not by a more endemic problem.

In other words, the play goes soft.

It’s much easier to dismiss than Havis surely intended. He must have been attempting a scalding condemnation of government policy; he certainly doesn’t allow the agents to credibly justify their mission. Never do we hear of any cases where these brutal third-degree interrogations prevented bombings or saved lives; we’re meant to view the whole arrangement as quasi-fascist.

Yet by shifting so much of the blame to Happy and his offstage crises, Havis lets everyone else--including Happy’s higher-ups--off the hook. This strategy might have its own rewards if the psychological portrait of Happy were more penetrating, but Happy remains largely a caricature.

The other characters were sketched no more deeply by Havis, but the actors flesh them out with some success. Margolis has the most interesting role--a disagreeable victim--and makes the most of it. Morris suggests plenty with her piercing gaze. Turner’s role, though the pivot of the plot, is underwritten. But Hunt’s cameo is as smooth as silk.

Steven Albrezzi directed with dispatch, using a James Joy set that skillfully suggests a contemporary bureaucracy, lit by Craig Pierce. Todd Roehrman’s costumes follow the author’s cues down to the last detail.

* “Hospitality,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles, Wednesdays-Fridays, p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 7 p.m., 3 p.m. matinees on June 16 and July 7. Ends July 21. $17.50-$19.50. (213) 477-2055. Running time: 2 hours.