Experiences of Patricia Lara, Meir Kahane Inspire Look at Bureaucracy at Its Ugliest

The setting is stark, gray, matter-of-fact. Two newly arrived visitors to the United States--a female journalist from Bogota and an Israeli right-wing separatist--are being detained and questioned at an immigration office in New York. Quickly, the questions go from routine to dehumanizing. Soon, medication and food are withheld. There is physical abuse. Before week’s end, one of the characters is dead.

It’s bureaucracy at its ugliest in Allan Havis’ ironically titled “Hospitality” (at the Odyssey Theatre), a five-character drama inspired by real-life incidents. The playwright’s curiosity was initially sparked by the story of Colombian journalist Patricia Lara, who was held in maximum-security detention for five days during 1986 after arriving to attend an awards ceremony at Columbia University. The Israeli politician is loosely based on the late Meir Kahane, founder of the radical Jewish Defense League.

“As an American, I was outraged that we would treat someone so badly,” Havis said of the Lara case. “I like themes of someone out of their element, dealing with a negative projection. Lara came here for a positive reception and was treated as a criminal. But it was important for me to have a dialectic, also look at the far right--to have a point-counterpoint. Meir Kahane seemed an interesting protagonist: someone who had legitimacy in the United States and was fighting to keep his dual citizenship.”

Lending much of the complexity to the situation is the Kahane character (renamed Chaim Agunier), a tough, sharp-witted elder who speaks contemptuously to his interrogators and shrugs off the morality of his own racist convictions.

Another complicated character is the senior interrogator, Happy, whose impotence--both physical and psychological--fuels his escalating sadism and brutality. Yet Havis saves the play’s Bad Guy Award for the icy government investigator, Monteith. “Happy is a well-intentioned bigot, a well-intentioned patriot whose world falls apart, and no one’s there to help him,” he said. “But Monteith invests nothing of himself and is willing to make pawns of people.”

On a larger level, the longstanding McCarren-Walter Act paves the way for such humanitarian and diplomatic abuses.

“Foreigners don’t have due process, so they’re in a really murky area--which allows for tremendous manipulation,” said Havis, 39, who believes that the “McCarthy-era piece of legislation” is frequently used as a partisan weapon against perceived foreign enemies. (The story of Lara, who’d been branded a subversive by the State Department, was played out in the New York Times and on “60 Minutes”; in February, she settled her suit against the federal government.)

Havis, a native of Long Island whose local credits include the socially conscious “Haut Gout” and “Morocco,” admits that activism is rarely absent from his work.

“I want to get people a little angry, a little more interested in civil liberties,” said the writer, who was awarded a Rockefeller grant for his next work, an examination of Arab-Israeli relations. “How do we respond to political situations that are against democratic principles? Also, the issue of racism is very important to me. The United States is a little xenophobic; it doesn’t know how to deal with other nationalists in an easy way.”

If he had his way?

“It would be nice for us as a country to be more self-examining--not knee-jerk patriots trying to make up for Vietnam,” said Havis, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama.

Yet he hopes to reach out on other levels, too: “Sometimes I watch my play and just see it as entertainment--dark fun. It’s like Mamet, where the humor is not from escapism but in coming back from tragedy. I do hope it’s very funny. I don’t want to be a Sunday school sermonizer.”

“Hospitality” director Steven Albrezzi finds the material a rich menu--socially and theatrically.

“The first thing that attracted me was the dialectic between five people: the different perspectives on patriotism, the many sides of it,” said Albrezzi, whose last project was the acclaimed “Cabaret Verboten” at the Itchey Foot. “His use of language is extraordinary. And I love the cat-and-mouse game; it’s great meat for actors. I also tend to like enigmatic plays, where it’s all not spelled out. Here, everything happens in a gray area. And all the characters are culpable.”