Pattern of Life

Play (2014)
by Walt McGough

With Nael Nacer (Rahmat), Lewis D. Wheeler (Carlo)

Carlo is an American drone pilot based in Nevada who assures the audience, at the outset of this tragic and intense drama, that drones should not be regarded as “pilotless” planes, merely ones in which the pilots are not on board. Rahmat, a teacher, is one of those located at the site in Pakistan that Carlo is targeting.

Remarkably, the only two characters in this play never speak to one another, save in dreams. That gave me some pause at the outset, but my reservations were quickly addressed as the play unfolded; the superb writing and highly effective acting and direction created an intense result overall.

The playwright identifies the time of the play as Right now. Right this second. with an urgency of tone, a sense of immediacy, that drives home the import and significance of this timely drama. The unfolding of the heartbreaking story only underlines the current significance of the events that we all too often catch as brief emblems on the news.

Nael Nacer, a young actor who has contributed during the last several years a new and compelling presence to the Boston theater scene, plays Rahmat with a humane sweetness that drives to the core of one’s sympathies. One watches his penetrating performance and thinks how many decent, compassionate people wind up in the crossfire of such conflicts, and how one wishes that were not the case. McGough has written, and Nacer plays, a character of such warmth and charm that one immediately wants to know him.

Lewis D. Wheeler is brilliantly effective as Carlo, the drone pilot. His role, as targeter, is a less naturally sympathetic one, but he pulls it off with passion and bravado. The writing of this role, and Wheeler’s performance, create an emotional maelstrom, a vortex of guilt, duty, confusion, responsibility, rebellion, professionalism, and utter dissociation in a way that forces open the soul of this character to view. Amazingly, in the end, one feels great compassion for this character as well, drawn into the stark awareness of the conflicting forces around and within him.

In the short span of the play (it runs ninety minutes with no intermission), McGough has clearly painted two worlds tied only by a virtual connection. Astutely, though, he has connected his characters not only with interlaced monologues, but also in dreams, which, in this imaginative turn, they share.

The collective unconscious comes forth in this play as a significant psychic landscape that underlies and connects these two worlds, revealing the deep sensitivities that pervade their extremes, revealing poetically the common terrain they inhabit.

Searingly intense and well-written, artfully acted and directed, and of current political and psychological moment, this production is not to be missed.

– BADMan