The Last Supper

"If you had the chance to kill Hitler or Stalin when they were young men, would you have taken it?" That's the hypothetical at the heart of "The Last Supper," the latest production from Rising Sun Performance Company. What's good about Dan Rosen's play, which is based on his screenplay for the 1995 movie of the same title, is that it provides an answer. What's bad is that the answer is confused.

The premise is that in the course of a dinner party, five liberal friends kill a conservative guest when he viciously attacks one of them. Rather than report his death to the police, however, they decide to pursue the idea of weeding out societal undesirables before they can take root. Over the next few months, the five invite a series of extreme conservatives to dinner and eliminate them with poisoned wine. The killing spree comes to a head when a well-known right-wing television host attends one of their dinners. As he talks to them, he reveals that he is a rational person and not the monster they thought him. A battle of wills then breaks out between the four who wish to spare him and the one who doesn't.

This setup would seem to be an ideal platform from which to launch a Shavian war of ideas, an Ortonesque demolition of hypocrisy, an orgy of Hitchkockian suspense, or even a Dostoevskian exploration of murder. Rosen attempts them all, and though some might find the result a nourishing stew, I found it an uneven clash of styles that ultimately made no more significant point than "Liquidating people is bad, even if they're conservatives."

"The Last Supper" is being presented with two rotating casts in order to accommodate Rising Sun Performance Company's ensemble. By sheer chance I saw cast two, and I have to say that cast one will have to work hard to equal it. Though it probably isn't fair to single out individuals, I particularly enjoyed the acting of Anastasia Peterson and Becky Sterling Rygg, as two of the friends, as well as Leal Vona, as the evil Norman Arbuthnot.

Single-named director Akia, also the company's founding artistic director, works hard to blend the elements of farce, satire, suspense, and tragedy landed on her by playwright Rosen, but she only occasionally succeeds. Special mention goes to composer Christopher Bowen, a member of Blue Man Group, for scene-change music that is as smart and playful as the production should be.

Although "The Last Supper" doesn't analyze them very well, it does raise issues that resonate after the curtain rings down, so I commend Rising Sun for lobbing a grenade into the American political conversation, even it produces more smoke than light.


Presented by Horse Trade Theater Group and Rising Sun Performance Company at the Red Room, 85 E. Fourth St., NYC. April 28–Aug. 25. Wed., 8 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com.