The Hillary Game

Reviewed by Neal Weaver
The Other Space at the Actors Company
Through July 17

I was perplexed by the title The Hillary Game, so I googled it, and got some odd results: There was a Slap Hillary Game, a Kill Hillary Game, and several other violent games attacking Ms. Clinton, and provided by vindictive GOP PACs, and other oddities, none of them helpful. Guy Zimmerman’s play itself is abstract, non-linear, highly verbal, and rather cryptic — typical of the work spawned by the Padua Hills Playwrights.

In a Quonset hut, on a tarmac, in a bleak landscape that might be Afghanistan, there are two stools, a metal cot, and some kind of electronic control console draped in camouflage netting. An unnamed older man (Darrell Larson) in desert camouflage fatigues is tethered by a wire to a sort of metal urn, with the other end locked to his ankle. The wire keeps tangling and tripping him up and limits his movement. He’s soon joined by an unnamed woman (Alana Dietz) in a black jump suit with military patches. Around her neck she wears a blond wig on a string, while he is similarly equipped with a long grey beard.

They perch on the two stools, and begin to play the Hillary Game, though we’re never told the point if the game, or what the rules are. Apparently she’s Hillary Clinton, or pretending to be, when she dons the wig, and when he puts on the beard, he’s a radical Islamist. They talk at length about military drones, violence and the kill chain. She complains about her inability to press the (kill?) button. “I can’t press the button. And I don’t know why.” He worries that the machines are making the decisions. She accuses him of being a traitor, though he seems to have tender feelings for her. And she blames him for his treatment of a woman named Jessica, who, it seems was her mother. And the man is her father. He tells us she sings like an angel. She steals his dog-tags, but later gives them back.  And after a while she unlocks the wire from his ankle. There’s much talk about something or somebody code-named Frank Sinatra, and she sings a verse of “Strangers in the Night.”                                                                                   

She accuses him of being too abstract and getting off the subject, though we’re never really sure what the subject is.

We’re told Frank Sinatra is approaching in a car, and we see it via a video projection. She pushes a button and the car is blown to smithereens. There’s a mysterious escape door, but it’s locked. And when it opens she’s afraid to go out. There’s another escape route, but apparently it’s through a kill zone. He makes a break for it, and suffers the consequences, and she announces that she’s losing touch with reality.

What it all means, I couldn’t venture a guess. But the audience was always attentive. The video projections reveal a bleak mountain landscape, the actors perform with considerable skill, and since Zimmerman also directed his play, he presumably got the production he wanted.

The Other Space at The Actors Company, 916 North Formosa Avenue, West Hollywood. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 7 p.m.  www.brownpapertickets.com. Running time: One hour and 10 minutes.