Indian Wants the Bronx and The Dutchman

The House of Epicureanism at Washington Ensemble Theater

Number of people in the audience: 31.

It's easy to get plays about race and racism dead wrong. There's the cardinal sin of being too preachy and a million other ways—tidy resolutions, caricatures—to gum up a good production when it wanders into race matters. Happily, these two one-acts avoid every one of those potholes. Unhappily, every major pothole is deliberately driven into during the painfully earnest post-play discussion.

Indian Wants the Bronx is straightforward: Two New York kids (Aaron Jewell and Taylor Maxwell), who keep yelling to an offstage character named "Pussyface," come across a non-English-speaking East Indian man (Rahul Upadhyaya) who's lost and waiting for a bus that may never arrive. Jewell and Maxwell wrestle each other and torment Upadhyaya all over WET's Little Theater space, creating a palpable sense of danger—on the evening I attended, a man in the front row got hit with a trash-can lid.

The Dutchman is the superior play. A suit-wearing, Harpers-reading African-American named Clay (Charles Norris) gets hit on by a crazy white woman (Amanda Raleigh) on the subway. Raleigh plays her part with compelling weirdness, one minute stroking Clay's thigh, the next calling him pretty much every epithet in the book. Clay's climactic monologue is the centerpiece. It's a gloriously aggressive, proud, and confused rant about everything from Uncle Tom to interracial romance that lends retroactive meaning to both plays, and Norris does every word justice.

Sadly, the actors decided that the plays were so "heavy," they needed to have a Q&A session with the audience to "blow off steam." It was a viciously embarrassing 20 minutes. Early in the talkback, Jewell insisted that "Even though my character does what he does [assaults an Indian man because he doesn't speak English], I don't think that my character is a racist." By the end, the audience and cast agreed that "education" was the way to "build bridges and keep on, you know, building bridges." I recommend the plays heartily, but I also recommend bolting if the actors try to talk to you after the show. PAUL CONSTANT

The Blackmailer

Experimental Theatre Project at the Richard Hugo House

Number of people in the audience: 22.

First bad sign: "the Experimental Theatre Project." Second bad sign: The play's only named characters are Her Uncle and His Niece. Third bad sign: The running time is 120 minutes, plus a 10-minute intermission. The Blackmailer, by local playwright Roxanne Ray, sounds tedious, self-important, and long. It is.

The play begins with Her Uncle drawing a battle scene, which leads to a discussion about sadism—something about the Marquis de Sade being a sissy and military men, men like Her Uncle, being the world's real sadists. It's a stupid idea, that soldiers are gratified by carnage (post-traumatic stress disorder, anyone?), but at least it's an idea.

The rest is a bleary mush of clichés: Her Uncle is a kinky Nazi, His Niece is a lost soul caught in his freaky fascist bell jar. A dozen yawns later, she's been coerced into kicking him and calling him names while he masturbates. But it's just transgression for transgression's sake—incest and kink never seemed so dull.

There are a lot of problems with The Blackmailer. Here's just one: There isn't a shred of seductive about Her Uncle, so why would His Niece stick around for his abuse? He chews up the scenery, talks in funny voices, and (when actor Edwin Scheibner gets his lines right), bleats about impurity, infection, and other fascist flimflam. He is such a silly, dithering jackass, the Nazi Anti-Defamation League should consider a lawsuit. BRENDAN KILEY