Great actors are great compartmentalizers. They must be able to change a room's emotional weather quickly and thoroughly, like stepping out of an Alabama heat wave and into the complete, unambiguous chill of an air-conditioned lobby. Seattle's Todd Licea is that kind of actor, and his virtuosic ability to compartmentalize elevates Three Hotels from a dour drama about a corrupt businessman into something rich and heartbreaking, at once highly specific and universal.
Three Hotels, by Jon Robin Baitz, concerns Kenneth Hoyle, an executive for an evaporated milk company. Hoyle is a martini-drinking hatchet man in charge of markets in the third world, where his company can get away with claiming that baby formula is healthier than breast milk. As a result, his product has killed a few babies and sparked protests and an inquiry by the World Health Organization. "I seem to spend more and more time lately fending off a particular brand of self-satisfied righteousness," Hoyle growls. "Mostly from women." Mostly from his wife, in fact, who first met her husband while they were both working in the Peace Corps. Now, years later, she is beginning to crumple under grief: for her changed husband; for their dead son, who was stabbed on a beach in Rio over a wristwatch; and for their mutual lost innocence.
Baitz (creator of TV series Brothers & Sisters and the real-life son of a Carnation evaporated milk executive) wrote Three Hotels as three monologues, delivered in hotel rooms in Tangier, St. Thomas, and Oaxaca. "I came of age in hotels," Hoyle tells the audience. "I drew comfort from them... in a hotel, nothing sticks." Except it does.
The middle monologue belongs to Barbara Hoyle (Lisa Carswell), but the play belongs to Kenneth. A lesser actor would play him as a monster, a capitalist caricature with gin on his breath and blood under his fingernails. But Licea gives a more tragic performance, as a once-confident man so devastated by his son's death and his freezing marriage that he recognizes his pity and regret from a distance, but cannot begin to feel them. A single crack in his icy heart would shatter the whole thing. So he wonders, coolly, about his contemptuous colleagues—racist Germans in the Nairobi office, ambitious sociopaths at headquarters—and his conscience.
Licea not only shows us what Hoyle is feeling, but the feelings behind his feelings. "I think there is a point at which a particular kind of cruelty becomes meaningless," Hoyle says, telling us about an after-dinner fight with his wife. "Becomes habit and it ceases to hurt." He is, ostensibly, tired of his wife's cruelty. But he is more exhausted by his own—and leaves us, in the end, exhausted for him. 
Three Hotels by Our American Theater Company at Theatre Off Jackson. Through June 28.
