Seattle Repertory Theatre, 443-2222. $15-$44 ($10 for anyone under 25). Through March 24.

At first, I blamed the production. Though the script was a bit clumsy, a smarter hand at the controls could surely have wrought some tension in these scenes--after all, the play is about a young man uncovering the truth about his father, who was a spy in the Cold War. These scenes should be full of unspoken secrets; and though most of those secrets are divulged in the most bland and obvious ways, it's the actors' and the director's jobs to find some compelling reason why the characters are saying these things, to evoke in the audience some curiosity about what that reason might be. None of that was to be found. Every sentence was rattled off as if it were a particularly annoying bit of exposition; a game of wits was played with the monotonous to-and-fro of a game of Ping-Pong.

But as the play went on, I grew sympathetic to the poor actors and director. Every scene contained some ponderous thematic pronouncement; the discussion of politics had all the intellectual nuance of a high-school debate; the set changes held more surprises than the scenes themselves. This play is truly bad.

But during the second act, during a stultifying scene meant to be a daring reversal of our expectations, during interminable speeches that longed to be arias but ended up as didactic laundry lists of recriminations, I realized the playwright had no idea what he was doing. Either this material was so personal as to blinker any dramatic skill he may possess, or he's such a hack he didn't know any better. The real culprits are the people who thought this play could be put on the stage in front of innocent people. By passing this abortion off as an exciting new work, by giving audiences another reason to write theater off as a dead medium, Seattle Repertory Theatre is not only destroying itself, it is taking the entire art form down with it.