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.
