It's a slick little thriller, Christopher Stetson Boal's Pimm's Mission, directed snugly by Terrence O'Brien at 59E59 as an Oberon Theatre Ensemble undertaking. By "little," I mean the drama packs its nastiness into only 60 minutes plus. If it were a 1940s cinema release, it would be the B movie on the bill, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Pimm's Mission unfolds its vituperative purpose in Rebecca Lord-Surratt's idea of what seems to be a few-notches-above-grungy bar on Manhattan's East side. There FBI agent Staats (Daniel Morgan Shelley) is asking -- and eventually grilling -- slightly injured Robert Pimm (Mac Brydon) about his whereabouts when a bomb went off in a nearby pharmaceutical headquarters from which bodies are now being removed.
Staats appears to be convinced Pimm knows more about the bombing than he's saying, but, getting no satisfaction from Pimm and about to leave, he changes his mind when bartender Jim (Brad Fryman) throws his two cents in. Jim mentions Thomas Blander (Ryan Tramont), Pimm's frequent drinking buddy, who just happens to work at the now decimated locale.
This bit of lowdown sets a flashback in motion that returns intermittently to fill in the back-story on the Pimm-Blander association, which Staats assumes is a friendship. Whether it is or not is what playwright Boal is getting at in a piece that has corporate aggression and corruption as one of its concerns. Another more implicit target constantly poking at the surface is the rampant misogyny among a kind of angry and perhaps inadequate male.
The extent to which Staats is correct in his assumption about Pimm -- as silent partner Agent Charles (Patrick Hamilton) comes and goes with background checks and the like -- is another of Boal's interest. Actually, Staats, as written, is so arrogantly certain he's in the right about the man he's cornered that a spectator's wishing he'd turn out to be wrong can be forgiven.
Boal's dialogue is sharp throughout. A tirade through which Pimm challenges Staats on a definition of the word "friend" is especially juicy. Indeed, the jeremiad leaps naturally from the characterization of Pimm as a man perhaps too clever to be the lowly pharmaceutical peon he claims to be -- and at a company in competition with Blander's.
Equally well drawn is Blander, a recently divorced man who's having trouble finding his balance and is therefore an easy mark for someone like Pimm, if Pimm is looking for an easy mark. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. What is Pimm's mission, anyway?
While Staats is unrelenting start to finish, loose-tongued bartender Jim gets laughs as he keeps trying to convince the bibulous Pimm and Blander to try any number of new liquid concoctions. One he plugs has just a dash of kerosene as an ingredient. Curiously, he never offers to mix a Pimm's Cup.
Since this review is going to remain spoiler free, what's really going on between Pimm and Blander won't be revealed. It's a honey. But speaking of tough-minded '40s flicks and the novels from which they were often adapted, it might be fun to suggest that there is the faintest similarity between Pimm's Mission and Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train as unfolded on the page and as Alfred Hitchcock brought it to the screen.
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For the record: Happy 50ish -- written by Lynn Shore, Mark Vogel and David Burnham with songs by Shore and Vogel and starring Shore and Vogel and directed and choreographed by Paul Stancato -- is playing at the Beckett.
In the musical, Vogel is hosting a surprise birthday party for lifelong friend Shore in Shore's backyard and counting the entire audience as the guests. (Christopher Ash designed the set, in which are Shore's electric piano and a cooler holding an endless supply of props.)
Before this intermissionless 90-minute celebration-with-audience-participation ends, Shore and Vogel -- both of whom have strong voices and an evidently sincere hope to entertain -- get around to what they consider the pressing and often discomforting male issues associated with starting a sixth decade. Among the topics they bring up in quickly forgettable words and melodies are slow urinations, colonoscopies and erectile dysfunction. The latter outcry Vogel performs with the aid of long, suggestively twisted blue balloons. The 15 ditties are, of course, predictable and for anyone over 50 extremely laughable, if hardly laugh provoking.
In sum: A night out for the downright desperate.