STAGE REVIEW : Topicality Informs Hare’s Passionate, Well-Drawn ‘Map’

British playwright David Hare has called his 1982 “A Map of the World” a “disputatious” play and has complained in print that, even though he himself had staged it three times, he had yet to achieve the balance intended. “In an ideal production,” he wrote, “ . . . you find yourself agreeing with whoever has last spoken.” Or should.

That balance has either been struck in the play’s West Coast premiere at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, or this writer is a total sucker for vigorous and intelligent political argument in which everyone has a complex, thoughtful and pertinent point to make.

Disputatious? Absolutely. But lip-smacking too. How refreshing it is to hear articulate, passionate views, instead of the soporific vapidities that pass for views, as we’ve noted only too well in the days since the Los Angeles riots.

Hare’s play speaks to those riots. It is set in Bombay at a UNESCO conference on world poverty. Among the participants (in the drama and the discussion) are Stephen (Christopher Paul Hart), an idealistic young British left-wing reporter; Elaine (Lynne Moody), an attractive African-American representing CBS; Victor Mehta (Philip Baker Hall), an expatriate Indian novelist of some note who makes thinly disguised fiction out of political fact; Peggy Whitton (Andra Millian), an American actress, all enthusiasm and apple pie, and M’Bengue (Tucker Smallwood), a Senegalese delegate to the conference and the only real politician in the lot.

Mehta has been invited to address the conference, but because his novels take a cynical view of the Third World and the United Nations, he’s controversial. He is being asked (and refuses) to read a disclaimer delineating fact and fiction prior to delivering his speech. The disclaimer was drafted by M’Bengue and young Stephen--an additional irritant, since the older Mehta is competing with Stephen for pretty Peggy’s favors.

The discussion is lively all right, but in “Map’s” least credible plot twist, the decision is made to resolve the wrangle by private debate--just Stephen and Mehta--in which the winner will walk off with the spoils: namely Peggy.

As weak a ploy as this is, Hare’s quicksilver dialogue and Allan Miller’s staging at the Odyssey make us swallow it whole, thanks to the unflagging pace, the ardor of the excoriations and the sheer conviction of a splendid cast.

Not satisfied merely to make his points with opposing views and contrasting environments (the interior luxury of the hotel and implied squalor of the surrounding streets), Hare also draws his “Map” in several realities.

The play is not just a play, but the script of a movie that is being filmed in a London studio even as we watch. The actors, therefore, are actors playing other actors. And the story is the true story of Peggy and Mehta and the incident that brought them together years before in Bombay. It is also about their inability to reconcile this script with personal recollection.

So we have remembered fact and its fiction, actuality and reconstructed actuality--or a play inside a movie inside a philosophical discussion. The various realities cross over and inform one another at all times. It’s an extraordinary writing feat matched by muscular acting.

Hall gives his usual polished performance as the sophisticate Mehta, full of worldly rue and melancholy, which make him irresistibly sexy to the American Peggy, a woman naive by virtue of her culture as well as her youth.

Millian is a vibrant and nuanced Peggy, both the giddy one of the film and the mellow one in real life. Moody’s, bright, relaxed Elaine is more PBS than CBS, reminiscent of no one so much as TV’s Charlene Hunter Gault. And Smallwood’s well-spoken M’Bengue proves an inspired opponent for the formidable Mehta--at least as daunting as Hart’s Stephen, who, youth apart, is not to be underestimated. It is this balance of power among fractious warriors that lends the play its astonishing force.

Production values are more than adequate thanks to the appropriate efforts of Paul William Hawker (sets), Gary Floyd (lights), Pauline Cronin (costumes) and John Bryant (sound). But this play is about the thundering power of words and Miller knows it. In this deserted realm of artful disputatiousness, Hare has very few peers.

“A Map of the World,” Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., West Los Angeles. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m.; Sunday, May 17 only, 2 p.m. Ends June 7. $15.50-$19.50; (310) 477-2055). Running time: 2 hours.

Christopher Paul Hart: Stephen

Lynne Moody: Elaine

Philip Baker Hall: Victor Mehta

Michael Nordstrom: Waiter/Propman 1

Jim Caviezel: Waiter/Propman 2

Eric Underwood: Waiter/Propman 3/Diplomatic Aide

Andra Millian: Peggy Whitton

Randy Lowell: Angelis

Gilbert Stuart: Propman 4

Lani Hyatt: Script Supervisor

Andrea Whitney: Makeup Woman

Michael Holmes: Martinson

Tucker Smallwood: M’Bengue

An Odyssey Theatre Ensemble presentation. Producer Ron Sossi. Director Allan Miller. Assistant director James Kushner. Playwright David Hare. Sets Paul William Hawker. Lights Gary Floyd. Costumes Pauline Kronin. Sound John Bryant. Production stage manager Christina Salcido.