SCR’s ‘BAFO’ Offers a Humorous Glance at an Ugly New World

COSTA MESA — They’re white, they’re male, and they’re pissed. Not only that, they’re defense contractors, and they’re being downsized, big time. They know an AK-47 from an ordinary rifle. Which could come in handy.

Tom Strelich takes the anger of these men and puts it to good use in his funny new play “BAFO,” which stands for best and final offer. Following the playwrights’s lead, I’ll withhold explanation till later. The play opened Saturday at South Coast Repertory, which commissioned it for a season that is shaping up to be an impressive one for the theater and for new American work.

A testosteronial satire with debts to “Catch-22,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “Mastergate,” “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Falling Down,” “BAFO” is a play about paranoia, about the new order, the fallen order, and the crazies produced by unilateral displacement. While he doesn’t offer any new or even subtle ideas about confused white men, Strelich writes comedy that is fresh and vigorous, and his language is often both clever and elegant.

The play opens in the ostensible banality of a corporate meeting room (nicely put together by designer John Iacovelli). “What’s the threat?” asks Clay (Richard Doyle), a flinty-eyed, pot-bellied bureaucrat from the good old, Cold War days when a man clearly could identify his enemy, maybe. At the conference table sits Willie Peet (Hal Landon Jr.), the smartest and most sardonic of the bunch, who answers Clay’s question by rattling off a list of things he is terrified of. Starting slow, Willie’s list grows so long and all-encompassing and fulsome that it begins to take on the aura of poetry.

“Black males between the ages of 18 and 24, with their hats on backward,” he begins, before warming up to his job, the naming of less obvious terrors, such as satanic cults, intelligent women who want your job, the NEA, Microsoft, vibrating crack babies, radon, militant militias and “silent asteroids hurtling through space, coming to give us the dinosaur treatment.”

Strelich makes clear that the dinosaurs are these men in bad suits, who devise threats and appropriate weapons for their government. Assailed from without and within, they realize that, as Willie puts it, “the swamp has finally dried up.” One of their former co-workers has been spotted working as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Even worse, almost, another of their former co-workers, who, apparently, didn’t want a job at Wal-Mart, is roaming the halls with several guns and a long sword. In fact, he’s shooting people. And he’s heading their way.

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And so begins a confrontation between the shooter, P.K. (Don Took), who sees himself as just another nice guy driven mad by a world grown incomprehensible, and five ex-colleagues. P.K. tries to explain his reasonableness to Shokanje (Susan Patterson), an African American woman from human resources who just happens to be in the conference room when the siege begins. He is frustrated. In his lifetime, he tells her, he has had to shift from using colored to Negro to black to African American. How do you people expect brand loyalty? he asks.

But P.K. steps over the line when he insults Maya Angelou (which he mispronounces), sending Shokanje into a rage. But that doesn’t upset old P.K. He’s on a mission. He wants to know, particularly from his fellow men: When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, what can you come up with about the worth of your life? What’s your best and final offer?

Strelich can’t resist providing an eleventh-hour, heartfelt answer to this question, a speech that belongs in another play. A more final, sardonic ending works better, though a brief coda is missing the extra, brittle snap that would finish the play off properly.

Under Martin Benson’s direction, the pacing is crisp almost throughout. Gaps occur because the cast is uneven, ranging from the wonderful Landon (does he have most of the great lines, or does it just seem that way?) to a very persuasive Doyle, to a gently comic Art Koustik to Ron Boussom, who pushes unforgivably as Sayles, a high-strung jabberer. Patterson is solid as the nerviest of the bunch. She is wonderful when she urges P.K., a classic rampage-before-suicide nut, to cut out the middle man and just shoot himself. And Took is excellent as the weirdly calm nut case.

About the old school, “BAFO” is of the old school itself. These are the characters of “Dr. Strangelove” and “Catch-22” recast in a 1990s setting. But Strelich mines new comedy in the juxtaposition; he takes pleasure and he gives pleasure. “BAFO” marks a happy return for a playwright who has not had a debut here in almost 10 years.

* “BAFO,” South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, Tue.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 2:30 p.m. Ends Feb. 23. $26-$29. (714) 957-4033. Running time: 90 minutes.

Hal Landon Jr.: Willie Peet

Richard Doyle: Clay

Ron Boussom: Sayles

Art KoustikL Ashe

Susan Patterson: Shokanje

Don Took: P.K.

A South Coast Repertory production of a play by Tom Strelich, directed by Martin Benson. Sets: John Iacovelli. Costumes: Todd Roehrman. Lights: Lonnie Alcaraz. Sound: Garth Hemphill. Production manager: Michael Mora. Stage manager: Randall K. Lum.