Theater Review—

Who Comprises ‘The Third Army’ And What Do They Want?

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — My favorite part of The Third Army, Joe Sutton’s ostensibly political melodrama set in Czechoslovakia five years after the revolution (when the Communists were ousted), is when the handsome and idealistic young village mayor, Pavel Marek, talks to his American seductress, Diane Brodsky, about the happiest day of his life

Once, under communism, Pavel tells Diane, about 50 of his college friends gathered for a party at his one-room homemade hunting lodge. They sang and drank, and then when it was late, two of the party confided a secret. They were planning to defect to Germany, after midnight, hiding in the trunk of a car. When they reached Germany safely they would call to say so.

All night Pavel worried whether they would make it, and whether the call would come. In part he was anxious for the two fugitives. More importantly, Pavel was concerned that if the two were stopped by the police and caught, it would mean that someone among the 50 people in the room had betrayed them, in which case he would not be able to trust his closest friends.

When the call finally came that they were safe, it was “the happiest day of [his] life” because it meant he knew who his friends were, and whom he could trust.

That theme is the essence of The Third Army, which is currently in its world premiere presentation at Long Wharf Theatre. According to press releases and program notes, the play deals with serious ethical issues concerning the push for, and effects of, American development in former iron curtain countries.

Perhaps Mr Sutton, who spent a year living in a Czech village as a researcher, had that as his original intention, but this play comes off more as a tribute to the Orson Welles movie The Third Man. In that movie an American innocent, Holly Martin, falls in love with Alida Valli while trying to find out what happened to his evil profiteer boyhood friend, Harry Lime. Zithers play and people speak with accents and everyone tries to take advantage of him during the turmoil of occupied Austria after the War.

Third Army is a five-character play. There is Pavel Marek, a former nuclear engineer who is now the mayor of his small village. Pavel is trying to organize other local mayors to resist the reopening of the a nuclear power plant which was originally built by the Soviets along the model of Chernobyl, but was never made operational. Now that the Communists are gone and foreign commerce is welcomed by the Prague government, three companies are competing for the multi-million dollar rights to remodel the plant and get it up and running.

A Peter Lorre-like Czech-American millionaire, Lubo Brodsky, and his beautiful young wife, the aforementioned Diane, court the mayor. “We have an arrangement,” Diane explains when Pavel worries about Lubo being jealous, but Lubo keeps popping up — with vodka, or a camera — every time the younger two fall into a clinch.

Lubo, who has mysterious connections to both Fort Meade in America, and a past of double-dealing in Prague, has his own plans concerning the power plant and a sneaky way of appealing to Marek to get his way.

Barry Axelrod, the publisher of an American newspaper in Prague, settled there 20 years earlier when he was an American soldier who fell in love with a Czech woman. There is a mystery in Barry’s background of special interest to Alison Crawford, a young freelance journalist searching for a scoop.

Barry offers Alison a job working for him, getting the goods on Brodsky, rather than probing his own background, and she tentatively accepts, although she is suspicious about Axelrod’s earlier ties to Brodsky. And all is not as it seems….

The actors are good — veterans of Law and Order for the most part — but there is too much of a television plot feel to this rather than a genuine moral discussion.

The title is a double reference. According to the playbill it was Patton’s Third Army that was in line to liberate Czechoslovakia from the Nazis, but was ordered to defer to the Russians instead and let them do it. Had the Americans insisted, at the time, they might have saved Czechoslovakia from being an Iron Curtain satellite for so many years.

However, now that the Russians are gone, the American industrialists and developers constitute a new “third army,” one of economic liberation, that has finally arrived. (Alternately, the invading Americans can be seen by patriots like Marek as the third army coming in to seize control of his country, after Germany and Russia.)

It is true that if it is profitable, American corporations are more enthusiastic about opening Chernobyl-type plants in other countries rather than back home, and they may well cavalierly dismiss the dangers of nuclear waste so long as it is not on our turf.

However, these issues play a smaller role in the play than does the mystery of exactly what is going on here. How are all these people connected, and does Marek stand a chance of defending himself and his village against them? After all, with that Slavic style combed-back hair, he’s so handsome…

The Third Army opened earlier this month and continues through February 11 on the Mainstage at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven. Contact the theatre’s box office, 203/787-4282, for performance details and ticket information.