Caught a play called “The Unmentionables” at D.C.’s Woolly Mammoth Theater last night.

It was very good. It’s a dark comedy set in West Africa that skewers America’s obsession with and fetishization of the continent. There’s much for a libertarian to like. Playwright Bruce Norris flicks opprobrium on everyone, from the corporatist investors who prop up corrupt regimes, to misguided do-gooder missionaries and backpack-toting altruists, to self-aggrandizing celebrity philanthropists. He’s doesn’t shy from casting ample blame on Africans themselves, either.

It’s a bit heavy-handed in places, but conveniently tempered with lots of humor when things get tense. In an interview published in the playbill, Norris is quick to explain that his play is about Americans–about whom he knows quite a bit–not about Africa, about which he concedes he knows very little. The beginning and end of the play feature an African native character mocking the audience for even attending, suggesting that we’d have been better off staying at home and watching television than pretending to be worldly by purchasing tickets to a play about Africa written by an American that pokes fun at Americans who pretend to care about Africa (follow that?).

Refreshingly, the same play about Africa-obsessed Americans who take their own altruism far too seriously doesn’t, in the end, take itself too seriously, either. It’s mostly a comedy, though a biting, sometimes abruptly dark one.

I wasn’t crazy about all the performances, but the actors who played the jaded native doctor, the tycoon, and the tycoon’s chatty, self-absorbed (but ultimately likable) wife were terrific.

Washington Post review here.

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