Theater review: 'Ideation'

Aaron Loeb’s “Ideation” thinks the unthinkable at Urbanite Theatre. As Edmund Burke once said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” In Loeb’s play, evil triumphs when bad men hire good consultants.

We open at a conference room at a high-level consulting firm. Four highly paid brains sit around a table. Their group dynamic is what you’d find in any corporate office. There’s interoffice romance, turf battles, petty jealousies and backstabbing — but also bursts of good humor and camaraderie. It’s a familiar mix of competition and team spirit — with no laughable incompetents. These four consultants are all very good at their jobs. They quickly fire an obnoxious intern and get down to work. The task at hand?

Design a collection, distribution and disposal system for millions of infected bodies in the event of a global pandemic. The consultants think it’s a purely hypothetical question. At first.

And their coldly quantified discussion of corpses and containers had me giggling, at first. It reminded me of that scene in “Dr. Strangelove” where General Turgidson made a case for a first-strike against the Soviets. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops! Uh, depending on the breaks.”

Black humor. You laugh because you shouldn’t.

The consultants’ discussion flows with relentless logic. (Helpfully illustrated with diagrams on a white board.) They explore the forking paths of decision trees. If we do this, then that. If we want that, we’ll need this. It’s all about problem solving. And compartmentalized, amoral thinking that isolates abstract logic from real-world implications. Like, say, dissolving millions of dead bodies in acid. And getting rid of what’s left without anybody noticing.

A globally distributed assembly line of death. That’s what they’re really talking about. At the end of the line, it makes lots of corpses go away. But the people going in are still very much alive.

The play keeps this fact close to its chest. Once it plays that card, my giggles stop. The consultants catch on to the horrific implications at about the same time. They start to get worried …

What if the plague isn’t hypothetical? What if it’s a cover story for genocide? In all probability, we’re not the only team working on this. To maintain deniability, the client would compartmentalize the problem. They’d break it up into different pieces for different teams. They’d only tell us what we needed to know — but we’d still know too much. Isn’t it logical they’d kill our team once we solved our piece of the puzzle?

One team member has a crisis of conscience and leaves. Others wrestle with their consciences. Maybe it’s a loyalty test. Maybe it’s a crime against humanity. The clock ticks, the time is up, and the client wants to hear their plan.

Jim Sorensen’s direction shines the harsh florescent light of everyday banality on this sinister think tank. Everything’s normal, corporate, clean and squeaky. A horror movie served with Starbucks coffee and scones.

Summer Dawn Wallace’s Hannah (the project manager) wears her power suit like armor; she’s a warrior of the mind in a man’s world. Brock (Brendan Ragan), is the testosterone-soaked, Alpha-male insult comic; his words are cutting, but they’re backed by a sharp mind. Brock marks his territory — but he always returns to the problem at hand. Ted (Tom Foley) is about 10 years older than Brock. His junior colleague gives him grief for his age and Southern accent. But Ted gives as good as he gets; his mind has lost none of its power. Sandeep (Gopal Divan) is a witty engineer who only seems to hang back from the discussion. It may look like his mind is a million miles away, but he doesn’t miss a tick — and reacts to the genocidal implications before the others. (Sandeep’s the one who walks out.) Anthony Gullikson’s Scooter is the entitled brat who gets kicked out at the meeting’s start. (Although he’s possibly an assassin playing a role.) Lawrence James plays the unseen client — JD. Who speaks through the intercom with the booming voice of a false god.

Set designer Rew Tippin informs you of the banality of this world from the gitgo. His conference room is a cold, angular space emblazoned with empty motivational slogans. (“EXPLORE EVERY POSSIBILITY! SUCCESS IS THE ONLY OPTION!”) Costume designer David W. Walker dresses the actors for success. They’re tricked out in killer suits, not the feldgrau of Nazi uniforms.

The Nazis are the obvious parallel, of course. Specifically, the coldly calculating, high-level Nazis who mapped out the Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. The difference being that the Nazis went into that conference with their eyes open. Reinhard Heydrich and the rest knew exactly what they were doing. The consultants of Ideation Inc. only know what they might be doing. Even so, their careers, consciences and lives are at stake.

What would you do?

Loeb’s play is a grippingly surreal, black comedy in the tradition of “Dr. Strangelove” and “Catch-22.” The playwright never makes it easy for you or spells out the reality behind the horrific discussion. It’s possible this is an elaborate psych test, along the lines of Stanley Milgram’s experiment. It’s equally possible that it’s all grimly real; that Sandeep has been murdered; and that “Scooter” is back to clean up loose ends. You never know. But the question remains …

What would you do?