Review: A Chaotic THE FIFTH DOMAIN at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Back after a two-year pandemic hiatus at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV, little more than an hour from Baltimore, I start this review, of Victor Lesniewski's play The Fifth Domain, with a one-question quiz.

Here goes.

Do you fully understand the following sentence?: The Fifth Domain is a play about pen testers. If you do understand, this may be a play for you. If not, you may well have trouble keeping up.

Now, looking around the Frank Center, the stage where this play is to be seen, on a Wednesday afternoon, i.e. at a time and on a day when folk who are still part of the world of work are likely to be elsewhere, I see very little evidence of theatergoers who are not retirees like me. Out here in the Washington exurbs, there's an excellent chance that some of them might possibly be retired from three-letter agencies like NSA and CIA, but they are still retirees: people, then, who have the majority of their lives in a pre-internet age, and who might not be terribly comfortable around lines of code, IM chat, or the shadowy world of hackers. They will probably not know what pen testers are, and they will not get much of this show.

About the pen testers, on Page 11 of the script, Troy, identified in the script's list of Characters (though not in the program) as a hacker (Dylan Kammerer), is offered a gig as a pen tester. Not until Page 35 are uninitiated members of the audience given to know what it is a pen tester does. A hint: It does not involve writing implements. The job title is actually hacking jargon for penetration tester. "The security team," a character tells us, "or the red team, attempts to penetrate the system in a variety of different ways to expose its vulnerabilities. Once the system has been hacked, then we know how to protect it."

Oh, goody. We're a third of the way through the play, and we finally have a topic sentence. Playwright Lesniewski, who in addition to more conventionally thespian haunts, apparently professionally inhabits the world of the play (though he claims never to have hacked anything), has two characters talk about how everyone in hacker world was always the best educationally, every one of them a high school valedictorian. One assumes Lesniewski had similar training - and yet no one trained him to put the topic sentence first? No one told him that when you introduce dialogue about what "Snowden" was trying to do, you'd best remind people what Snowden did, exactly? That when you lead the play with scary news coverage of a total internet blackout on the West Coast, it's a good idea to relate it intelligibly, in short order, and with some urgency, to the rest of the story?

Mind you, pen testers, putative good guys standing in the shadows and acting like bad guys, seem like promising raw material for drama. Spy novelists from Graham Greene to John LeCarre have exploited the good-guys-acting-like-bad-guys convention. The convention and the milieu that gives rise to it is rife with opportunities for both plot ambiguities and moral ambiguities of the sort that absolutely drive both melodrama and dramas of ideas. But you have to get up and move with this stuff, present some cloaks and some daggers, not just endless tableaux of people sitting around talking languidly about things most of the audience will not understand. And two people in front of laptops IMing with increasing excitement about a hacker's exploit they're pulling off is a pallid improvement. (Particularly when the IMs are projected on a screen so quickly that most members of the audience will have difficulty reading them - difficulty even surmounting the initial incomprehensibility of the lower-case screen handles the characters use that differ from their actual names. And after surmounting that initial comprehension, audience members are likely to be asking themselves whether these messages are supposed to be something the characters are generating or something they're spying on. It takes a while to sort that out, and we're already lost as to the subject matter by the time we do. Moreover, if we read an endnote to the play, after the last page of the script, we'll have our noses rubbed in the fact that that exchange wasn't even what it purported to be anyway.)

And it's not just the tech stuff. It's the personal drama as well. We know that Troy and another hacker, Lena (Kathryn Tkel), used to be sexually involved, and are now just friends. Given who they are and what they used to be to each other, there's a certain sexual tension and a certain professional tension between them. But to what end? I don't think we ever learn. Toward the end of the play, we finally find out, if we can follow the elliptical account, how and why their relationship was discontinued. Troy took certain actions in pursuit of a cause of his that rendered their continued liaison - and his continued employment in one of the three-letter agencies - inexpedient. By the time we grasp that, though, we're asking ourselves a different question, which is who caused the West Coast meltdown and how did they do it. Lesniewski may think he's answered the question, but not with clarity sufficient to make me confident I can repeat that answer.

I know that answer has something to do with the two other characters in the play, Naveed (Aby Moongamackel) and Meili (Alexandra Palting) - except for the minor detail that one of these characters may not exist, even though the production has been showing the character behaving as if real, that is, taking up physical space and plausibly interacting with other characters. (In other words, this isn't a Sixth Sense fakeout, where you realize that the apparent conversations were actually characters not interacting at all. These are conversations that, according to the normal usages of the stage, actually happened.) Here, the playwright appends to the script a listing of which of the play's 14 scenes (four and a half in number) only happened in a character's head, never happened at all, or were fabrications to mislead the authorities. And, apart from one deliberate non sequitur in the staging meant to be a big reveal, there is nothing in the play that I saw that would give an audience cause to think that any of the merely imaginary scenes was unreal within the world of the play. Without the endnote, however, I doubt many members of the audience, even after the reveal, would be able to look back and say confidently which parts of what we had just seen were unreal. Nor would most of us, even upon being told which parts had been the unreal ones, be able to reconstruct how that had worked or why.

In short, the play is an ungodly and irremediable mess.

That said, and in fairness to the people who evidently worked hard on the production, let me add that the show is beautifully staged, and that the glossy surface might be enough to redeem the experience for some. Great set by David Barber. Great computer code projections by Max Wallace. And fine performances from all of the actors, who are well-directed by Kareem Fahmy.

The title refers to the fact that warfare, after having occupied land, sea, air, and space, has now invaded a fifth domain, the cyber world. Whatever else the play has or has not achieved, it has demonstrated that proposition. And I guess that it has also demonstrated the importance of the proposition for which the character Troy was willing to put his career at risk, i.e., that more care needs to be taken, by industry and government alike, of secrets - their own and everyone else's.

The Fifth Domain, by Victor Lesniewski, directed by Kareem Fahmy, presented through July 31 by the Contemporary American Theater Festival at the Frank Center, 260 University Drive, Shepherdstown, WV 25443. Tickets $38-$68 at the link below or 681-240-2283 ext. 1. Adult language, sexual behavior. All audience members will be required to show proof of vaccination status and photo ID, and to wear a mask while in the theater.

Production photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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