Would You Buy a 'Dark Play' From This Cast? Yes, You Would

Good actors are like the cagiest salesmen: No matter how deep your initial skepticism, you might wind up buying some of the most impractical things they have in stock. So blame your admiration for Forum Theatre's "Dark Play or Stories for Boys" on an impeccably pushy cast, which manages to sell from the stage of the H Street Playhouse every unlikely twist of Carlos Murillo's Internet-Age drama.

Don't get me wrong: Murillo, a Chicago playwright, has crafted a corrosively entertaining piece about a dastardly digital masquerade -- a kind of perverse modern riff on all those classical plays about disguised wooers. The one hitch is how Murillo takes the easy way out with the more far-fetched threads of his tale, by offering us the option of concluding that what's transpired has been a figment of his antihero's imagination.

Still, imagination is fervently in charge on this occasion, empowered by a director, Michael Dove, who manipulates the proceedings with a starkly seductive agility. And a cast, led by the sterling James Flanagan and the deeply sympathetic Brandon McCoy, that nimbly distills both the everyday and the exotic in Murillo's story.

The unadorned, 90-minute production -- it's played in the round, on a bare floor, with only a few sticks of furniture -- reinforces the perception of Forum as a small local company with its foot on the gas. This fall, Forum will shift its headquarters from H Street NE to downtown Silver Spring, where it will truly put its big appetite on display, in a revival of both parts of Tony Kushner's epic-length masterwork, "Angels in America."

In the meantime, Dove is staging the area premiere of "Dark Play," a work that illustrates how anonymous sex on the Web can be weaponized. The device has shown theatrical potential before, in such plays as Patrick Marber's "Closer," although in this case, the dramatized computer conversations pose a much more sinister threat.

The crux of the play is the recollection by a California college student, Flanagan's Nick, of a cruel Internet hoax he perpetrated as a 14-year-old. "Dark Play" posits that all you need to ruin someone's life -- especially someone too naive to handle the more predatory applications of technology -- is a keyboard and a user name.

Nick's mark is a 16-year-old, McCoy's Adam, a hopeless romantic who haunts a chat room, waiting for the girl of his dreams. He has no clue that the girl with whom he connects and falls into cyber love is actually Nick, precocious, slightly demonic and more than a little sexually ambiguous: He persuades Adam to perform autoerotic acts in front of his webcam. One of the play's murkier aspects has to do with Nick telling us the story after an amorous night with his college girlfriend, played by the excellent Casie Platt, though perhaps Murillo is leaving Nick's sexuality, as with the veracity of Nick's tale itself, open to interpretation. (The playwright weaves in other details that might hint at an untrustworthy narrator.)

Sustaining the elaborate charade at times ties Nick and the playwright in knots: Murillo depends on our clinging fast to the belief that Adam's longing trumps his common sense, to the point of spurring him to violence. Yet the dialogue he's constructed for Nick and Adam in their furtive chat-room romance rings with truth, with the delicate two-steps-forward, one-step-back tentativeness of pursuer and prey.

With Dove's encouragement, the magnetically skeevy Flanagan and the coltish, skittish McCoy find an intimate wavelength on which to carry on. Flanagan -- so in his element as a stoner dude in "The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow" a few seasons back at Studio Theatre -- once again seems eerily right for his role, this time as an aggressive kid with sociopathic tendencies. McCoy's pensiveness comes across just as convincingly: You can sense in Adam's silences the character's compulsion to believe what his internal lie detector should tell him could not be real.

Platt, Charlotte Akin and Cliff Williams III round out an exemplary cast, which infuses "Dark Play" with all the conviction that a tense cat-and-mouse evening requires.

Dark Play or Stories for Boys, by Carlos Murillo. Directed by Michael Dove. Set, Matt Soule; lighting, Paul Frydrychowski; costumes, Heather Lockard; sound design and music, Christopher Baine. About 1 hour 35 minutes. Through Aug. 2 at H Street Playhouse, 1365 H St. NE. Visit http://www.forumtheatredc.org.