Halcyon Days.

As political plays go, Steven Dietz' s Halcyon Days is fairly simple compared to Mad Forest. Days is a satire about the American invasion of Grenada, but its main target is not the event itself but the spin doctors - speech writers, White House advisers - who try to find the right words and video images to make an heroic occasion of a tragic farce. Almost everyone in the play - in so far as they are people with more substance than the cardboard cutout of President Ronald Reagan that is used in one scene - is greedy, ambitious, manipulative. With only a few exceptions, the characters - at least as they were played in the production I saw at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia - were complete caricatures. Of those exceptions, the most important are a Grenadan woman (the play's only black), sharp of tongue and eye, who understands what is going on and of course has to die in misdirected shelling; and a liberal senator who is trapped between his horror at the invasion and his fear for his son - a nasty piece of goods not needing his concern - who is using his medical-school base in Grenada to run a variety of scams. These two characters, particularly the senator, suggest that the play might have gone for something more complex than the laughs it generated. It cozies up to the audience with its we-all-know-don't-we tone. The playgoers are allied with the satirist here, never his target. Dietz, unlike Churchill, chooses not to be disquieting.