EL SALVADOR
Inside the hotel, six half-crazy yanquis play out the rituals of a culture that believes it can control world events if it just watches enough news footage. Interestingly, Rafael Lima’s play never leaves the relative safety of this hotel room. We never see the war outside, we only hear about it, as it’s described by the infantry of the unnamed network’s news army, the cameramen and reporters who daily leave the hotel to film another bang-bang or photograph yet another tangle of disfigured corpses by the side of the road. All this accentuates the fact that most of what we know about places like El Salvador comes to us via the airwaves, served up in bite-size chunks in the safety of our living rooms.
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Next to these two, Tim Hopper’s and Kevin O’Conner’s more subdued, but no less real, portrayals sink into the background. Even when Hopper, as the prepped-out on-camera correspondent McCutcheon, freaks out during a machine gun battle in front of the hotel, his panic seems more comic than serious. In marked contrast, Ted Levine’s portrayal of the growling, mumbling burnt-out photographer, Pinder, was so intense and believable that the two little old ladies sitting behind me whispered uncontrollably whenever he spoke: “Isn’t he a mess!”
