The first thing the audience sees on entering Howard Community College's Studio Theatre for Rep Stage's production of Intelligence is a curtain.
Curtains are unusual in contemporary theater, but this one has a purpose. It reminds the audience of the secrecy that conceals the work of intelligence operations.
The curtain opens to reveal a book-lined office in a fine old house. Amid the room's dark paneling, bay window and gracefully arched doorway, a computer and a telephone scrambler with blinking red and yellow lights are a jarring presence.
The office's occupant, John Stella, is a sixtysomething, gray-haired man. The meaning of all the cryptic phone calls he makes and receives isn't clear to the audience, but he appears to be the president's security adviser.
Eventually one thing emerges: There's an election coming up in a Latin American country, and the United States is meddling in it.
Stella has contracted to write an autobiography, and he hasn't delivered. His publisher has sent Bevan Daniel to serve as ghost writer.
Daniel, scruffy and disrespectful, is not impressed by Stella. His late father, whom he hated, had also been a powerful government official.
Daniel has ideals and ethics. So does Stella, he discovers, but they are totally opposed to his. The clash of their mutually exclusive philosophies forms the basis of the action.
The play is not so much about intelligence as about power - understandably, since the purpose of gathering intelligence is to achieve power.
Daniel considers himself free. He has rebelled against power and the worship of it.
Stella tells him money is freedom. He was the son of an Italian laborer. He became a lawyer, not so much to practice law as to make money. He went into investment, then into government.
How, he asks Daniel, can a poor man like him call himself free? Daniel replies that he has the power to refuse any writing job he doesn't like - even Stella's book. And he does.
Suddenly the Latin American election demands all of Stella's attention. The U.S. is backing the current military government, but an expatriate writer and political leader, Jesus Victor Redondo, is on his way home. Stella fears Redondo will cause unrest, arouse the people, maybe even upset the election results.
Daniel admires Redondo as a writer and leader. To Stella he is a leftist troublemaker. He sets up a covert scheme to have Redondo diverted en route if possible, killed if not.
