William McNulty as Count Wintergrin and William Garden asnBlackford Oakes in William F. Buckley Jr.’s playnStained Glass.n’>&fl|[^ InAnne Pitoniak as Mabel in HarrynCrews’ Blood Issue.n48/CHRONICLESnare the trials of various white supremacists,nthe murder of Denver talk shownhost Alan Berg, speeches of men likenRev. Richard Butler of the .Aryan Nations,nand the seduction and indoctrinationnof various members of the “ThenOrder.” Dietz covers a lot of ground,nand it is perhaps too much. Most of thenactors play several parts, and with onenexception no character is on stage longnenough for the audience to get a feel ofnhim.nThere is something impersonalnabout all this, and manipulative. Centralnto Dietz’s Aryan iconography is anyoung blonde boy, who hardly speaks,nbut whom the audience over thencourse of the play sees in various stagesnof indoctrination. He is the future, Insuppose, the child of angry parentsnwho will carry his hate over into thennext generation, no matter how manynwhite supremacists the FBI shoots intonoblivion; he is representative of thenyoung people who gathered last Decembernon Whidbey Island off of Seattlento commemorate the death of RobertnJay Matthews, The Order’snfounder. He is a symbol; the trouble isnhe’s all symbol. Plays work best whennthey have people in them, not mouth­nnnpieces and straw men. You run intonproblems when there is no literal levelnto your play, and Dietz doesn’t havenone — except the utteriy literal level ofnhis research. He has not written a play,nhe has staged a documentary, even ifnhe has staged it well.nThe festival’s one disaster was ConstancenCongdon’s Tales of the LostnFormicans, an extraterrestrial anthropologynclass on humans. Much betternwas Richard Strand’s The Bug, a satirenon the bureaucracy of corporate American(an employee concerned about jobnsecurity unleashes chaos with a simplenquestion). It was, again, a two-dimensionalnpiece of work — the charactersnwere vice presidents and underlings,nnot people. Of course that’s preciselynStrand’s point, that the ofRce makesnautomatons of us, and the play as anwhole was well-structured and amusing.nEven more satirical — often obscenelynso—was Arthur Kopit’s Bonethe-Fish,nin which an ex-producer undergoesnan increasingly horrible set ofnhumiliations in order to earn thenchance to get in on the “biggest filmndeal of his life. In its terrible way thisnplay has as good a first act as a satirencan. Suffice it to say that all thenlanguage Californians use metaphoricallynto describe humiliation becomes,nin Kopit’s Hollywood, literal. The haplessnJerry bleeds for this deal, and that’snjust for starters. Unfortunately, oncenthe deal-making moves to the house ofnrock star Zalinka in the second act, thenplay loses all of its momentum andnmuch of its humor, keeping only itsnrather sharp edge.nThe most traditional play was, fittinglynenough, William F. Buckley Jr.’snadaptation of his novel Stained Glass.nRumor had it the actors had somentrouble with the language — they saidnthe characters all spoke as Buckleynspeaks — and that rewrites were comingnin from Buckley in Switzerland,nusually a sign of some trouble. But thenactors didn’t stumble, and while Infound Blackford Oakes as unsympatheticna character on stage as I do innprint, this was a workmanlike if highlyntraditional play. Bill McNulty, especially,nwas excellent as Count AxelnWintergrin, fighting to reunify the twonGermanics following Worid War II.nThe cause is a dead one, and thenperiod long enough ago to be dated,n