Mauritius

GOING POSTAL
Angry dealers vie for pricey stamps.

Joan Marcus

Theresa Rebeck’s Mauritius, a mercantile thriller set in the wild and woolly arena of stamp collecting, is of a piece with its subject matter: It’s a thin little slip of a play, but it basically delivers. Rebeck sets the action in motion lickety-split in the first scene, when an apparently naive young woman, Jackie (Pill), arrives at the office of a prissy philatelist named Philip (an amusingly sourpussed Dylan Baker); her late mother has left her a book of stamps, and she wants to have them examined. Philip refuses, but Dennis (Cannavale), who has been loitering nearby, believes she possesses a pair of megavaluable offerings from the isle of Mauritius. Soon, all three—as well as Jackie’s snooty half-sister, Mary (Katie Finneran), and Dennis’s menacing boss, Sterling (a powerfully coiled Abraham)—are stuck in tense negotiations over the authenticity and ownership of the collection.

Rebeck writes punchy dialogue and provides the requisite quota of who’s-zooming-who reversals, affording each character a fair share of venality; the show plays like a softer-nosed version of David Mamet’s rat-race dissections. The cast of Doug Hughes’s typically accomplished Manhattan Theatre Club production is persuasive, and John Lee Beatty’s impressive revolving set keeps everything moving at a swift clip. Yet Mauritius has little life beyond the stings and counterstings of its plot: If the characters seem shady, it is partly because Rebeck hasn’t done much to illuminate them. The play is diverting, but leaves the envelope just where it found it, decidedly unpushed.

—Adam Feldman