THEO AND LEO

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

To date, all of Robert Kroller’s plays have contained what can only be called second sight. His debut, The Flaming Gavel, in which a decorated judge hired an assassin to dispatch his estranged wife, premiered onstage exactly one year before nearly identical events unfolded in the state’s highest court. Kroller’s second, Nature of the Beast, told of a mysterious virus ravaging racehorses while also granting them the power of speech; six months after it opened, Switchyard, the winner of the year’s Kentucky Derby, was scratched from the Preakness with an unknown illness and, the morning of the race, appeared before the press with his trainer, who angled the microphone toward the horse: “I’m disappointed,” Switchyard said. Last year’s Comet Calls presented a more intimate version of this phenomenon. The main character, Kent Markham, was a writer more than loosely based on Kroller who, in the opening scene, smashed his thumb with a hammer. A week after opening night, Kroller did the same, to the same thumb. This past weekend, we learned that the prophet is fatigable. Kroller’s new play, The Gardener Smoking Out a Wasps’ Nest, does not even attempt to assay the future, portraying as it does a scene from the anchored past: 1929, to be precise, in Nebraska, when the events described in the title unfold exactly as indicated. The lead character, Theodore Zirco (Kroller’s genius with names remains undimmed), is a mild-manner gardener working for one of Lincoln’s wealthiest families, the McDougals. Sweet on the oldest McDougal daughter, Leonora, he camps outside her window, not a Peeping Tom exactly but at least a seeking one, at which point he notices a massive wasps’ nest. Fearing for the safety of his beloved, he lights a small fire beneath the nest. The remainder of the first act is too intricate to relate, but suffice it to say that by Act Two, Zirco and Leonora are living as man and wife in Rome, he working as a stonemason, she as an artist’s model, when a man from her past arrives bearing a photograph that will change everything. The dialogue crackles. The performances are sharp. And yet, there is a melancholy sense of something missing—to wit, Kroller’s divining eye. The only hint of it comes at the play’s close, when Leonora stands on the balcony in Rome, gazing at the moon. “One day man will walk on the surface of that distant gray orb,” she says, and while that is a prediction already secured, the second half of her musing takes on greater risk. “Sixty years after that,” she continues, “the grandson of that man will dine in a restaurant with a woman whose sister will have a son  who will grow up to be a political operative who will be murdered in the halls of Congress by a foreign service officer assumed at first to be a terrorist but revealed soon enough to be a jealous husband. I just know it, Theo.” To which he replies, in a voice that seems to spring directly from, if not the author himself, the critics and theatergoers who have lionized him for his precognition: “I know it too, Leo. Now come to bed.”