Rabih Mroué begins his theatrical piece, "Looking for a Missing Employee," with a transparent declaration: "this performance is not trying to find the truth or the untruth, not trying to find who's guilty and who's innocent."
Can we trust him? Is Mroué on the level -- an innocent bloke with a story to tell? Or is he on the verge of spinning the kind of manipulative propaganda web that political hierarchies construct with the eager participation of media machines? We'll never know, and like any good poker player, Mroué offers hints only when it is to his advantage. We are helpless, lost in an Orwellian maze and reduced to trusting the only man in the room with all the information -- Mroué .
The Beirut-based playwright/actor is on his first American tour with "Missing Employee," which landed Thursday night at the Walker Art Center's "Out There" series. He employs three video screens live-streaming these things: his face as he narrates the story of a government employee who disappears during the Lebanese civil war; the notebooks he flips through, containing his newspaper clippings of the case; a color-coded chart on which fellow performer Ghassan Halawani jots clues, names, timelines and suppositions.
Mroué says the story is based on a real case. That hardly matters, because he is pursuing a deeper experience for us: to give us a sense of a world in which information mutates, where power is expressed through corrupt statements presented as truth.
The clippings tell how the story gains dissonant energy from rumor and scandal. There are reports of kidnapping, embezzlement, assassination, forged stamps and criminal flight. The employee is a martyr, a thief, a bon vivant, generous, homely, ideal. The amount of money involved in the scandal ranges from mere millions to many billions.
At one point, a compliant newspaper publishes a correction about the case because the finance minister said certain numbers were wrong and "the minister always tells the truth." On another occasion, Mroué notes that one key person in the case is "Josef K," though not the Josef K from Kafka's "The Trial." Sure, and we believe Mroué because he always tells the truth?
This is a terribly sly and seductive piece of work. Mroué says it straight out toward the end of his 100-minute performance: "Between the truth and the lie there is but a hair. I am trying to cut this hair."
Mroué speaks with serious intent, occasionally dotting a point with whimsy, gaining our confidence and constantly keeping us off (or is it on?) guard? This must be what it's like to live in a society built on disinformation.
