PORTLAND, Maine — James Wormold is an unlikely candidate. Then again, the hapless vacuum cleaner salesman, living in Cuba for a decade, is the perfect man for the job. So he’s tapped by the British Intelligence Services to create a spy network in Cuba and recruit fresh blood in “Our Man in Havana.”
Portland Stage’s timing of the satiric play is strangely in sync with world developments.
With the U.S. embargo on Cuba loosening for the first time in decades, what can this Cold War spy thriller, opening Jan. 23, teach us about this country caught in a time warp for more than half a century?
“I selected this play a year ago,” said the theater’s executive and artistic director Anita Stewart. “The whole notion of spies [and] how do you become a spy is exciting.”
The adaptation of the Graham Greene’s 1958 novel about a bumbling humble-salesman-turned-spy is “very smart and well-written, he paints beautiful pictures. You feel like you are going somewhere new and exotic,” said Stewart, who created the sets for this show.
“The fact that it’s dovetailing with the release of spies in the news and Cuba is double fun,” said Stewart referring to President Barack Obama’s recent exchange of three Cuban spies for American Alan Gross, imprisoned since 2009.
The play has four actors, and three of them perform 30 roles. Among the cast is Katie MacNichol, a Cape Elizabeth native who returns to the state to perform in Portland for the first time.
“This is the theater that I came to when I was in high school and saw shows,” said MacNichol by phone Wednesday. She’s a full-time actress who lives in Los Angeles and has performed on Broadway.
“The actors that I saw here in high school set me on my path,” she said. “I went to NYU after high school to major in acting and never looked back.”
Her husband, Bruce Turk, is the play’s lead, Wormold.
Whether the audience walks away with a new sense of Cuba is not really the point, director Paul Mullins says, though the focus on Cuba in the news should give the show a new sheen and has boosted ticket sales.
“Our challenge is to make sure it’s a good deal of fun,” said Mullins. “It’s an absurd comedy. It’s very funny but has depth to it. How do we end up in situations we never expected to be in?”
Clive Francis, born in Sussex, England, adapted the story for the stage a few years ago. The arches of Cuba’s frozen-in-time architecture will take the audience away to another age. Also, the tech-free nature of the show is a refreshing reset.
“We are talking about a world before computers, a very analog world where things are sent on a plane and by boat,” said Mullins, dashing any comparisons to modern spy stories. “It’s such a different thing from Edward Snowden sitting at a computer and making decisions. Greene depicts a much lighter and absurd kind of world.”
And with only 5 percent of Cubans able to access the Internet as of last month, the decades-old story may not be too far off.
“They were probably much more like the rest of the world. The government shut it down and isolated them. They have been left behind. It’s a very interesting moment,” said Mullins. “They are being thrust back into the world, into the mainstream.”
So is life imitating art, or vice versa?
“We had talked about it a lot as we were waiting for this to begin,” said Mullins. “Well, how right on the zeitgeist can we be?”
Tickets are $37 to $47 and can be purchased online at portlandstage.org. The show previews January 20 to 22, and runs through Feb. 15. at Portland Stage, 25 Forest Ave.
