The Unmentionables, Woolly Mammoth’s incendiary season-opener, boasts one of the strongest companies to tread a District stage this year. Their comic timing is both tight and loose, like a well-rehearsed but highly instinctive group of musicians. But the real star is Bruce Norris’s play itself, a screwball satire about imperialism, do-gooderism and hypocrisy. Set in equatorial West Africa, this jeremiad finds as much fault with supposedly altruistic relief workers who come to ease their troubled consciences as with the capitalists who ally themselves with despots. To call it a “black comedy” seems in questionable taste, but that’s exactly what it is — the blackest.

It’s also funny as hell. In fact, one of Norris' characters, identified only as “The Doctor,” (a droll John Livingstone Rolle) seems to have been put here simply to remind us that it’s OK to laugh at the farrago of human misery this play exposes — or it least that our respectful silence does nothing to reduce the suffering. Etienne, the African teen with whom we begin the show, takes this idea even further, telling us we’d do just as well to go home and watch TV as to sit dutifully through a serious play about the pain of an entire continent. (Kofi Owusu rocks the house in this small but pivotal role.)

In a setup that vaguely recalls Luis Bunel’s film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, the action is set over the course of a single night in the palatial home of Don (Charles H. Hyman, familiar from a million 80s TV shows, and marvelous here) and Nancy (Woolly regular Naomi Jacobson). He’s a wealthy manufacturer of something or other whose financial support props up the pseudo-democratic regime of which Aunty Mimi (Dawn Ursula) is the no-nonsense, finger-snapping representative; Nancy is his self-absorbed trophy wife. Dave (Tim Getman), a Christian missionary schoolteacher, is uncomfortable accepting Don and Nancy’s hospitality for even a single evening. But given that somebody just burned down the school where he lives and his fiancée, Jane (Marni Penning), is paralyzed by muscle spasms, he has little choice. Dave just wants to pass the night and get an early start fixing up the shack he’s found for he and Jane to live in, but Aunt Mimy takes a hard line on finding and punishing the arsonist. Events become bleaker — and more uproarious — from there.

Norris’s real achievement is not that he’s managed to invent a credible scenario that dramatizes the effects of Western intervention — be it economic or humanitarian — in Africa, but rather that he’s done so without making any of his characters a cipher. (Nancy is close, though, and it takes all of Jacobson’s skill to make something of this, the play’s thinnest character.)

The four Westerners, while all deluded in their own ways about their motives and the results of their actions, each have moments of sympathy. Norris may not want us to like these people, but he makes it difficult to hate them. The five African characters, while no less selfish, are certainly more attractive in their frankness and their bemusement at the Americans’ refusal to see things as they are. When Hyman, checking his broken wristwatch for the third time, laments, “Jesus, what has become of the Swiss?”, it sounds like Norris is gunning for Tom Stoppard's job as contemporary Satirist-in-Chief.

Indignant but never shrill, The Unmentionables points Fat Albert’s giant index finger at the audience in a way that will make you cringe in recognition through your laughter.

The Unmentionables is at Woolly Mammoth through Sept. 30. Tickets are available online.
Pictured left to right, Charles H. Hyman, Dawn Ursula, Marni Penning and Naomi Jacobson