The North Plan

The phrase emergency situation takes on an urgency that circles back to banal in Jason Wells’s dark satire. Some sort of coup has occurred in the U.S. government, with the Department of Homeland Security taking control. Details are fuzzy, as we learn in the holding room of a Podunk police station in rural Missouri, where a midlevel State Department employee allies himself with a loudmouthed petty criminal. The action here, given a good deal of menace in Kimberly Senior’s production, raises provocative questions about the use and misuse of the Constitution in our post–September 11, perpetual-war state. But Wells doesn’t probe too deeply, favoring farcical high jinks before coming to an abrupt and unsatisfying end.