Master of the Game

D: Jeff Stolhand; with Uygar Aktan, Garry Peters, Steven Prince, David Stokey.

Narrative Feature Special Screenings, World Premiere

If you can believe — or suspend your disbelief — that a bored group of Nazi officers would on a dare submit their lives and authority to a captured American Jew, this claustrophobic excursion into the nature of power and identity is intelligent, suspenseful, and an actor’s tour de force. The engaging script is by Uygar Aktan, also the lead, a nameless soldier who challenges his captors to assume the roles of condemned prisoners for the purpose of a metaphysical question: Is authority natural, or socially constructed? Remarkably, Aktan, director Jeff Stolhand, and a strong cast dramatize that problem in a manner always interesting and often gripping. At times the emotion rises almost to the level of Twelve Angry Men (the script’s inspiration) — and local audiences should find it amusing to see an Austin Studios set and Bastrop State Park standing in for an isolated cabin in the Black Forest. (3/15, Paramount, 5pm)

This article appears in March 15 • 2002.

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Contributing writer and former news editor Michael King has reported on city and state politics for the Chronicle since 2000. He was educated at Indiana University and Yale, and from 1977 to 1985 taught at UT-Austin. He has been the editor of the Houston Press and The Texas Observer, and has reported and written widely on education, politics, and cultural subjects.