'Basra' mines the tensions of a murky conflict

Jerrell Lee (left) and Joe Lanza in ''How Many Miles to Basra?,'' about a humanitarian mission gone wrong. (Robert Boyd)

STONEHAM - As director Weylin Symes points out in his program notes, Colin Teevan's "How Many Miles to Basra?," an Iraq-war drama making its US debut at Stoneham Theatre, originated as a radio play. Attempting to ignore that fact is like trying not to think about elephants. Despite Cristina Todesco's evocative set - sweeps of desolate desert brown punctuated by electricity towers - and the best efforts of a generally skilled cast, the play never achieves three-dimensional credibility.

"Basra" tells the fictional story of a humanitarian mission that Sergeant Stewart MacDonald (Derek Stone Nelson), the leader of a British military unit, embarks on after his men gun down two Iraqis at a checkpoint, having mistaken a flashlight for a weapon. With his dying breath, one "Mr. Raghead" - that's hothead Freddie (Jerrell Lee) talking, whose itchy trigger finger initiated the bloodbath - entrusts a small fortune in ransom money to the sergeant, explaining that a sheik has kidnapped his wife and son. As Ursula (Eve Kagan), an embedded journalist, translates, "Now that you have killed him, the debt is yours."

The sergeant is mere days from heading home, but being a man of honor - not to mention a regretful husband who married rashly and too young - he decides to head off across the desert and attempt an unauthorized rescue (red tape would be tantamount to a death sentence for the woman and boy). He's accompanied by Freddie (clearly a mutineer in the making), the equally volatile "Dangermouse" (Joe Lanza), and a green recruit, Geordie (Alejandro Simoes). Ursula, being a tireless tracker of the truth, hires a driver, Malek (Mason Sand), and trails after them.

You can probably picture some of the trials that lie in store: bandits, sandstorms, and worse. And given the cursory character sketches already in place, it's not difficult to extrapolate how each will respond. There is plenty of drama, but it's muddled by often impenetrable accents (Nelson's is crystalline, Lee's uniformly unintelligible), inadequate stage effects (the VW Golf that Malek drives looks like a carnival bumper car), and intrusive theatrical machinations. At a key point in their slog, for instance, Teevan suddenly has the characters switch to narrating their actions in past tense, thereby revealing that they survived this particular challenge. So much for suspense - though the playwright, like both sides in this murky conflict, does have a few more tricks up his sleeve.

There's some very fine acting on view here - Nelson in particular, and Sand as an educated man, a former archeologist, who has seen his career, family, and homeland destroyed. "To remove this monster Saddam, whom you made to keep us in our place," he states matter-of-factly, "you have bombed us, impoverished us . . . You reduce a country to rags, and then you call us ragheads."

It's a stinging indictment. "How Many Miles to Basra?" may not fully succeed in bringing the war home, but the experience does bring it closer.