It's a title that pulls together the seemingly incongruent elements of the play more efficiently than playwright Carson Kreitzer can manage in this world premiere at Marin Theatre Company. In the words Lasso of Truth, you can infer plotlines that will involve the developer of the polygraph, rope-bondage fetishism, and one of the enchanted weapons in Wonder Woman's arsenal. True, the title doesn't manage to reference polygamy, but three out of four isn't bad.
If we were only talking about comic-book history, William Moulton Marston may be one of the most influential comic-book creators you've never heard of. While Bob Kane (Batman), Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Superman), and Stan Lee (Spider-Man) were alive and feted when their creations began their evolution into mega-buck franchises, Marston died in 1947, only six years after Wonder Woman made her debut, and long before Lynda Carter embodied her on television. Marston, played with a gee-whiz madness by Nicholas Rose, wasn't interested in creating a female knockoff of the reigning male superheroes, but wanted to imbue her with his idiosyncratic views of feminism and subtly suggest the social benefits of bondage role-play.
Flash-forwards to contemporary times do provide Kreitzer with opportunities to suggest how the Carter-ized Wonder Woman influenced young female viewers, with an adult woman (the sturdy Lauren English) telling the audience of the empowerment she felt watching the TV series. Her obsession with finding a copy of the very first Wonder Woman comic book leads her into an amusingly awkward romance between her and a comic-book collector nicely played as a doofus hipster by John Riedlinger.
The relatively traditional aspects of their relationship provide a sustaining counterpoint to the world of Marston, his wife (a starchy Jessa Brie Moreno), and the young woman (a spritely, steely Liz Sklar) they invite into their lives as a third spouse. They variously like to tie each other up, more about subtle supplication than hardcore bondage, but a little bit of systematic binding accompanied by mild odes to power-play turns out to go a long way on stage. Marston's early experiments at creating a lie detector also have to be considered in the proceedings, and Kreitzer provides a feverish scene with Marston's two women entrapped in chairs by polygraph straps.
That we sometimes shift into a comic-book world is represented with elaborately imaginative projected graphics and videos (by Jacob Stoltz and Kwame Braun) that somehow even get Gloria Steinem in on the act. In cartoonized live-action videos, with the theme from The Mary Tyler Moore Show setting the time and tone, Steinem is determined to put Wonder Woman on one of the first covers of Ms. magazine if only the comic's current guardians get their heroine out of her hip professional attire and back into the outfit we know so well. The bondage, well, she's says, let's not dwell on that.
The life and work of William Moulton Marston are such an unlikely confluence of ingredients that Kreitzer really has pulled off a minor miracle in finding a dramatic form that can contain it all. There are several points in the second act where the play can satisfactorily come to an end, but Kreitzer seems reluctant to let go of the lasso and set us free.
Lasso of Truth will run at Marin Theatre Company through March 16. Tickets are $37-$58. Call 388-5208 or go to www.marintheatre.org.