Sexpionage takes center stage in ‘Rubicon’ at Denver Center

At the Denver Center, a world premiere about a real-life spy whose battlefield was the bedroom

Spies aren’t born, they’re made, and in Rubicon, we get the origin story of one real-life agent from the 1930s and ’40s. Kirsten Potter’s comedic drama came out of the DCPA Theatre Company’s 2022 New Play Summit, and with Chris Coleman directing, the intriguing script comes to vivid life in a world premiere at the Kilstrom Theatre.

The action centers around Betty Pack (one of her many names), an American with a well-connected military officer for a father who traveled extensively as a child and picked up languages and lovers through her teens. We’re introduced to her on her wedding day to Arthur Pack — a member of the British embassy in Washington many years her senior. Even as she prepares for the ceremony, she’s hiding another lover under the bed while her mother chides her about clearly being pregnant.

Act One is a fast-paced journey through Betty’s early years as an indifferent mother and wife more interested in sexual liaisons than family life. All of the details of the early years of the marriage — a move to Chile and then Spain, an affair with a Catholic priest, dabbling in fascism during the Spanish Civil War, Arthur’s stroke and plenty more — are portrayed in number of rapid-fire scenes. There’s so much exposition and information being thrown at us in the first act that, by intermission, I felt somewhat overwhelmed. Would this thing come together in Act Two?

Aaron Blakely and Carolyn Holding as Arthur and Betty Pack | Photo: Jamie Kraus Photography

One busy stage

Staged in the round at the Kilstrom, Coleman takes full advantage of the theatre’s copious bells and whistles — most notably heavy use of the many trap doors, turntables and elevating platforms. The recently revamped stage has more gadgets than the Batmobile, and there are times when all that whiz-bangery becomes a distraction even as they help propel the action with quicky scene changes.

Rubicon is staged with a minimal cast with only Carolyn Holding as Betty playing a single character. One of the main themes of the play is how effective sex can be as an espionage tool, and Holding has Betty’s number as a woman who sees no moral issues hopping in bed with a mark if it furthers the war goals. Some of the sharpest bits of dialogue revolve around how the men in her life view the transactional application of her naughty bits. At one point she tells one of her handlers that she’d never felt any shame about the sex until he mansplains his own morality insecurities to her.

Betty’s exploitation of men is masterful, and some of the most delightful moments come as we watch her easily work those little heads no matter the status of the bigger one up top. It’s her show, and Holding has the character firmly in hand in a bravura performance.

The reed-thin actor looks the part of the shapeshifting femme fatale, and costumer Meghan Anderson Doyle has fun dressing her in an array of classy outfits that are easily doffed for sexual congress. (There’s no nudity in Rubicon, but the many sex acts contain plenty of humpin’ and a-bumpin’ managed by intimacy choreographer Samantha Egle.)

The ensemble

The rest of the people in Betty’s life are handled by Kate Forbes, Aaron Blakely, Pomme Koch and Denver favorite Geoffrey Kent. Koch has the most fun as two of Betty’s lovers, and the actor is convincing as he transitions from a Spaniard to a Frenchman. He and Holding establish a strong rapport as a team in Act Two during a caper to steal codes from the Vichy embassy in D.C. during WWII. It’s this lover, Charles Brousse, who Betty eventually ends up after he convinces her he’d love her no matter who else she slept with. (In real life, she lives out the end of her days with him in a medieval French castle until her death from throat cancer in 1963.)

While Kent and Blakely do fine work portraying a number of the male characters, Forbes is asked to play a few men in addition to several females. It’s not often we see this kind of cross-casting in drama — even one a fair amount of comedy such as Rubicon — and it hits the wrong key. Forbes is quite petite, for starters, and seeing her in a gray wig and suit chomping a cigar as an elderly U.S. senator made me think of Kate McKinnon on SNL portraying Jeff Sessions. I don’t think that’s the kind of funny Coleman was looking for, and it’s a rare misstep.

But he’s on his game in other places, particularly in managing the many transitions — some of which have two of Betty’s marks in the same bedroom. Watching her wiggle out of one bed and into the arms of the other guy in the same room is a genius stroke that nicely illustrates the challenges she faced managing all those pesky penises. The focus given to the sex scenes was key to fully portraying the action in Betty’s theatre of war — although I didn’t envy the actors trying to get comfortable in beds that were essentially raised wooden platforms. And there’s some awkwardness at times as they wrestle with clothes, shoes, bedding and things going up and down.

That aside, Rubicon is an engaging story well told in a sleek production that does Potter’s script justice. Wartime spawns a thousand stories, but so many of them are tales of men. Here, we get an up-close look at a woman who knew her power and how to use it. Even if the men around her didn’t fully comprehend her effectiveness, she knew her actions in the bedroom were often more impactful to the war effort than anything taking place on the battlefield.