Gas. Between 1917 and 1920, German playwright Georg Kaiser wrote a trilogy about greed and the evils of industrialism at a plant that manufactures some form of gas. The plays were an early exploration of the way manufactured energy was changing the world, and workers in the industry.
A new local theater group, the Anthology Project, is presenting Gas, taken from part of that trilogy, in an overwrought adaptation by artistic director Thomas Choinacky. The play's messages are muddy (it seems to speak for an unrealistic form of "going green" while simultaneously attacking it), and it is tedious in its early-20th-century dialogue and didactic lead character (an unconvincing Mark Robson), who commands the plant with a stream of nonsense about the nature of man and the power of machines.