E-Mail This Article to a Friend Twists of faith Blinders; Den of Thieves BY LIZA WEISSTUCH

By now you know the drill: you read the papers, watch the news, and witness events unfold as choreographed by the media and the spin doctors. Commentators step in to reinforce or refute the concocted images; then the bubble bursts and reality leaks out. In his clever new Blinders (at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre through April 17), local playwright Patrick Gabridge uses the scalpel of comedy to disassemble the media machine that often churns out propaganda. The play could easily have been written about the alleged WMD in Iraq, but this isn’t a documentary, so the premise is, well, less outlandish. A scientist (Maureen Keiller) has discovered two humans who are exactly alike but who are not twins. The press goes hog wild over the "scientific" find and turns the duo, Chris and Alex, into marketable media darlings complete with T-shirts, tours, and sneaker ads. Soon the cash is flowing in and the look-alikes’ wave of popularity swells to a presidential candidacy.

But intrepid reporter Karen (a sparky Karen Woodward Massey) is out to blow the whistle on the harebrained scam. After all, Chris and Alex, though equally dopy and able to finish each other’s sentences, don’t look at all alike. But Karen is thwarted by charges of insanity hurled her way and by Stack (Stephen Cooper), her publicist husband, who leaps at the opportunity to help oil the PR gears for the devious duo.

The story unfolds in rapid-fire scenes that are reined in by Gabridge’s well-structured, witty dialogue. The preposterousness of the "discovery" and of the media’s complicity in a deceit that divides and multiplies like an amœba would seem to require extreme suspension of disbelief, especially when the second act swerves into a film noir–ish espionage plot. But Gabridge’s capricious yarn proves easy to buy given the scams we’ve been fed by mass media of late.

Without preaching, Blinders shows how society’s materialism can border on religious devotion — a willingness to worship any golden calf. Faith is also put to the test at the Boston Center for the Arts, where Company One is offering Den of Thieves (in the Black Box Theatre through April 23), an early play by Stephen Adly Guirgis, the New York über-hipster and a founding member of LAByrinth Theater Company, where pal Philip Seymour Hoffman directs all his plays. Thieves is a good example of a concept drama, one hatched from an interesting idea that gets played with until it wears thin.

Guirgis’s works — including Jesus Hopped the "A" Train, which Company One staged in 2003, and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which was just extended at New York’s Public Theater — reveal his fascination with the Christian faith. Thieves takes place at the conceptual crossroad of spiritual salvation and packaged quick fixes. The characters are all addicts of a kind, prey to some vice that corrodes their self-worth to the point that they’ve turned crooked to cope. Troubled Maggie (Nicole Parker) is a compulsive kleptomaniac and overeater. Paul (Keith Mascoll), formerly an obese and chain-smoking klepto, has trimmed down, styled up, and been 682 days theft-free. He’s here to "save" (and flirt with) Maggie. But when her ex, Flacco (Mason Sand), a hot-tempered career criminal, drops by to rope Maggie and Paul into helping with a mega-heist, temptation looms for Paul. Now addicted to 12-step programs and fluent in personal-growth jargon, he justifies his relapse by adopting the work ethic of his grandfather, a member of the Den of Thieves, a philanthropic Jewish gang that funneled stolen money into libraries for urban kids. Toss in Boochie (Molly Kimmerling, who does justice to the script’s best zingers), a pea-brained exotic dancer and the sexaholic of the group, and you have a motley crew doomed to botch the job. The would-be thieves end up hostages of Mafiosi who force them to decide among themselves which one will die.

Guirgis has a sharp ear for the poetic vulgarities of street talk and a way with incorporating spiritual considerations, especially as they relate to temptation, charity, and forgiveness. But the play tips from perception to parody when Paul’s appeal for mercy sets off a psychoanalytic spree in which he diagnoses the mobsters’ brutal inclinations as symptoms of their own obsessive habits.

That even scoundrels can be redeemed is not a new theme, and by thwacking us with his point that the evils of the world might be tempered if criminals distilled their aggression into problems healable in 12 steps, Guirgis renders his play too obvious. The need for half the cast to join Overactors Anonymous doesn’t help. Sand’s Eminem-like Flacco and Mascol’s cloying Paul appear all the more overblown besides the less buffoonish performances, notably Parker’s stoic, brooding turn as Maggie and Tony Berg’s icy rendering of unflappable assassin Sal. Between them, these two steal Thieves.