Friedrich Durrenmatt's "The Visit" is the best yet in the current Army Readers Theatre season of classic scripts. The cast boasts an abundance of talent as a dozen performers, many of whom have played leads on other Island stages, take on supporting roles in a tragic comedy of retribution and doom.

The 1956 play centers on the homecoming of the fabulously wealthy Claire Zachanassian to the central European town of her birth. Gullen has fallen on hard times and its citizens are anxious to please the wealthy woman. She offers them a million pounds to kill their most popular citizen.

Now 70, shopkeeper Alfred Ill is as poor as the rest of the citizens, but not without guilt. Many years earlier, after getting Claire pregnant, he bribed a couple of drunks to testify that they had slept with her. Shamed out of town, she was driven to prostitution.

But Claire married well, and with the newest in a line of husbands in tow, returns to Gullen to carry out her revenge.

The language in the Army Community Theatre reading is clear, the plot direct, and the large cast keeps the characters distinct with only a minimum of doubling up in roles. The dark humor underlying the tragedy is that, slowly and steadily, money has the ability to turn heads, alter philosophies and buy murder.

The central characters are portrayed by Victoria Gail White (Shari Lynn in later performances) and Richard Pellett.

White keeps Claire uniformly and blissfully blithe and matter-of-fact about her corrupting purpose, smugly confident that she is wise to the ways of the world because she owns it. She's similarly careless about buying the actions of the townspeople and "turning the world into a brothel."

But with this one-note dedication of purpose, one wonders whether she's pleased or disappointed about accomplishing her aim and whether she takes any satisfaction to be followed out of town by Alfred's coffin.

By contrast, Pellett's reading of Alfred takes the character through wrenching changes. First confident in his popularity (He's the mayor designee.), Alfred becomes increasingly unnerved as the fickle townspeople begin to buy on credit things they can't afford. Ultimately, he becomes resigned to his sacrificial fate.

Much of the interest in the reading comes from the supporting characters as the promise of wealth corrupts and changes them.

Religion (Peter Clark as a priest), government (David Schaeffer as the mayor), and medicine (David Starr as a doctor) slowly turn their backs on Alfred. A schoolmaster (Larry Bialock) defends him for a time, but eventually gives in. Even his wife of many years (Jan McGrath) has a new and unpaid for fur coat hidden in her closet.

Among Claire's entourage are John White as husbands No. 7, 8, and 9, Dion Donahue as a butler, and James Imlay and Joshua Imlay as blind castrati. Eden-Lee Murray handles the narration.

"The Visit" offers a moving illustration of the power of greed and the ultimate disappointment that comes with satisfying it.

'THE VISIT'

2 p.m., Sunday and March 16

Richardson Theatre, Fort Shafter

Free

438-4480

Joseph T. Rozmiarek has reviewed theater performances in Hawai'i since 1973.