Trying to Dispel Mortality With Lavish Sprinklings of Fairy Dust There's certainly a twinkle in Uncle Walt's blue eyes, but it's not the glimmer of benevolence you'd expect from the man who brought joy to countless children as the creator of Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom. No sirree. As portrayed with soft-spoken, silky menace by the mesmerizing actor Larry Pine, the man we meet in Lucas Hnath's new play, "A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney," exudes the casual cruelty of a kid who likes to pull the wings off flies on the playground, just for kicks. The play, which opened at Soho Rep on Thursday night in a superb production directed by Sarah Benson, presents a blackly comic inversion of the public Disney persona, in the form of a stylized screenplay being read in an anonymous-looking corporate conference room. As is often the case with this first-class downtown company, the expert set design by Mimi Lien incorporates the audience; we sit on chairs upholstered in bland, synthetic white fabric and are made to feel like attendees at a shareholder meeting being presided over by a particularly ruthless chief executive. Mr. Pine begins the proceedings by announcing: "I'm Walt Disney. This is a screenplay I wrote. It's about me. But the real Walt, who devoted his life to airbrushing away the world's imperfections, would hardly be likely to write this warts-and-feet-of-clay-only self-portrait. On the contrary, Walt would be doing cartoonish gyrations in his grave if he were to see how thoroughly Mr. Hnath (pronounced nayth) has subverted the popular image of Disney as America's jovial paterfamilias, spreading sunshine with each new enterprise. In Mr. Hnath's version of the Disney legend, Walt's head ends up being cryogenically preserved for posterity, so perhaps one day the reconstituted man can offer his own critique. Departing liberally from the historical record - that cryogenics rumor has been firmly debunked, for example - Mr. Hnath is less interested in illuminating the life of the man than he is in excavating new meanings from the arc of his celebrated career. "A Public Reading" is a meditation on the human desire to aspire to the status of a god, and the corrupting influence of this wish on the spirit and the flesh. Written largely in long streams of staccato dialogue, which, as in Mr. Hnath's "Isaac's Eye," another highly fictionalized drama about a historical figure, suggest a hypercaffeinated David Mamet, the play concentrates on the relationship between Disney and his brother Roy, played with glum subservience by the terrific Frank Wood. Roy is Walt's sounding board and his primary henchman, expected to execute Walt's increasingly ambitious dreams with nary a murmur. Walt's not satisfied making all those "fairy tales and fairy things" and has decided to expand into the "real world," first by making nature documentaries. "No one really wants to climb a mountain," he grumbles, "cuz who has the time?" And yet when the lemmings in their picture don't behave as lemmings are supposed to - you know, throwing themselves off cliffs in those picturesque mass suicides - Walt urges Roy to fake it. Later Roy must take the fall when labor disputes threaten to erupt among the animators, fouling the air in Walt's perfect world. No moral blot can be allowed to blacken the reputation of a visionary. "People actually name their children after me," he adds, after taunting Roy with his comparative worthlessness. But Walt's own relations with his daughter, played with simmering resentment by Amanda Quaid, are even more poisonous than those with his brother. With all those little Walts peopling the world, she and her husband, the ex-football player Ron Miller (Brian Sgambati), had nonetheless declined to honor Dad by naming any of their sons after him (at least until Walt decided to install Ron in the company during a power battle with Roy). "Because when I say your name," she calmly explains, "I think all sorts of things I don't want to think. When I say your name, I think of you, and when I think of you I get all angry, and when I think of you and the way you act, and the way you yell, and the way you threw a tantrum at my wedding and threw cake at people ... Mr. Hnath's dialogue sometimes falls into this repetitive, almost incantatory style, as if it were on a repeat loop. More often the effect is of a record player skipping, as characters interrupt one another's utterances, so that their lines of dialogue seem to be proceeding on different sound tracks. Although this highly artificial style can be wearying, the actors do a remarkably good job of giving rhythm and drive to this disjointed talk, so that the play has the smoothly propulsive movement of, well, the Monorail at Disneyland. Mr. Pine, exuding entitlement from every pore, speaks in the quietly commanding voice of a man who doesn't need to raise the volume to have his wishes made manifest. Popping pills, smoking incessantly and pouring liberal lashings of vodka into a water glass, Walt is occasionally irritated when reminded that the world is not bending itself to his will quickly enough. The Disney board and rascally Florida politics are hindering his grand dream of building his own city, an idealized urban environment where he will have "solved the problem of problems," as he memorably puts it. His real ambition, Mr. Hnath's play suggests, is to solve the problem that most glaringly symbolizes life's imperfection, namely the hard fact of death. It's a bugbear that you can feel itching at Walt whenever he is not barking out commands or, in another of the play's stylistic gimmicks, speaking the "slug lines" and other nondialogue elements of the screenplay ("Exterior. Day. Parking lot. ... "Cut to," etc.). Ignoring the copious amounts of blood he keeps coughing into handkerchiefs, Walt believes himself to be the living embodiment of the can-do spirit of American optimism that he promotes in his works, and cannot quite grasp that he won't be able to cheat death too. But he's more glaringly an example of the pathology of egoism: the fear of dying stems from a terrified sense that, for all his big dreams and big accomplishments, Walt is not "one of the most important people who ever lived," as he grandiosely aspires to be, but just a mortal like anyone else. While apparently devoting his public life to bringing pleasure to millions, Mr. Hnath's Walt Disney had a horror of being considered one of them. A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney By Lucas Hnath; directed by Sarah Benson; sets by Mimi Lien; costumes by Kaye Voyce; lighting by Matt Frey; sound by Matt Tierney; choreography by Annie-B Parson; special effects by Steve Cuiffo; props by Jon Knust; production stage manager, Heather Arnson; production manager, B D White. Presented by Soho Rep, artistic director, Sarah Benson; executive director, Cynthia Flowers,; producer, Caleb Hammons. At Soho Rep, 46 Walker Street, TriBeCa, (212) 352-3101, sohorep.org. Through May 26. Running time: 1 hour and 15 minutes. WITH: Larry Pine (Walt), Amanda Quaid (Daughter), Brian Sgambati (Ron) and Frank Wood (Roy).