Photo. Maria Vartanova

You don’t have to be an avid philatelist to be entertained by this drama about stamp collecting.

Essentially, Mauritius is a caper story with two legendary error-laden stamps as the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Conceived as musical chairs of con artists and propelled by the greed of all the participants, Mauritius is fast moving and absorbing. However, in focusing on the well-researched, main theme of a grab for rare stamps, playwright Theresa Rebeck chooses to allude to dark secrets and previous conflicts among the characters, without giving more than a hint of the back stories, a ploy that works only some of the time. Why, for instance, are the half-sisters who claim ownership of the family’s stamp collection so hostile to each other? What happened eight years earlier between the knowledgeable owner of the store and the psychopathic philatelist who craves the stamps? And did the third crooked philatelist have a connection with the younger sister before the con game began or did they simply come together because of the similarity of their goal?

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