Ceirra Lundy and Suzy London (Photo by Doug Engalla)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
Group Rep
Through May 10
D. Anthony Boone and Erik Nothstein (Photo by Doug Engalla)
There is a play somewhere amid Tamir Yardenne’s script in this world premiere production, but detecting it is a mystery far more confounding than the preposterous murder mystery at its heart. Actually, that should read its multiple hearts, for this is a play with several, each pulsing with its own wildly careening rhythm but which never combine into a credible pulse. If this play were an EKG, a defibrillator would be close at hand.
It’s a spoof on the high stakes and melodramatic emotion of afternoon soap operas. It’s a satire on industry ego and vanity. It’s a murder mystery along the lines of Agatha Christie on crack. It’s a denunciation of the half-steps and missteps in the wake of the racial reckoning in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
What it isn’t, at least in this early stage of its development, is clear; it isn’t cohesive or compelling. A Black man on the set of an apparent antebellum soap opera opens the play dressed in a gorilla suit while hurling N-bombs. At play’s end, the same actor is taking a stand against institutionalized racism; but in between, he is hosting a Daytime Emmy Award nomination party for the very people — and system — that he is railing against.
A chorus of stereotypical characters surround our lead character, Jesse (a suave D. Anthony Boone), an 18-time Emmy nominee still waiting for his first win (yes, the Susan Lucci references are ubiquitous). There’s the ambitious junkie Colby Anne (a suitably spunky Erin Lee Smith), reveling in her first nomination but who doesn’t get long to savor it; there’s his (and her) mercenary agent (the well-grounded Cierra Lundy); the vacuous Kit, (Erik Nothstein) another actor on the soap; a conniving showrunner with leaking breasts (Suzy London); a Dominican detective (Tharun Dulla) and a drunken script supervisor (Marcel Licera), both with big secrets that are less teased than spontaneously erupt; and Maryam (Oceane Rose Laurent), Jesse’s executive assistant, whose primary role seems to hold the tenuous strands of Jesse in place.
There are also the requisite love (or sex) triangles, an unseen Latina kitchen servant with Parkinson’s, enough drugs to incapacitate a herd of elephants and, of course, a murder in which everyone is the suspect — even though we clearly see only one character do anything to suggest their direct role in it.
The revelations and secret motives burst like a string of firecrackers lit by a mischievous street urchin (one thing this story lacks), rendering all suspense and plausibility irrelevant.
The convoluted plot, saddled by subplots that don’t move it forward as much as stall it, isn’t helped by Douglas Jewell’s direction — or lack thereof. This play doesn’t move as much as it plods like a circus clown car with flat tires and no driver. One-liners land haphazardly, the timing is all over the place, and the broad characterizations make just about every character, other than the most egotistic, vain and histrionic one – Boone’s Jesse – equally unsavory.
That’s a shame because playwright Yardenne is an obvious devotee of soaps and murder mysteries and seems to want to say something about embedded racism in the entertainment industry. But in its current form, the racial animus that bookends the play feels like an intriguing appetizer and tasty aperitif, with a whole lot of goulash in between.
The Group Rep Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd, North Hollywood. Thurs., 7 pm, Sat., 4 pm, Sun., 7 pm. Thru May 10. https://thegrouprep.com. Running time: 2 hours and 20 minutes with an intermission.
