Hooked

Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
City Garage Theatre
Through December 18

A sad Russian clown. His wife, who can’t laugh. An interloper with a mysterious past. A hook that appears in the bathroom one day.

These are the ingredients of Hook, writer/director A. M. Sannazarro’s new one-act now playing as a guest production at City Garage Theatre. The show is billed as a dark comedy, but nothing about either the script or its execution is funny.

The play opens on Ivan (Sannazarro) sitting on the toilet. He farts, and the play is off and running. His wife Anya (Nicelle Davis) cooks them breakfast, but it’s not very good since they’re poor and can’t afford quality ingredients. Then Ivan goes off to work as a clown. We follow the couple through banal interconnected scenes, until Ollie (Jeffrey Gardner), a neighbor, appears. Anya welcomes him into their apartment, but Ivan doesn’t trust Ollie and kicks him out. Ollie returns later when Ivan is at work, and it is then that Anya realizes that Ollie has killed his grandmother and is currently armed. When Ivan comes home, the two men get into an altercation. Things spin out of control, and the lives of all three characters circle the drain.

The script is sparse; the characters usually spit out only a few words at a time, which leaves the performers with plenty of gaps to fill. Unfortunately, they don’t fill them effectively. The blocking is awkward, and the overall effect is alarmingly reminiscent of the recurring Saturday Night Live sketch “High School Theatre Show” —  but distinctly unfunny. Anya hops around the stage, and instead of laughing, utters “ha ha ha, he he he, ho ho ho.”

Although the ensemble painstakingly establishes the geography of the play’s apartment setting, clearly delineating doorways, the layout of the apartment doesn’t make sense. And while there’s a gun onstage for most of the play (breaking Chekhov’s rule about weapons onstage), it’s only used once, about halfway through the show, and then just sits there, front and center, for the rest of the play. It’s entirely perplexing, but then again, that’s in line with the show as a whole.

Hooked briefly delves into the existential about one third of the way in. Anya, bemoaning the state of her marriage, speaks to herself: “What have I been watching this for? This lousy joke! This unfunny parable I’ve locked myself into, a lesson learned to earn a laugh, but I’m not laughing, I don’t hear not even one chuckle, I don’t see the beam of one grin, and I don’t remember when was the last time… no, more than that, I can’t remember the sound of my own laughter.”

It’s the sole moment of clarity in this piece, a brief indication that Sannazarro knows that this play isn’t a comedy, and that watching it isn’t an enjoyable experience. But then Anya snaps back into her reality, and the story keeps plodding along towards its bleak finale.

City Garage Theatre, 2525 Michigan Ave, building T1, Santa Monica, Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m., Sun., 2 p.m., Sun., 4 p.m., though Dec. 18; (661) 874-5110 or theindustrialplayerstroupe@gmail.com.  Running time: 65 minutes with no intermission.