Waste Land 

 Reviewed by Paul Birchall 
Collaborative Artists Ensemble 
Through May 6 

Playwright Don Nigro’s drama about the ill-fated romance between poet T.S. Eliot and his emotionally unstable wife Vivienne receives its world premiere in this unevenly acted, perhaps overly reverent production. To channel one of those dreadful house hunting TV shows on the Home and Garden Network: The show has good “bones,” but much of the execution requires a total gut job. 

The story concerns the early years of the American-born Eliot (JJ Smith), before the creation of his epic The Wasteland. While studying in London, Eliot falls in love with a whimsical, quirky British gal Vivienne (Meg Wallace) and they marry.  His early works soon gain him entry into London’s Bloomsbury set, but his emotionally undemonstrative manner creates friction with the needy Vivianne, whom Eliot’s pal Virginia Woolf (Georgan George) refers to as “a bag of ferrets around his neck”. 

And when, seemingly as a result of Eliot’s escalating disdain and lack of compassion, Vivienne’s sanity starts to decompose, who can a poet turn to for advice but other poets? 

Just as the latest Avengers movie combines Spiderman and Iron Man, so does Waste Land feature a match-up between Eliot and super-poets James Joyce (Rich Brunner), Ezra Pound (Bartholmeus De Meirsman) and Gertrude Stein (Deborah Cresswell).  Their advice is enough to further shake poor Vivienne who, as history tells us, perishes in a lunatic asylum. 

Director Steve Jarrard’s staging is both straightforward and rather heavy-handed, as again and again the performers play the most obvious choices and interpretations of Nigro’s writing.  His imperfectly toned script is clearly part of the problem: It’s a work that clumsily changes mood moment by moment. There are fly-on-the-wall café sequences full of literary celebrities spewing pretentious epigrams such as “the man who suffers and the man who creates – keep them separate!” And then the work lurches into half-formulated scenes of awkward whimsy that come across as irritating, such as a weird one in which Wallace’s Viv plays an Alice In Wonderland-like game of croquet with George’s Virginia Woolf, complete with hedgehog croquet balls and flamingo mallets.  

This isn’t the first theater piece to explore one of 20^th century literature most complicated relationships. Michael Hastings did it in the drama Tom and Viv, which was adapted into an Oscar nominated movie back in the 90s and was noteworthy for its attempt to explore the universal emotions underpinning the love lives of the two central characters.  In Nigro’s work, though, the characters are mere names. Viv’s escalating madness is a sort of bug eyed shrill bawling, while little attempt is made to figure out what makes Eliot tick. And Viv’s role is strangely thankless: She exists only to orbit Eliot, and we are told very little about her unrelated to her wayward husband. 

Performances are generally as unseasoned as the direction. Although Smith offers an intermittently intriguing enigma of polite coldness and charm as Eliot, and George’s snarky Woolf is a pleasure to watch, some other performances are downright weak.  Wallace’s disappointingly turn as Viv lacks the delicacy required to fully convey emotional collapse. It’s a pity that little attempt is made here to explore her madness; given as she’s portrayed here, one can understand why Eliot committed her.  

studio/stage, 520 N. Western Ave., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through May 6. (323) 860-6569(323) 860-6569(323) 860-6569860-6569(323) 860-6569860-6569(323) 860-6569860-6569 or https://brownpapertickets.com/event/3321593. Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with an intermission.