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Inland Empress

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman

Lounge Theatre

Through February 28

In Tom Cavanaugh’s implausible melodrama, the unsettled lives of a family of women grow more turbulent when their former breadwinner shows up after seven years in prison.

Once the main squeeze for the local drug kingpin, Louise (Lily Knight), prior to her incarceration, had been known as one tough cookie, a gal you crossed at your own peril. Nevertheless, her drug dealing and wild and illicit ways had kept her family financially afloat, and she remains a beloved sibling for her maternal sister, June (Monica Martin).

But prison has changed Louise; not only has she given up drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and junk food, she’s found religion – not Jesus, as one might expect of a white woman from Southern California, but Allah. A stint in a cell with a couple of black Muslim inmates who showed her kindness has radically changed her life.

Trouble is, her niece Sierra (McCready Baker) has since seized on both Louise’s operation and her man, and remains unconvinced of her aunt’s transformation. The blustery leather-jacketed Sierra is fiercely possessive of her drug-dealing turf and determined to have a showdown, despite the older woman’s protestations that she’s no longer interested in either the meth trade or the smarmy dude (Jeffrey Wylie) who runs it.

In his program notes, Cavanaugh writes that the play was inspired by the mysterious death of a young friend in her 20s, as well as the experience of her mother, who served time. The playwright traveled inland to the desert to try and get a feel of how these women lived, and in his drama aimed to capture the woof and warp of working class women struggling to survive.

But the work that’s emerged from these labors is derivative — a Sam Shepard clone for the ladies — and so pitted with contrivance that it’s impossible to appreciate its prime virtue, as a dramatic vehicle for five strong female performers.

This is true both in terms of the play’s details, which include Louise’s questionable sporting of a taqiyah, a cap for Muslim men, (rather than a hijab or a Muslim woman’s traditional headgear),  and its prime plot twists.   I hesitate to reveal what these are but let’s just say that the reverberations that ensue from the uncovering of the family’s secret — itself a dodgy bit of dramaturgy — are unconvincing and overblown.

As to lesser plot points: Though Sierra’s been strung out on the goods she peddles for quite some time, her addiction (and fiscal indebtedness to the bad guy) has, incredibly, gone unnoticed by the others until Louise points it out to them. Introduced as merely a person with anger management issues, Sierra is, by the end (ostensibly only a day later) a quivering wreck in withdrawal.

Sometimes these kinds of problems get ameliorated in performance, but director Jessica Hanna has accelerated the pace of the action, making the interchanges seem even shriller and more strident than they already are. Knight, through no fault of her own, delivers much of her exposition uncomfortably standing around, with little to do. The stage violence is, well, as stagey as it comes. And as Sierra, Baker has a bad habit of declaiming out to the audience, underscoring the ersatz theatrics of climactic moments.

The most fundamentally convincing portrayal is furnished by Di Koob as Sierra’s buttoned-up sister Jolie Beth, but even this authenticity is swept away in the production’s bathetic floodwaters.

Lounge Theatre, 6201 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7 p.m.; through Feb. 28. (323) 960-7789 or www.plays411.com/empress. Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.