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Solitaire

Reviewed by Lovell Estell III

The Underground Theater

Through Dec. 21

For U.S. Marine Jeremy Stills (Gabriel Miller Schwalenstocker), life in a military stockade consists of daydreams, sporadic bouts of sanity and insanity, and an eerie game of solitaire played with a phantom image that periodically appears in his cell. We are immediately driven to wonder what the cause of his predicament is, but this is something playwright-director Joshua Crone doesn’t specify until late in the play.

Stills receives visits from a girlfriend (Julianne Kusmierczyk), and by two marines (Richie Stevens, Tim Bowman), who add to his distress with physical and verbal abuse. He is also visited by his lawyer (Varda Appleton), whose interaction with her client is as baffling as most of what follows. This is a play without any hint of a viable dramatic arc, and Crone’s opaque, distended script — which bounces from past to present, fantasy to reality— is clearly adrift. At the end Act I, it is revealed that Stills confinement is connected to his participation in the torture and murder of a terrorist detainee, but by play’s end, even that detail is devoid of meaning.

At least the performances are passable.

The Underground Theater, 1314 N. Wilton Pl., Hlwyd.; Thurs.-Sun., 8 pm., through Dec. 21. (323) 283-7316, www.solitairetheplay.com