The Cross-Over

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Actors Forum Theater
Through November 19

This strange play by Eugene H. Butler boasts a number of offbeat quirky ideas, but they are hampered by lackluster execution. Yes, there are some bona fide moments of weirdness here — but they are enacted so clumsily that they come across instead as merely sloppy. 

The show starts out promisingly enough with an early scene right out of Dante’s Inferno (making one wish someone actually would adapt Dante for the stage) before getting sidelined and descending into an awkward series of scattershot incidents and ideas.

Depressed young Johnny (Tanner Haynes) shoots himself in the head and winds up in the Afterlife, where he wanders around a forest that is literally full of moaning lost souls turned into trees. The idea of a forest of suicides is right out of Dante, of course, and before long, Johnny is introduced to his Virgil — a shaggy-haired Robert Plant-lookalike named Charlie Cool (playwright Butler), who welcomes Johnny — a “newfer,” as the Hellish vernacular refers to him — to the underworld. Charlie sets out to help Johnny find his place, and the first step is to stage a huge “show” about Johnny’s life.

Auditions and rehearsals for the play-within-a-play are hastily arranged and the cast is assembled: Medea (Suzanne Erickson) plays Johnny’s hard-working and increasingly embittered mom, Casey (Brandon Fricke), who gassed himself, becomes Johnny’s stoner best pal, and a sexy “cutter” (Kate Clancy) takes on the role of Johnny’s demanding wife. As Johnny watches his life play out, the inevitability of his final choice takes hold.

Butler’s play seems to have a great deal to say about the nature of suicide and the possibility of the afterlife, but the writing is careless and top-heavy with pretentious half-baked notions that come across as campy. The randomness of Butler’s conceptualizations becomes increasingly irritating, and the inexperienced performances make it impossible to view the material as anything other than silly. One also wonders at the (hopefully unintentional) shallow take on the mental illness that drives people to suicide:  The whole piece reeks of superficiality, which is exacerbated by the implication that in such a world the hero is right to kill himself —  an off- putting, almost offensive sentiment.

Butler’s staging relies on that type of 1970s acting game during which performers wriggle around on the floor, or pretend to be tables with their bottoms high in the air, while making little “fuh-fuh-fuh” noises through their teeth. And his vision of Hell has some real limitations: Everyone pretty much just wears grey t-shirts and black slacks.  Why on Earth be so damned prosaic?  A bit of flame or sinful red would help the design. 

Haynes makes a sweet, but unconvincingly suicidal leading man, while some intermittently moving moments are provided by Erickson, and by Michael Cavanaugh as a leering demonic figure.

As Johnny’s beat-poet-ranting guide, Butler boasts a lot of personality, but his diction is so poor, that it’s often difficult to make out what he’s saying, especially since he spends half the time orating clunky pseudo-Iambic pentameter verse, which is quite maddening.  Ultimately, a few good ideas may be found in this show, but its overall sloppiness makes for an experience that is more purgatorial than needs be.  

Actors Forum Theater, 10655 Magnolia Blvd, North Hollywood; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; through November 19. https://www.actorsforumtheatre.org/ or (818) 709-3530.  Running time: 2 hours with an intermission.