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The Why
Reviewed by Bob Verini
The Blank Theater Company
Through Oct. 19
Victor Kaufold’s The Why is a young man’s play, and feels like it. Essentially a series of revue sketches on the topic of school gun violence, it was featured in the Blank Theater’s venerable Young Playwrights Festival in 2000 when Kaufold was 19. Now with a Yale MFA in tow, he doesn’t appear to have revisited the work much to deepen its thrusts and smooth over its rough edges. An enormous amount of tragic campus water has gone over the dam in the ensuing 14 years, and Kaufold’s heart remains demonstrably in the right place. But his taste and funny bone are open to question.
Four actors play a variety of roles, and if any two provide a solid through-line it’s Nicholas Cutro and Ben Crowley as, respectively, 16-year-old Robert and his prison shrink, the latter trying to get to the bottom of a murder spree that left three classmates dead and one brain-damaged. In their confrontations, each demonstrates habits sure to irritate the other – Robert’s perverse humor; the doc’s unflappable affability – yet within all the thrust and parry can be felt the aching subtext of unstated need.
A satisfying whole could, and perhaps should have been crafted around these men alone. Jen Landon offers additional authenticity in a pair of monologues from a shaken bystander.
Those trenchant characters aside, here are some of the satiric targets with which Kaufold insists on interrupting them. Fatuous TV news reporters. Toothy game show hosts. Pompous Southern preachers. Tweedy, nerdy academics. Jocks, cheerleaders, and stoners. And of course, Forrest Gump-like hillbilly gun nuts. The play seems to congratulate itself on these caricatures, unaware that they are one and all tired cliches and that something fresh needs to be done with them. The effect is that of a Second City show whose audience suggests the topic of school shootings, and for whatever reason, the improvisers keep making predictable, unamusing choices.
When not trafficking in worn-out tropes, The Why can get downright bizarre. An opening Mexican standoff among four stock types – Western gunslinger; mob hit man; psycho; and blowsy thugette (think Amanda Plummer in Pulp Fiction) – never finds a tone we can connect with, and isn’t clarified when reprised later on. A reporter (Landon) uses sex to rev up the resentment in an addled, bullied teen (Crowley). Does Kaufold actually believe that the media willfully incite violence? That’s hard to say, given that he has Cutro come forward as “a real journalist” with serious mien to indict “the playwright” for maligning the fourth estate. (A neat writer’s trick, that: calling out one’s own misaimed darts.) The force of damaged Robert’s therapy is hardly enhanced when Jeff Witzke keeps popping in with floppy ears, a doggy nose, and a guitar to serenade his owner.
The Why has a little bit to say about just about everything concerned with its timely, painful topic. Still, as is so often the case, saying Everything isn’t nearly as effective as saying Something. Daniel Henning keeps things moving fluidly, but when so much of the satire is going awry, keeping things moving is probably the sanest directorial option.
The Blank Theater, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; Fri-Sat, 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through Oct. 19. (323) 661-9827; https://www.theblank.com
