For the first time that I can remember, a local theater is producing an Israel Horovitz play — two plays, in fact. Hat Trick Theatre, which has shown an admirable attention to major playwrights ignored by other companies — writers like Chris Durang, Mark Medoff and John Osborne — is now bringing us Line and Hopscotch, two one-acts by the amazingly prolific Horovitz (he's written over 50 produced plays).
Horovitz is best known in America for an early work, The Indian Wants the Bronx, but his dramas are exceedingly popular in Europe, where he's perhaps more famous than in his own country. He's also a screenwriter and was artistic director of the Gloucester Stage Company in Massachusetts for more than 20 years. He's a figure who should be more familiar to theater lovers.
Unfortunately, the two plays being presented by Hat Trick — Line and Hopscotch — are both problematic, one because the script itself is too blatant, the other because the acting is too blunt.
Let's begin with Line: This play wants to be an allegory about the human obsession with dominance and hierarchy. Now, the use of allegory in the theater is a tricky thing. If it doesn't work on the first level — as story for its own sake — then it doesn't usually work at all. An example: Sam Shepard's Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child. On the surface, this is the story of a young man, Vince, who comes to visit his grandparents' home and then discovers that nobody there — not even his own father — recognizes him. It's not much of a leap to say that what Shepard is really writing about is America and more particularly the coming of age of the countercultural generation that Vince represents. But we only arrive at this interpretation because the allegory works perfectly on both levels: as a comic, surreal story about an intensely dysfunctional family, and as long-playing metaphor about the American young coming to power. If the play works on the first level, it works on the second. If the surface is coherent, so is what it signifies.
Line lacks that first level. This 1967 exercise (first performed at La Mama ETC in New York) is all too obvious. As we watch five characters strive to get to the head of a line, as we watch them use trickery and fists and sex and even Mozart to defeat each other in a competition for first place, we eventually, and inevitably, come to find the pageant boring. After all, besides the jockeying for power, there's nothing to think about: no credible relationships, no "real" personalities.
There's just this one incessant message — human beings are hierarchical and will fight for primacy — told again and again to the point of tedium. And the problem isn't solved by calling the play "surrealist" or "absurdist." Buried Child is surreal but riveting in its surface details; Ionesco's The Killer is absurdist, but still fascinating on that first level. We want some flesh on our allegories, then we'll extrapolate a meaning.
Nevertheless, the acting in Line is admirable. The very talented Jack Holloway plays Fleming, who begins at the head of the line and combines size and aggressiveness to establish his claim on first place. Holloway's such a fine actor that it's dispiriting to see him waste his skills on such an underwritten role. Still, he does his best to show us a high-testosterone competitor who's not too macho to be shocked by the lengths that the others will go to in the pursuit of power.
As his first opponent Steven, Paul McColgan is cheerfully resourceful. Tall and slim and wearing glasses, he looks like a technocrat who has everyone else beaten in terms of intellect and who finds the whole contest for superiority strangely pleasing. Johanna Griesé as Molly is all sexuality, a calculating siren who drags one man after the next into a "dance" behind a white sheet. Curtis Belz as her husband, Arnall, is a mopey nebbish whose personal creed — the most interesting idea in the whole play — is that all pain can be avoided if one expects disaster in advance.
Finally, Craig Ruska as suave Dolan seems to believe that the way to the top is through personal style: He's well dressed, well coiffed and as unflappable as Sean Connery in an early James Bond movie.
Director Joe Winskye has done well in demanding a different power strategy from each actor — we all have different methods of trying to be No. 1, see — and if the play is finally exasperating, it's not his or the actors' fault.
And speaking of uninteresting, Jeff Boe's set is precisely what Horovitz asks for: a bare stage except for a line of white adhesive tape on the floor. Come to think of it, that white tape tells us all we need to know about our Darwininan struggles: Humans will, it quietly reminds us, see life as a queue. Now, was the whole play really necessary?
Another Horovitz work, Hopscotch, opens the evening at the Silver Meteor Gallery. This two-hander is based on a distressing time in Horovitz's life: When he was 17, he fathered a child with a 16-year-old girl whom he subsequently married. The child was born badly malformed, then died after a few days; the marriage lasted a few more months and then was annulled.
From these difficult facts, Horovitz wrote a play about Elsa and Will, two 30-something Americans who meet at a playground and who play at being strangers until we finally come to understand that they know each other very well. This is a play that needs great subtlety and fine shadings of emotion to really work. Unfortunately, as directed by Lani McGettigan and acted by Grayson Ross and Belz, it's loud and bellicose and almost entirely lacking in human interest.
As Will, Belz comes across as a would-be rapist with designs on a single woman; as Elsa, Ross seems mean-spirited and ill-tempered, humorless and unlikely to be anyone's romantic object. What we really need from both characters is the sense, however tentative, that they once cared about each other and are trying, with some difficulty, to remember that care all these years later. Instead we get mostly menace and hostility. On Boe's minimal set, featuring a park bench and a hopscotch diagram, these actors miss most opportunities to win our concern.
Still, it's good to see that local theater has noticed Horovitz. He's been amazingly prolific over his nearly 70 years, and we ought to have had much more exposure to his works. Maybe other local theater companies will now consider his work when choosing their seasons — because there's more to this playwright than one would guess seeing these two unsatisfying one-act dramas.
This article appears in Jan 24-30, 2007.