Bechnya

The issues surrounding international adoptions are huge, and even when narrowing the focus to one particular piece of the baby market pie—a piece handily producing nice blonde babies that fit beautifully into all-American family photos—there are a lot of stories to be told. Playwright Saviana Stanescu's tale involves an adoption from a fictitious Eastern European country. But unlike in the fairy tales that keep popping up in this imaginative new work that's built to take us in many directions, we don't get easy answers or happy endings. In the play's production now at the Hudson—a version bogged down with too many video elements—we also don't get a clear sense of the script or the playwright's intentions.

"Bechnya" starts with a bang: an East-meets-West "La Femme Nikita" hostage scene on a Manhattan rooftop. The black-clad, heavily accented Shari (Svetlana Iva), a made-for-TV girl with a grudge and a gun, has obviously got a score to settle with the stylish, moneyed, New York career woman, Vicky (Maria Bobeva). With the help of flashbacks—seen only on video—we learn that these women are sisters, but although pretty Vicky was adopted into the American dream, Shari was left to live in the nightmare of war-torn Bechnya. (Jon Mack and Bryan Lay play the onscreen couple shopping for the perfect child.) Director Atanas Kolev has assembled a gifted cast who do some solid work here. But without a level of stylization that tells us that what we're watching is, indeed, larger than life, we can't appreciate the dark humor or the smart, often gorgeous writing.

So we're missing the groundwork we need for when the play switches gears, and we see another version of one woman's reality, and we go deeper inside her stories in search of the truth. Add to this video footage of Reagan, Obama, Netanyahu, violence in the Middle East, and orphanages in Eastern Europe interspersed with the play's characters and projected dialogue, and instead of connecting "Bechnya" to a powerful social and political statement, the barrage of images causes us to lose our way entirely.

Presented by and at the Hudson Mainstage Theatre, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. Sept. 22-Oct. 22. Thu.-Sat., 8 p.m. (323) 960-7721. www.plays411.com/bechnya.