A familiar character in plays about the theatre is the aging actor who's lost touch with reality and sees his life as a compendium of all the roles he's played over the years. Captain (John F. Goff) is one such character, and the news has filtered down to his son, Lieutenant (Jon Mozenter), a journalist who has reluctantly returned home to take care of things. There he finds two temporary residents: one a young stripper, Phyllis (Philece Sampler), an opportunistic, fringe-y Southern belle, whom Captain is tutoring in several subjects, including acting, in preparation for the Broadway play he's purportedly writing; the other a mailman, Stanley (Larrs Jackson), the Captain's best friend, who hangs around for the daily dose of quality abuse. The conceit is that the play we're seeing is the play Captain is writing, and Darian Lane, the credited playwright/director, had nothing to do with it. Lane would be well advised to go along with this. Watching, to pull a quote, "The greatest play of our generation" (interestingly, illustrated by the familiar hunched rear view of Willy Loman lugging his two heavy sample cases) is more of an ordeal than a pleasure.
Our first and last views of Captain are virtually unlighted fourth-wall breaks: a corny "Hi!" to the audience, demanding a response before he tells us what the play's about and, anti-climactically at the end, what we've seen while dragging Lane onstage to take his bow. In between are sandwiched a lot of drinking, several knock-down, drag-out fights, and long sections of contemporary and classic plays--Captain's secondhand quoted responses to every stimulus, all delivered with the same weight, from Hamlet through Neil Simon. Goff plays at a character rather than becoming one. Even so, he seems wildly eccentric rather than dotty, an impish old scalawag, far more interesting than his lumpish son, whose stock in trade is a pained expression. It's hard to see how Lieutenant's ineffectually written, and acted, character can help himself, let alone his failing father. Stanley's pandering enablement and Phyllis' aggressive baiting are in a very unsavory battle for what's left of the old man's sanity.
Lane's direction is as undisciplined and unformed as his play, allowing two characters to chew at the scenery and leaving two to stand in as wallpaper when they're not stumbling over each other in poorly staged fight scenes.
There is a second production of The Broadway Play opening in July at the Elephant Performance Lab. Lane's stated goal, theatre economics notwithstanding, is to have the play running simultaneously in various theatres throughout Greater L.A.