Playwright: Arik Martin
At: Half-Cocked Productions,
Phone: (773) 297-2745; $13
Runs through: June 27
Arik Martin’s new play (in English, despite the Spanish title) begins with eight healthy characters. Within 75 minutes, four are dead, three are maimed and one has escaped. This improbable potboiler—placing seven escaped convicts and (briefly) a prostitute in a tiny house on the Tex-Mex border—either is a metaphor for the nuclear philosophy of Mutually Self-Assured Destruction, or an exercise in hyper-fueled stage testosterone. It’s not bad, if you accept the improbabilities—indeed, the actors under Martin’s direction are into it—but it’s horrific and pointless.
The play posits that white collar criminals, manslaughter convicts and hardened murderers are incarcerated in the same maximum security prison and break out together. Next, the cons’ outside friends scout a house they know is empty, but do not arrange to meet the cons there. Then, the claustrophobic little house has only one bedroom, one bathroom and no dining room, but it has a security system. Finally, half the cons never switch their prison jumpsuits for civvies.
Martin doesn’t waste one second on character development. His seven cons begin and end disorganized, brutal, stupid or passive in varying combinations. No character is sympathetic, explanations for actions are minimal, and Martin sets up unfulfilled expectations. Take Petey, the silent, prettyboy punk who’s escaped with his lover, Reverend. There are no consequences when Petey murders the prostitute called in by the gang. Then, Petey uses leverage he’s acquired to demand that another escapee kill Reverend, for reasons never explained. But in the next scene, Petey himself kills Reverend in an arbitrary action, so what’s the point of leverage?
Some may dismiss these niggling details that engage the critical mind. In the name of theatrical pulp fiction, they may want only a slam-bang action show, and Somos Gringos Malos, Somos Diablos Blancos (We Are Bad Gringos, We Are White Devils) certainly delivers on that level. As suggested above, the actors relish the full-tilt, over-the-top demands of the script, and of Martin’s energized direction. The tiny Half-Cocked Theater—seating just 22—literally puts the action in your lap along with splashes of stage blood. Dieter Frank’s original score provides a nicely overwrought soundtrack for the murder and mayhem.
But what if Martin had approached the show with a dark sense of humor, making fun of the pulp-and-prison genre? Or what if he took the violence to exaggerated extremes, and turned the show into a shocking Grand Guignol? Or what if he had provided the tension and surprise of a good thriller? But he didn’t. What’s left is sound and fury signifying nothing; an auteurist’s exercise in character manipulation and situation. Martin shows strong signs of ability, but he’s still on a learning curve.