Audio By Carbonatix
As wrongheaded as it is well-intentioned, CityStage Ensemble’s world-premiere production of Bad Money flounders from the very first scene and never gains much of a foothold thereafter. Ostensibly written in the style of film noir, which uses ambiguity to heighten mystery, cloak clever plot twists and slowly reveal character, David Earl Jones’s play starts out with a nude scene that leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination, and an exchange of epithets that’s more laughable than menacing. As the two-hour tale limps to its obvious conclusion, it’s difficult to care about the characters, the story or any of the relevant issues it raises and, more often than not, just as quickly skirts.
Part of the problem is that Jones and director Dan Hiester get wrapped up in communicating their message in “cutting-edge” ways rather than attending to basic fundamentals like credibility of character, believability of situation and progression of plot. It isn’t enough to layer the story with a general air of indifference, meanness and impending doom. True, the dialogue’s overly forced tone and the endless violence, profanity and nudity are heavy-handed elements that seem an intentional form of overkill for theatergoers numbed by decades of violent movies and crass television shows, but while abundant images of gore, decadence and debauchery might indeed reflect the ills of the present age, no one needs reminding that they exist. Nor does anyone need to be shown again that TV evangelists are, on the whole, more disingenuous than their non-publicity-seeking brethren, that women looking to score with athletes who frequent strip joints are asking for trouble (though, to be sure, no one deserves the brutal beating that one character endures in this play), or that stealing half a million dollars from someone who basically stole that money himself is going to result in a run-in with some large guys with weapons and bad attitudes.
What matters far more than the trappings of an age are the underlying human forces that shape it, and there is precious little of that to be had in Jones’s play. Most of what we witness is painfully obvious to even the most casual observer: some athletes do drugs, treat women badly and blame their parents for the evil in their lives. But so do a lot of other people. And what of the vast majority who are tempted to go one way but don’t, or those who grapple with the idea of reversing course but can’t? At times we see beyond the surface, as in the imagined interactions between child and parent — touched on here, but, like everything else, quickly dismissed or oversimplified — that evoke a young man’s struggle to find his place in a world of skewed values.
Unfortunately, most aspects of the drama that seem intended to shock us into thought merely shove us into giggly indifference: The TV evangelist has a yen for dressing up like Little Orphan Annie because he likes musical theater (thanks for sharing, Rev, but why should any of us care as long as you’re not showing up that way in the pulpit?); the theme from “Dragnet” plays for a couple of bars, then inexplicably stops — never to be heard, referred to or put into anything remotely resembling a context again (this show could use Jack Webb’s deft sense of pacing, though); and a supposedly hard-boiled detective decides to beat a confession out of a jaded pro athlete by hitting him over the head with a paper-thin manila file (hey, flatfoot — a rolled-up copy of the NFL’s substance-abuse policy would probably work better).
A more effective play might have resulted from crafting characters that are less absolute and predictable, and by hinting at the production’s noir-ness rather than exaggerating it. Most of the time, the characters in Bad Money show us everything, make much of nothing and respond to events in ways that are grossly out of proportion to each scene’s (admittedly contrived) circumstances. The actors do what they can with the sordid mess, and two or three achieve measures of theatrical heroism in the process. But they can’t, sadly enough, save this play from itself.
