STAGE REVIEW : ‘RATTLE OF MOON’ AT THE BURBAGE

Can the Rob Sullivan who wrote (and so whimsically performed) that poetic abstraction “The Long White Dress of Love” be the same Rob Sullivan who has foisted upon us “The Rattle of the Moon”? Impossible.

If it is--and the program at the Burbage Theatre Ensemble insists it is--Sullivan must be suffering temporary artistic schizophrenia.

Everything “Love” was, “Rattle” isn’t. It’s not leavened. It’s not loopy. It’s not even, at the most fundamental level, put together well. The long white dress has become the unrelieved black lining--even at 90 minutes with an intermission.

Neal (Marc Alaimo) is a dingy, self-righteous truck driver who lives in a dingy apartment with his dingy wife (Tina Preston) and his gorgeous daughter (Leslie Hope).

His role as ardent husband has cooled in favor of a new one as overstimulated father. The mission: to keep his increasingly voluptuous 18-year-old daughter Bonnie in control. Preferably his.

How is it done? By making ever-so-slightly incestuous passes at Bonnie and, when she pulls back, laughing it off. But when Bonnie dares to give signs of independence and--horrors--favors another man, Neal swings into high gear.

He beats her up, while mousy wife Mary looks on until she can’t take any more and deals with it her way: by screaming at the top of her lungs and dumping whatever meal happens to be on the table (one of several) all over the kitchen floor.

Regrettably, this provokes more irritation than compassion. Along with their other ills, the characters rattling around in this ill-begotten “Moon” adhere to unremitting stereotype. They are monosyllabically repetitive bores who speak too much to say too little, and are served up with neither mystery nor background enough to suggest (let alone explain) the fundamental flaw in their horrendous behavior.

(A fourth character, nicely performed by Erich Anderson, is that of the boyfriend, another incomplete blue-collar stereotype who remains stubbornly peripheral to the action. He is a cog whose usefulness in part, when he delivers spotlighted neo-poetic monologues, is to provide time to clean up the floored culinary messes.)

This awkward device gives a small sign of how grimly earthbound is Sullivan’s poorly engineered exercise on family violence. Whimsy has caved in to sullenness with a vengeance. And, as if the bleakness of the dialogue weren’t enough, the action remains, for the most part, unresolved. Pronouncements (“Answer your father”) are followed by unenlightening verbal constipation (“I can’t”), followed by blows or blackouts.

The term kitchen-sink drama has also been carried to a stultifying extreme. Meal after tedious meal is served--always a bad sign when a playwright must stuff the blanks with props instead of dynamic exchanges. For truly deft handling of a similar subject, see Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge,” a play in which every omission is supremely charged with telegraphed information.

No such luck here.

Despite Alaimo’s proven ability as an actor, he cannot overcome the fundamental lack of motivation in Neal’s character. His is a strong yet paradoxically superficial performance that ultimately wears out its audience. Hope manages to strike a suggestive and enriching balance between Bonnie’s sexual awakening and her utter confusion, but as her deadened, drab and crazy mother, Preston pays the price of total defeat. Nowhere is the absence of specifics more keenly felt.

Momentary relief comes in the shape of original background music by Bo Harwood and Bobbie Permanent, but Susan Lane’s strange multilevel set and Jim Blickensderfer’s flat lighting plunge us right back into dejection. Choreography, attributed to Jeff Yagher, is mysteriously nonexistent.

Director Roxanne Rogers has brought no more than an unsubtle, head-on approach to the material, which already feels like a hurried first draft. Why Burbage producer Ivan Spiegel thought such relentless and unfinished sturm und drang merited production at all is a mystery best left unplumbed. On to the next thing. Fast.