STAGE REVIEW : WRONG NOTE IN MUSICAL METAPHOR

“American Music” at 2nd Stage is not a musical in progress. It is not really about music at all. Yet the fact that playwright Bennet Cohen uses those words for the title to a dark and violent drama about “the making of a soldier--an American man,” underscores the importance he places on the connection between music (in this case early rock and Elvis Presley) and the male ethos, American style. Hmmm.

A lot of the play is also about what Cohen identifies as “a lack of choices. . . . In America, if you’re not an aggressive male, where do you go? For women, if you’re not victims, then what?”

Whoa. Cohen is clearly speaking for himself and it’s important to juxtapose his statements with his piece, because the central problem with “American Music,” despite its general right direction, is its inability to deliver on that premise.

The reasons are many, starting with Cohen’s central character, a nebbish named Miller (Eric Douglas), pathologically unable to know his own mind, who hero-worships Elvis Presley. His brutish squadron leader, Heiser (Steve Bassett), marvels that Miller ever made it through boot camp. This cracker’s astonishment is not farfetched.

Miller develops one friend, Sanchez (Billy Zane), a decent but troubled guy who tries to help him grow up--form an identity.

Unrealistically, Miller sets his sights on Marie (Kathy Graber), a waitress with unfocused longings who falls in love instead with Sanchez. It is symptomatic of the hapless Miller that, rather than get mad or even, he finds a way merely to rationalize the event.

These are three men--Miller, Heiser and Sanchez--in various stages of discontent thrown together in the seething boredom of a pre-Vietnam Army. The year is 1963. Horror is being hatched. (A fourth man, D’Antone, remains so superfluous to the action that Darin Taylor who plays him cannot escape self-consciousness.)

Frustrations predictably turn to poison and violence inevitably erupts. When Sanchez reports Heiser for brutality, Heiser takes care of it the only way he knows how. And Miller, a horrified bystander, having lost his one friend, chameleon-like, takes on the coloring of his enemy. He is potentially more dangerous in his weakness than is the bully in his spite.

If this sounds like shades of “A Man’s a Man” and “The Good Soldier Schweyk,” stirred with a dash of “Woyzeck,” you’ve got it.

Cohen’s derivative statement is at once sweeping and remarkably narrow. It may be his view of the quintessence of American life, but he doesn’t make a persuasive case for it. He has not created an Ugly American we can care about--whose pain we feel (mostly we feel impatience) or whose transfiguration we track.

Miller is not a non-aggressive male victimized by a crushing system. He’s weakness incarnate--a treacherous parasite so incapable of being himself that he has to feed off of others.

The results are flawed because Cohen’s fundamental premise is false. He confuses lack of choice with lack of spine. His musical metaphor is self-conscious and superimposed.

As far as his women are concerned, he has chosen to depict doormats--less so Marie, who at least dreams of getting out, than her friend Ronnie (Denise Galik), the quintessential victim, who clings to a bad relationship with Heiser like an unwashed security blanket. They’re hardly representative of a society groaning under incipient liberation. The gulf between the play and its intent remains unexamined because Cohen has misread the charts.

One does admire aspects of it--such as the starting of a new scene before the closing of the previous one. It creates a sense of echo in the continuity of life. But there is too much other unfinished business. We don’t know enough about who, or what, has molded any of these characters. They are simply there, in limbo. Cohen who, unlike Pinter or Beckett, is gratuitously nihilistic, cannot sustain interest with enigma.

While the production at 2nd Stage is strong enough--well staged by Jules Aaron and generally well performed by the cast--the play, which was read at the 1984 National Playwrights Conference at the O’Neill and staged last April as part of “CalArts in Town,” remains a work in progress.

Since it isn’t a matter of refining so much as rethinking, making the right changes must mean a major return to the drawing board.

Performances at 6500 Santa Monica Blvd. run Thursdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7:30 p.m., indefinitely (213-465-6029), except for Dec. 26-29 when the theater will be dark.