STAGE REVIEW : WORDS DAMPEN FUSE IN ‘DIARY OF HUNGER STRIKE’

It feels a little callous to watch a play about the hunger strikes in the Maze prison near Belfast and emerge from it having found the experience flat.

It should be deep. It should be moving. How can so politically charged a subject not light a fuse? Blow up some emotional dynamite?

Not for lack of trying.

Peter Sheridan’s “Diary of a Hunger Strike,” that opened Thursday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 4, is unquestionably felt deeply by its author. The dialogue tells us so, which is one of its problems.

The subject itself is as dramatic as they come: incarcerated young Irish Republicans, wrapping themselves in blankets rather than accept the prison garb of common criminals; believing passionately in their anti-unionist cause (against union with Britain, for unification with the Irish Republic); above all, believing in their status as political prisoners and willing (eventually) to starve themselves to death to make the point.

These are the principled ingredients of high drama--even Greek tragedy when you remember Antigone and Polynices. The analogy is not lost on Sheridan, who claims he wanted to go beyond “particularity” in this play, to embrace “a metaphor for the wider society.”

Has he succeeded? Not really. Rather like a hawker at a fair, Sheridan puts words in the mouths of prisoners, wardens (Irish prison guards), governors and English lords, working hard to sell us their dilemmas and his persuasions by telling rather than showing.

Beyond the conversation, confrontation and debate, not very much goes on in this prison where young men are dying--or in this play, or in our emotional response to it. One might argue that not very much goes on in Greek tragedy either, where the real action tends to remain offstage, related by breathless messengers on the run.

The ancient Greeks, however, were careful to create distinct protagonists with internal as well as external conflicts, and provide a chorus to enhance our understanding of their motivational plight. Sheridan’s characters tend to be mouthpieces, black or white--the wardens, lords and governors indistinctly lumped as “the enemy,” and his stalwarts, committed to their cause, only slightly more distinct as the heroes.

Patrick O’Connor (Colm Meaney) is the chief protester and protagonist, a man of principle and strength, both physical and moral. His cellmate is Sean Crawford (Shaun Cassidy), a slighter creature, more fearful of his limitations and therefore more touching.

Crawford is the vulnerable counterpoint and, in that sense, more colorful than O’Connor, whose righteousness is devoid of shading, either because Sheridan has forgotten to put in the chiaroscuro or because Meaney has. It’s hard to tell.

Bairbre Dowling has some lovely moments as O’Connor’s girlfriend who comes to visit and finds his devotion to the cause at their expense difficult to accept. Notable, too, is Tony Maggio in a sensitive cameo as a dying striker. And James Scally and Mike Genovese provide welcome character contrast in their roles as wardens.

Finally, what makes a play play? As much the unspoken word as the spoken, the semaphoric body language, the acting out, the silences that exacerbate tension and the charge in the events themselves.

In “Hunger Strike,” Sheridan has given us essentially one-dimensional characters and relied too heavily on talk. Despite his attempt as director to counter the verbosity with a certain presentational abstraction of reality (a simple, impressionistic set by Russell Pyle and pools of confining light by Todd Jared), he cannot extricate a play from the cardboard principals and the morass of language.

Performances at 514 S. Spring St. run Tuesdays through Sundays at 8 p.m. with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. until April 27, (213) 627-5599.