STAGE REVIEW : ‘ALPHA’: AN IRONY WITH WRINKLES

“Theater explains itself,” says Slawomir Mrozek in the program notes for his new play, “Alpha,” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. “However, certain questions are inevitable. . . .”

This suggests a mind not easily pinned down. Robert Goldsby’s staging of “Alpha” is, in contrast, very much on the nose.

Its hero, a political prisoner (Colm Meaney), is a good man. His inquisitor (Franklyn Seales) is a bad man. With the apparatus of the state behind him, the bad man wins. The man of the people is demoralized and disposed of. Now his service to the state begins--as a symbol of national unity.

All very clear, very ironic and rather flat. Is this the play Mrozek wrote? (“Alpha” was first performed in Paris in January; this is its English-language premiere.) The production apparently has his blessing, but a reading of the script suggests that certain simplifications have been made.

The most interesting one is the ending. At the Theatre Center, Seales gives a hypocritical eulogy that seems to be going out over national radio. Behind him stand the figures who have visited the hero in prison, now revealed as his tempters. The state’s victory seems complete.

In the script, the eulogy is delivered at a party, and the “tempters” quietly dissociate themselves from the celebration. Perhaps a man’s memory isn’t this easily co-opted. The state may regret putting the hero’s face on its banners. It could start people thinking again.

That’s much more interesting and devious than what we see at the Theatre Center, and it’s not the only suggestion that “Alpha” is a more subtle exercise than it appears. Take the casting. On the face of it, Meaney is perfect for the hero, who is surely patterned after Lech Walesa. He’s got the mug and the build of a working-class guy, somebody with a healthy suspicion of political abstractions--people are where it’s at!

But do we see him change during his long house arrest? (The house is a mansion, with everything on tap except freedom--a touch of “No Exit” here.) Do the available corruptions bring him into a confrontation with who he is? Does he reach a point where he decides what he must do? Meaney creates every aspect of the character but the one we’re most interested in: what he’s thinking.

Again, Seales seems ideal for his captor: intelligent, suave and highly disturbed. But his colonel is a bit of a cliche, borrowed from all those handsome swinish Nazi officers in the movies. We instantly despise him. A plainer, more earnest performance would make us sense the pressure on the hero to be “reasonable.”

Goldsby’s staging can be absolutely on the mark, however. In two scenes we feel the power of sensory deprivation in bringing a man to heel. Meaney embraces a “dumb blonde” (Rhonda Aldrich) provided by the management in awe, as if she were a materialization he didn’t quite trust. It’s almost a moment of worship.

Later Mark Rosenblatt as one of Meaney’s visitors inhales a cigarette in the same sacramental way. He doesn’t have to tell us that it’s his first cigarette since being released from prison for revolutionary activities. We can feel that. And we can see what has happened to his hands. (Meaney has to hold the cigarette for him.)

Yet he tells Meaney that his captors “aren’t so bad. . . . What else could they have done? We were doing our work and they were doing theirs.” The acceptance is the horror, and Rosenblatt evokes a whole people as he conveys it.

But it’s hard to know how to take Ford Rainey, who comes on as a hidebound Roman Catholic cardinal, but makes an argument that only a post-1960s clergyman would make: that bloodshed under any circumstances is wrong. The point presumably is that churchmen talk whatever nonsense serves the moment, but we see it a little too quickly to sustain our interest in the scene.

Again, the “dumb blonde” character is absolutely trite, including her desire not to be one. Aldrich does what she can, but it would have been far more interesting to meet the hero’s wife, stuck out in the provinces. She presumably doesn’t see him as a myth, and a conjugal visit, easy to imagine under this “humanitarian” regime, would have left him with something to think about.

Another visiting female (Ronnie Claire Edwards) is a reporter who ends up telling the hero what his politics should be. This plays like a skit, as opposed to the visit from another revolutionary comrade (John Shuman), who has most delicately decided to defect from the cause, under the guise of emigration.

Mrozek’s play suffers, perhaps, from wanting to be too many plays--a black comedy, a psychological study of isolation and a meditation on the political myth-making process. But you’re not confident enough in this staging, or in Jacek Laskowski’s translation, to know if this, indeed, is the play that the author has in mind.

Designer Timian Alsaker serves Mrozek’s needs well, particularly his set--an opulent but bleak marble drawing room, with flimsy curtains giving onto a pinkish void. It’s solid, but you don’t know where you are. So with “Alpha.”

‘ALPHA’ Slawomir Mrozek’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Translation Jacek Laskowski. Director Robert W. Goldsby. Set, lighting and costume design Timian Alsaker. Sound design Jon Gottlieb. Stage manager Lee Alan Byron. With Colm Meaney, Franklyn Seales, John Shuman, Ronnie Claire Edwards, Rhonda Aldrich, Ford Rainey and Mark Rosenblatt. Plays at 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Sundays, with Saturday-Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Closes Nov. 16. Tickets $10-$22. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-6500.