STAGE REVIEW : ‘SARCOPHAGUS’: DIRE WARNING, BUT DRY DRAMA

The morning after Vladimir Gubaryev’s “Sarcophagus” opened at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the announcement was made that all major issues of a treaty between the governments of the United States and the U.S.S.R. to ban intermediate-range nuclear missiles had finally been settled.

It came as particularly welcome news after seeing and hearing the harrowing message of Gubaryev’s play--a relentless, clinical exposure to the first several hours at the Medical Experimental Section of the Soviet Union’s Institute of Radiation Safety after the April, 1986, explosion at Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. There the moment of truth has arrived. People are dying and science is powerless to turn back the clock or to save the victims.

The message is a dire, desperate warning. It is also didactic and dry. Gubaryev, who is Pravda’s eminent science editor, is only too painfully aware of the magnitude of this nuclear disaster: its significance, ramifications, consequences. Good reporter that he is, he delivers this knowledge in a language (as translated by Michael Glenny) that is earnest, factual, unvarnished butdisappointingly arid. The statement is important; the play much less so.

Strict realism, with its even stricter limitations in evoking truth, is a culprit here. The setting (by Timian Alsaker) is a vast, blindingly white, unfurnished stone room that looks like the interior of a tomb--or the concrete “sarcophagus” that now encases reactor No. 4. Ten ominous glass-door cubicles line the back wall. The curtain rises on an empty stage.

Out of one cubicle emerges a sallow, loping creature--something not quite human: a man with a large surgical scar on his bald head, with one or two clumps of gray hair curling away from it like wisps of smoke, and a few grossly bucked teeth in his mouth. He is Bessmertny (Gregory Wagrowski), a pre-Chernobyl victim of radiation and a scientific wonder who has survived against all odds and is the lone inhabiter of this place. He is mascot and symbol--the conscience of the play.

It is not long before the room fills up with panicked doctors and nurses, startled burn victims with haggard eyes, whirring gurneys, strident buzzers, flashing lights. Among the chaos, the dissertation begins. One by one the patients talk, are treated, die behind the doors of their pristine compartments. Among them is the head of the plant, who makes all the classic excuses about why the accident occurred (“the (bureaucratic) system failed”). At play’s end he is the last survivor--a man condemned to remain alive and witness the torment caused by his carelessness.

In between we meet the victims, listen to the despairing doctors (Nan Martin as Lydia Stepanovna Ptitsyna is the most eloquent and delivers a performance as lean and unsentimental as a toothpick). Alsaker’s hospital environment is an impressively sterile symbol and a comment on what we’re doing to the richness and variety of our planet, though its starkness grows tiresome--perhaps intentionally.

The acting and the presentation are entirely honorable, but they do not overcome the fact that many of the roles as written are mouthpieces for the author and too often interchangeable. Director Bill Bushnell has attempted to give “Sarcophagus” the throb of urgency, but the play is too carefully plotted, too methodical in its delivery of information and, at three hours, too talky by half.

For all its aspiration to be a play, the piece is fundamentally a hybrid form of docudrama--half fiction, half lecture. Its impulse and purpose are unimpeachable; its artistry falls short.

It does, however, triumph in another arena: With its blaming of the accident on “faulty parts” and a superannuated bureaucracy, its questioning of the delay in evacuating people from the immediate area and lines like “It must be serious, because nothing’s been on the radio,” “Sarcophagus” is politically amazing. That Gubaryev was not only allowed to write it (anyone can write anything), but to present it, abroad as well as at home, is immensely refreshing and should be profoundly encouraging to us all.

‘SARCOPHAGUS’

The American premiere of a play by Vladimir Gubaryev, translated by Michael Glenny and presented by Los Angeles Theatre Center as part of the Los Angeles Festival. Producer Diane White. Director Bill Bushnell. Set Timian Alsaker. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Makeup Bob Scribner, Stacey Zimmerman. Stage manager Jill Johnson. Cast Barbara Tarbuck, Gregory Wagrowski, Patrice Martinez, Erin Cressida Wilson, Juanita Jennings, Robert Symonds, E. J. Castillo, Tom Rosqui, Nan Martin, Aled Davis, Jere Burns, Henry G. Sanders, Daniel Roebuck, John Cameron Mitchell, Alan Mandell, Nobu McCarthy, Ben Piazza, Brian Brophy, Edward Blanchard, Linda Browne, Joseph Keeper, Scott Wilder. Performances at 514 S. Spring St. at 8 p.m., with weekend matinees and occasional 6:30 p.m. performances. Call for schedule. Ends Dec. 19. Tickets: $21-$25; (213) 627-5599.