STAGE REVIEW : Compelling Premise in ‘Honeymoon’

There has crept into our theaters a new kind of hybrid. Call it Theater of Bleakness, of Inertia, of Interstices. It is a peculiarly American phenomenon and California, which leads the way in so many areas, seems to be leading it in this too.

The Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival has been a prime exponent of this kind of theater-in-a-vacuum, so it is not surprising that it is launching its new, improved festival this year with Susan Champagne’s “Honeymoon.”

How deliciously ironic that an author with as bubbly a name as Champagne could write so demoralizing and oddly compelling a play. Sarah (Molly Cleator) has just married Stanley (Robert Hummer). They’ve moved into this apartment house, but Stanley gave the movers the wrong address and all they have for furniture is a kitchen table and three chairs. But never mind.

Stanley’s not comfortable with Sarah. He keeps leaving her for indeterminate stretches of time. Sarah hangs around. Waiting. No food. No money. Stanley has a buddy, Hovig (Leon Martell), who works at the same machine shop. They go fishing. Sarah waits. She has one visitor, her upstairs neighbor, Mary (Roxanne Rogers), who keeps telling her how wonderful things are up there in her love nest with husband Joe (Brent Huff) and their baby. . . .

Where is this play going?

For a long time it seems as stymied as the tongue-tied characters it portrays--all but Mary, that is. Mary can’t stop talking. It’s another way of shutting out reality. But Sarah and Stanley and Hovig can’t get the words out. Gestures, looks, silences--gaps more than silences--hang like toxic vapors over the tiny stage in Studio E of the Actors Center.

The play unspools excruciatingly, pause to pause, fade-out to fade-out, with all the deliberate speed of snails on Valium. It points to a stifling existence seemingly dedicated to waiting. And not talking. These are people without equipment--especially lacking the equipment to communicate. They are prisoners condemned by their inarticulateness. When things have to stay inside so much, they’re bound to burst out another way. They do.

Despite “Honeymoon’s” ostensibly realistic setting, Champagne shuns realism, opting appropriately for a kind of neo- or hyper-realism. For all the distention in this play, time is compressed. Someone is always showing up at the door. Events succeed one another quickly, even when the characters within them move painfully slowly.

This theater has its aficionados, but, as Touchstone would tell you, it’s “not for all markets.” It would take some retraining of audiences in our impatient “action” society to get them to sit through such tortuous non-action. The final scenes take on a lurid explosiveness for which no audience-training is required, but it’s a long and enervating if ultimately mesmerizing climb to get there--more like sitting through “Last Year at Marienbad” than “Friday the 13th.”

No one left at the intermission Thursday, however, so something in all those furtive glances and unpregnant pauses was working its spell, if not exactly its magic.

Lorinne Vozoff directed with obvious care and affection for the difficult tempo of the piece, overcoming the limitations of the minuscule space as best she could. The low-key acting by all (except Huff in a masterful show of brute menace) was strained only when Champagne’s string of uneasy banalities also was straining. Uneasy banalities are these characters’ stock and trade. They have no other way to speak. So don’t expect literature. Expect bathos.

This absence of language and emphasis on the ordinary may make this kind of theater more transient than it hopes to be. In the meantime, however, “Honeymoon” addresses a real and significant dilemma of our time: The tragic poverty of spirit and crisis of identity that infects a frustrated, semi-literate underclass like ring-worm--and the violence that is never far behind.

Performances at 11169 Ventura Blvd. in Studio City run Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., until May 15. Tickets: $7.50-$10; (818) 508-3714.