STAGE REVIEW : ‘Monsoon’: Racism in Barracks

“Monsoon Christmas,” produced by An Actors’ Theatre at the Lex in Hollywood, endured familiar Equity-Waiver hassles getting off the ground: The opening was set back a week because the show lost one of its stars to a movie job, and a week later patrons were sent home on opening night because another actor was shooting a movie too late to make the curtain. Is this an industry town or what?

But this backstage hand wringing has a notable ending. This drama about barracks racism, set on a remote, rain-swept U.S. military base in Okinawa in 1972, is both low key and scorching. The nine-actor male ensemble (five whites and four blacks) delivers impeccably crafted and searing work.

Director Victoria Hartman, who co-wrote the play with Patrick J. Mainello (whose experience as a Marine in the Philippines inspired the play), knows exactly what she’s doing. Hartman tightens the momentum ever so gradually until the inevitable confrontations flare in your face and then almost as quickly settle into an almost elegiac fadeout.

Here is a play with several stock characters--you saw many of them in “A Soldier’s Play” and “Streamers”--who look new again because the commitment and the execution is that strong. You expect brusque physicality, and this production ripples with vocal as well as muscular force, particularly from the chief combatants: Tommy Ford’s dangerous, insidious, imposing corporal and John Salvi’s taunting sergeant, who comes on like a linebacker.

One of the production’s deft touches is dramatizing how blacks and whites in these close quarters seem to get along. Hey, there’s no problem here. This deception consumes the better portion of the first of the two acts (in a textured bunk and locker set by Bill Martin, lit in alternating bright and greenish amber by Ken Booth and complemented by Mary Ellen Booth’s relentless but curiously soothing downpour of a sound track).

But the blacks’ ritual fist-to-fist bumping begins to burn the whites, and the blacks know it. Images like this propel the action. There’s not a declaration in the play about racism. Here we see it almost as a mist, and we observe it moving from two directions.

Other actors leave lingering imprints: Scott Kraft’s cocky hayseed, Marvin Elkins’ compromising middleman, Bill Martin’s coarse lieutenant, Dean Yacalis’ vivid and burnished private, Lewis Dix’s affable victim, Rahn Sargeant’s raw recruit grown cynical, and Burr Steers’ average Joe.

At 6700 Lexington Ave., Hollywood, Thursdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., through Oct. 30. Tickets: $10. (213) 850-4418.