STAGE REVIEW : Uneasy Ensemble in ‘Mojo’

There is a large danger lurking in plays that talk more than they do . If things start slightly off center, it can become difficult later to keep them on course.

Something like that may have happened Sunday at the opening of “West Memphis Mojo” at the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Hollywood. A door wouldn’t open at the beginning of the play, and while the actors--James Avery and Willard Pugh--were quick to get around the problem, they never quite got around some awkward timing and uneasiness for the remainder of Act I.

The trouble, of course, is that Act I is all talk. Playwright Martin Jones has carved out an old-fashioned play about three disenfranchised black men living in West Memphis, Ark., who’d like to crack the largely white recording world of Memphis, Tenn.

The time is 1955--a kind of limbo between the suicide of R&B; star Johnny Ace and the meteoric rise of Elvis Presley. For the men in Teddy’s barber shop, crossing the river to the other side of town is like crossing the Himalayas.

Middle-aged Teddy (Avery) owns the barber shop that doubles as a record store, but in neither case constitutes big business. He is joined by the much younger Elroi (Pugh), a protege, whose post-pubescent eagerness is uncontainable. Together they sit around, talk, drink and wait for Frank (Larry Riley), singer and guitarist--and third member of this avid group.

They wait. And talk. And wait. And dream. This is a red-letter day--the day they expect to record some songs at Sun Studios, where none other than Presley cuts his records. Never mind if the deal is a shady (and shaky) back-door deal.

But Frank doesn’t show. When he finally calls, it turns out his sister got sick and he had to go be with her children. The recording session? That was the night before and it got canceled anyway. Not a happy ending for Act I.

A week later, Frank arrives with a cut record in hand. But it’s not on the Sun label. It’s the work of a small outfit no one’s heard of, and Frank made sure that he got paid in cash. When he plays the record (Elroi’s composition), Elroi goes bananas. It’s the wrong tempo. It’s not what he wanted. Elroi storms out after a nasty three-way clash that comes perilously close to violence.

So no one gets killed (though Teddy, who keeps popping nitro-glycerin, may not last much longer), and there is a pragmatic yet optimistic resolution to the play. Jones has written some real fiber into this drama, but it’s pretty much lost at the Ensemble until Riley’s entrance in Act II.

Avery and Pugh are not comfortable enough in their roles (or were not at Sunday’s opening) to give the conversational subtext of the first half a real chance to bloom. Their talk remains talk. It skates on the the words, literally and figuratively. They are not always as audible as they should be. And we can’t blame that on the stuck door on Sunday.

It is director Michael Peters’ responsibility to see that his actors are understood as well as seen. But his staging of the play goes for the predictable, even the forced, and rarely focuses on subtext.

The result is a one-dimensional view of things. One is left with the suspicion that there is a better play there than this production points to, though the second half of the show is buoyed by the increased action and by Riley’s much stronger presence and sense of theater.

“Mojo” also benefits from a nice cameo by Shawn Modrell as Maxine, a young woman who cares enough to deliver the drunk and beaten-up Elroi to Teddy’s shop at 4 a.m., but who also knows when it’s time to get out of the way.

The realistic one-chair barber shop set by Peters, Riley and Llewellyn Harrison reflects the bleakness of these men’s lives, though it could have a few more records to sell. (The setting is reminiscent of Lonnie Elder III’s “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men,” another barber-shop play, that addressed similar concerns of self-realization and in which no one ever shaved anyone for profit.)

Neither Jones nor Elder uses a large canvas. The idea is to go deep, not wide. Somehow the feeling in “Mojo” at the Ensemble is one of painting by the numbers.

At the Ensemble Studio Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave. in Hollywood, Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 3. Ends Feb. 26. Tickets: $15-$17.50; (213) 466-2916.