STAGE REVIEW : Taper’s ‘Dutch Landscape’ Pitted With Misconceptions

Tread softly on this “Dutch Landscape.”

It is a mine field of loftiness gone awry. A checklist of don’ts. A desolation of stranded actors. How can one explain so many wrong turns in a theater as savvy as the Mark Taper Forum?

The new Jon Robin Baitz play that opened Thursday at the Taper is awash in good intentions. Set in South Africa, it wants to deal with big issues: pervasive apartheid, the evil exploitation of black Africans by white corporations, the corrosion of even the most liberal-minded whites by proximity to an intolerable caste system. And in the middle of it all, the disintegration of the neurotic, addictive, upper-middle-class white American family.

These are themes enough for a half-dozen plays, which is a small share of “Dutch Landscape’s” problems. More troubling is the fact that this latest piece by the author of the nimble “Mizlansky-Zilinsky” (a Hollywood parody) and “The Film Society” (a singeing piece about the death of colonialism) doesn’t seem to have an authentic bone in its body. Most of its characters feel like mouthpieces for solemn utterances locked in stilted situations wherein everyone is always trying to “sit down and think.” Hardly the stuff of vibrant theater.

The play takes place in a spacious beach-front farmhouse outside Durban on New Year’s Eve, 1977. Its insular and unhappy inhabitants are Rose (Penny Fuller) an alcoholic housewife from Malibu, and her sons Danny (Raphael Sbarge) and Alex (Todd Merrill). Alex, who was once thrown through a plate glass window by his father, has only just arrived from the States and has a history of problems with drugs and alcohol that resulted in a serious car accident. Danny, the younger boy, strives for equanimity at all cost and sees himself as his mother’s caretaker. The three are like stalking cats: by turns spooked, jumpy, flippant, ironic, uneasy and secretive with one another. “Father Knows Best” it’s not.

Rose and the boys are waiting for Philip (Stephen Joyce), their husband and father, a former Peace Corps volunteer now contemplating a new job with a Dutch corporation that manufactures one of those controversial baby formulas for Third World distribution. The Dutch are hiring the “ethnically sensitive” Philip to help them fix their badly damaged image. Things come to a crashing halt at the end of Act I, when, out of left field, the black African maid who missed her bus (Olivia Virgil Harper), goes berserk and has a violent confrontation with Rose.

The incident’s aftermath becomes the focal point of Act II. By then it’s New Year’s Day. Philip has finally arrived with one of his corporate persuaders in tow (Dakin Mathews, who gives the show’s most polished performance). He tries to piece together what went on in the house the night before--not easy, since almost no one in this family knows how to face the truth. The plot twists and turns in ways we won’t divulge but that careen almost invariably from the absurdly transparent to the implausible.

A major difficulty with the play lies in the fact that Baitz’s characters, with the possible exception of Alex, are spoiled, self-centered wimps for whom it is difficult to feel anything but impatience. Philip is a petty tyrant who has always done whatever he’s wanted at the family’s expense, despite lip service paid to family commitment. His white liberal views are simplistic and, it seems, easily bent.

Rose has become a pill-popping mess, unaware that she’s trapped her son Danny into becoming her parent. When at the end of the play she’s made to take a hard look at a pivotal action, her redemption is unearned. Lip service again--as unpersuasive in its abruptness as was the violence that provoked it.

These are emotionally constipated people (not to say disturbed) who speak in maddeningly banal, truncated bits of psychobabble, thoroughly deflating the play and leaving the nonplussed actors in the lurch. How compelling can you be with statements such as “Listen . . . How are you? . . . “ or “I’m not going to have a replay of every bad scene we’ve had with you, sweetheart, you know?” or “One thing all of you: Everyone--be careful.” Only Philip Reeves as a jaded diplomat is given dialogue he can roll around his mouth without fear of choking on its portentousness.

A program note from Davidson indicates that this is the culmination of three years of collaboration between Baitz and the Taper. If that’s the case, such commissions and collaborations should be re-examined. Given Baitz’s previous track record, three years may be what it took to improve “Dutch Landscape” into a non-play.

Heidi Landesman’s burnished set, in contrast to the play, does have an authentic feel to it. Ann Bruice’s costumes, Tharon Musser’s lighting and Rick Baitz’s original music provide the right, hospitable surroundings. But for what? There’s no spirit or vitality to this production, directed by Gordon Davidson with an exceptionally indulgent hand. The result is a dramatically vacant piece that, in yearning to be important, becomes merely self-important.