STAGE REVIEW : Unappetizing ‘Junk Food’ at Burbage Theatre

Willard Manus is out to prove that there’s life after the one-act play. His two-act “Junk Food” at the Burbage Theatre is a highly dubious expansion of his original, intermission-less piece, which was a prize winner at L.A. Actors’ Theatre’s one-act festival in 1981.

The earlier draft had a middle-aged factory worker daring his date, also a factory laborer, to throw away all their material possessions--down to their last stitch of clothes.

Perhaps in the time frame of less than an hour, this defrocking produced an emotionally pleasing effect, a slightly larger moment after a short series of small ones. In the new draft, it is a moment of deadly predictability after a lengthy evening of gliding along the surface of two nameless though not faceless characters.

Manus has written a first act set outside a steel plant at lunch, with the man (Eddie Zammit) refusing to pay back a loan to the factory’s union boss. The woman is the boss’ messenger (Dawn Davis) in a slave-master relationship.

Davis is repelled by Zammit’s apocalyptic cynicism and his (literally) auto-erotic affection for his custom-built, spage-age roadster. His seduction of her might provide him with a respite from loneliness as well as a way of getting back at the boss.

Dramaturgically, Manus reversed his blueprints. Many writers would simply continue their later draft where their first one ended. Here, he’s designed a first act to expand on the original piece’s potentialities. Which is fine, and more daring, but, in the end, the two pieces have to meld.

The second act’s arbitrary references to business we learned earlier heightens the sense of an artificial construct. Manus is already launching into the archly metaphoric when he has the couple making out in a junk yard, but inserting a jarring, brief visit from the boss (a simple lighting effect by Kevin Adams, whose lights and set look like a rushed effort) only demands that this story be developed more, or not at all.

Director Ivan Spiegel has cast perfectly competent actors who do elicit a few shadings, but Zammit and Davis lack the mettle for a two-hour, two-character performance. What’s missing at the Burbage is the durability of the long-distance runner.