STAGE REVIEW : Dealing With Light, Language in ‘White Ant’

Snoo Wilson is an irascibly elusive playwright who isn’t about to change his ways for anyone. His recent “More Light” made that clear, and his “The Soul of the White Ant,” at Hollywood Artists Repertory Theatre, makes it starkly transparent.

Wilson is a gamesmith who willfully and impetuously changes the rules on the playing field as far and as often as it suits his purposes. He does it within a style of language that can’t be quoted, not because it’s full of expletives, but because it has the density of good poetry that a single listening can’t penetrate.

More importantly, his highly elliptical style is firmly put to political ends. Whereas “More Light,” ultimately a failure of its own grand ambitions, attempted a fable on an intellectual battling the church state (astronomer Giordano Bruno vs. Pope Clement VIII), “The Soul of the White Ant” explores the cancer of racism.

The racism is in South Africa, but director John Moody’s production doesn’t seem as nearly fixated on the Afrikaner situation as, say, Athol Fugard’s “The Road to Mecca.” From the array of background American pop tunes, to the jukebox in Mabel’s bar where Wilson’s men congregate, to Moody’s very American cast, we are, and are not, in South Africa. Wipe away the accent, and we might be in Florida.

Dislocation is the operative word here. Wilson will start a scene in a familiar way (Mabel and her women friends, Edith and June, discussing “female problems”) and explode it into operatic excess (Mabel ends up carrying the collective white guilt on her shoulders). As the delicate balance of relationships breaks down, and Edith and June’s men (Pieter and Julius) violently react against a terrible and excessive series of accidents that have befallen Mabel, locales, rhythms and character identities shift abruptly.

The biggest shift is with the character of Eugene (J. D. Smith), who literally pops out of the ground. He is a kind of angel from below, a demonic savior for these decimated whites. At first, he is a bedraggled human slug who can barely talk, but possesses the swaggering Pieter. Later, he reappears as an odd country gentleman with the cure for everyone’s ills.

Wilson’s joke seems to be that only a kind of magical solution will cure apartheid--the type of coup de theatre that concludes his play. If so, it’s ultimately a joke without resonance, because it leaves the sense of being merely the last in a long series of authorial manipulations. His characters are pawns in a theatrical experiment more than they are living through a horrible set of catastrophes.

Despite the best efforts of the cast, led by Kym Sawtelle’s Mabel (she is the kind of expressionist actress Rainer Fassbinder used to work with), “White Ant” lacks an emotional spine. That’s most obvious with the off-stage black servant, whose catalytic death is never a felt loss. When the ends are exposing the strange psychosis of racism, a cool intellectual experiment is an inappropriate means.

The psychosis is made most dramatic, though, by Jeff Klarin’s cubistic sets, David Carlton’s discomfiting lights and Klarin and Moody’s unnerving sound design.

At 6817 N. Franklin Ave., Hollywood United Methodist Church, on Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m., through April 23. Tickets: $10; (213) 466-1767.