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STAGE REVIEW : Provocative, Corrosive ‘Edmond’ Unravels After a Promising Start

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Cal State Fullerton’s production of David Mamet’s “Edmond” starts with a lone sax man dressed up like a Blues Brother and blowing hard under a moody spotlight.

The guy’s not bad--the riffs are bluesy, progressive, a little off; it’s the right foreshadowing for Mamet’s corrosive black comedy of low-lifes and living in New York City. Yeah, mournful, urgent and a bit crazy, not bad.

But it all unravels soon enough after the last notes are played. Under Leonard Meenach’s unimaginative direction, the drama is the stage equivalent of labored breathing. Making the intense, scatological and almost always provocative Mamet stiff is some accomplishment.

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Then there’s the acting. Mamet’s characters, especially the principals, are out of reach for most of these student actors. Many of the performances walk the wire with weak legs, and with Mamet, there’s never any net.

“Edmond” is a spookily intriguing play, but it’s not one of his best works--too often it’s sensationalistic without being resolved. The scenes are often padded with popular cliches of New York seediness and sex, moments stuck in resin. But “Edmond” does have a dirty force that can tie us to a sense of doom, of a life careening away from itself as Edmond (Michael Denney) pinballs from one ugly encounter to the next.

The plot begins with ordinary domestic turmoil. Edmond, a middle-aged tie and suit, leaves his wife, goes drinking in a bar and then embarks on a quest for sex that takes him into Manhattan’s underground. He’s pushed around in almost every scene--even street shills beat on him--and in turn he starts to brutalize those he comes across. What’s unsettling is how quickly he becomes a part of the seaminess.

Most of these moments spit with violence or the threat of it, but “Edmond” never strays far from its nature as one long off-color joke. Edmond, no matter how bad the situation gets, always wants to know how much it’s all going to cost. How much are the hookers? How much to play the corner shell game? How much for that knife?

It’s his mantra. He’s a middle-class nebbish who adjusts but never really understands the implications of what’s happening to him. It’s sad, but funny, too. He’s the butt of the cosmic joke, life’s punch line.

At CSUF, it would help if we weren’t so removed from Edmond. Denney’s hold of the character is too tenuous--he doesn’t seem to fully understand what motivates Edmond to leave his wife and take this trip down, and how he’s changed during the journey. Without the actor putting the meaning between the lines, the audience can be left dangling.

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Most of the cast members generally take a hard-boiled stance in approaching their roles. Another mistake of Meenach’s is to minimize variation in the characters; not all New Yorkers, seedy or not, are this humorless and cynical. Even a pimp can have irony in his soul.

Still, there are a few capable performances. Rich Ascroft as the black prisoner who sexually humiliates Edmond and then begins something of an inmates’ marriage with him is dynamic in his few scenes. George Anthony Herrera, in a handful of parts from a shill to a policeman, has a natural delivery, as does Sylvia K. Biller, who plays a waitress Edmond sleeps with and accidentally murders.

In prison, Edmond comes to realize something of what he is. This self-knowledge sets up the play’s controversial ending. Most critics have condemned the moment when Edmond gently kisses the prisoner who has earlier sodomized him and holds his hand lovingly as simplistic and disingenuous.

But that misreads the scene. Mamet isn’t laying out a moment of love and redemption; the scene is the playwright’s last big sneer at Edmond and what he represents. It’s a manifestation of the Everyman’s weak acceptance of his place in the world, and that acquiescence deserves harsh laughter.

‘EDMOND’

A Cal State Fullerton production of David Mamet’s play. Directed by Leonard Meenach. With Michael Denney, LeAnn Slough, Renee Simoneau, David Michael Long, Lorilyne L. Plate, Ron McPherson, George Anthony Herrera, Sal Paradise, Xavier Reed Salinas, Stephanie Peterson, Alder Dixon, Sylvia K. Biller and Rich Ascroft. Lighting by Annie Fields-Walters. Sound by Greg Piedalue. Makeup by Abel Zeballos. Plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. with a Saturday matinee at 2:30 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. at the campus’s Arena Theatre, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Tickets: $3 to $4. Information: (714) 773-3371.

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