STAGE REVIEW : Audience Left in Limbo During ‘Nomads’ Trek

The subject of “Nomads in Limbo” is the dispossessed. The millionaire “haves” are dispossessed spiritually and emotionally. The poverty-stricken “have-nots,” being kicked out of home after home, are dispossessed physically. And the only thing that will set the lion to sleeping with the lamb is a nuclear meltdown that will bring a leveler of death and destruction to all.

Appropriately for the dispossession theme, the space used for this new multimedia work, by San Diego artist Baba Hillman through this weekend, is a former Navy galley-turned peeling studio that is part of the old Brown Airfield complex.

If San Diego pursues a proposed plan to build a new international airport at Brown Field, the very building in which the show is housed will be closed to its present occupant, visual artist and cast member Larry Dumlao, who also plays a tenant.

The irony drips from every piece of cracked plaster, hanging paint chip and rotting cork wall. It permeates the set with the pungent scent of abandonment and degeneration, accentuated by the set design of Neil Patel, who provides a junkyard decor enhanced by Randi Norman’s prop design: a smashed TV set in every room, some of which are lit by single red candles.

One even gets to share more directly in the discomfort of the characters’ surroundings by the very nature of the seating arrangements--20-plus viewers crowded together on cushions for two hours without intermission, craning their necks to follow the action that moves in front of the audience, behind them and in four additional spaces off to the left side.

Too bad the show itself, which moves to the Centro Cultural de la Raza on Jan. 26-27, is not that subtle. Hillman’s piece casts her characters into two camps: hapless victims versus caricaturishly drawn wealthy politicians and news people. She is at her best with the victims, which is clearly where her heart is.

While each of the tenants is sensitively drawn, Mayor Dan Trask, a thankless role played valiantly by the talented Jim Johnston, is an inexplicable figure who knowingly orders a new development to be built on an asbestos site in one scene and leaves his wife sexually frustrated in another. Is there a connection between the two sins? Is there a connection between these sins and the video segment in which the mayor opts for the unecologically sound choice of plastic versus paper grocery bags?

And do any of these evils have anything to do with the videotaped scene of a newscaster (Carol Pisarski) minimizing the impact of a leak in a nuclear power plant, or the tape of a group of picnickers trashing Balboa Park to the tune of Bing Crosby crooning “Teddy Bear Picnic”?

Well, maybe there is a connection--spiritual wasteland metamorphoses into physical wasteland, and all that. But that’s an intellectual abstraction this show hasn’t come close to nailing down yet. “Nomads in Limbo” throws everything at you, leaving it up to the viewer to wrest form and message from a limbo of confusion.

The haphazard hysterics in Hillman’s grab bag of no-nos is matched by the unreality of the portraits of Trask (Johnston, if anything, provides more shading and depth than seems extant in the script) and his wife, Cameron Hubbell-Trask, played by Cathryn Pisarski for broad humor as a sexually repressed, shopping- and food-obsessed creature.

In vivid contrast, the tenants facing eviction are genuinely moving. Verrier Scatolini is heartbreaking as tenant Rosemary Kieselstein, who naively believes that the city will make good on its promise to relocate her after she leaves the building; Eloise DeLeon radiates quiet heroism as Elena, who refuses to leave either her apartment or her memories behind; Hillman is touching as a drifter named Mary Jane, who has moved too many times in her young life and now chooses this time--with the mayor bearing down on her--to take a stand.

The actual techniques of the piece--carving theater out of a warehouse-type structure, moving the audience attention from room to room, splicing live action with video recordings, lighting the seemingly unlightable (Kevin Sussman)--are reminiscent of those skills refined by Sledgehammer Theatre. Hillman in fact shares two artists with the Sledgehammer company--cameraman Dave Cannon and costume and prop designer Norman.

The ending suggests something better that might have been. During a sleepless night of nuclear meltdown, the 10 performers moan at different pitches that creates an eerie harmony as they rise and, holding candles, sleepwalk out of the theater.

It’s a Whitmanesque touch which conveys a sense of how the different voices crying out in the night from the posh apartments to the condemned apartments could make a haunting music if they would only listen to each other before it is too late.

That is “Nomads in Limbo” at its best. It scales a height that one wishes the show would reach more often.

“NOMADS IN LIMBO”

Written and directed by Baba Hillman. Sets, Neil Patel. Costumes and props, Randi Norman. Lighting, Kevin Sussman. With Eloise DeLeon, Larry Dumlao, Chris Frye, Baba Hillman, Alan Hubbard, Jim Johnston, Andrea LaBella, Randi Norman, Cathryn Pisarski and Verrier Scatolini. At 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday at 1365 Lycoming St. in Otay Mesa (619) 294-7056, and Jan. 26-27 at Centro Cultural de la Raza, Balboa Park (619) 235-6135. Tickets are $7.