Stage Reviews : ‘Dogs’ Plays Dead at the West Coast Ensemble

Maria Irene Fornes didn’t just direct and design the set for Leo Garcia’s “Dogs,” at West Coast Ensemble--she also designed the walls of the theater. They’re painted with a vivid pattern from an exotic beach: red clouds surrounding palm trees with yellow trunks, with a scattering of grainy sand at the bottom.

The lush colors of the walls are picked up in the spare framework and high-backed chairs of the set itself. But the effect is very different. If the walls suggest a Caribbean beach, the stage suggests a Japanese garden.

All this color and form, visible before the play begins, raises expectations that “Dogs” can’t fulfill. The welcome sensuousness of the design isn’t particularly pertinent to this fairly conventional sick-family play.

Garcia’s series of brief scenes gradually takes us into the pathology of a rigidly oppressive father, his repressed but desperate wife and their three grown sons. Fragments of dialogue tantalize, but his characters remain too fragmentary themselves--as if Garcia is content to tag them with a familiar point of view and then call it a day, without exploring them in any depth.

Some of them verge on cliches. The father is a stick figure, and Myron Natwick plays him as no more, no less. The one son who lives away from home is--no surprise--a sculptor who was criticized by dear old Dad for his insufficiently manly behavior. At least Alec Franco does endow him with a physical and mental heft that works well against the stereotype.

As another brother, Forrest Witt begins the play with such a muffled quality that it’s a surprise to see him emerge as the most troubled of all the characters; Witt’s restraint helps intensify the drama. Michael Cerveris plays the flip youngest brother well, and Diane Dorsey frowns effectively as the wife and mother in pain.

There is a lot of talk about dogs in “Dogs.” An incident in which Dad shot the family pooch was a turning point in this family’s psychic history. But it’s also typical of the predictability of the dramatic structure; Garcia wants to make sure we understand how loathsome the father is, and a dead dog should do the trick.--DON SHIRLEY

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