STAGE REVIEW : The Limits of Strength in ‘Child’

Israel Horovitz’s “Strong-Man’s Weak Child” at Los Angeles Theatre Center is a potentially strong play with a weak center.

Set in an unusual milieu--a garage gym in depressed Gloucester, Mass.--the play’s weightlifters are beginning to buckle under the strain of conflicts with each other and themselves. But the conflicts resolve too easily. There seems to be a scene missing from the middle of the play--a scene that could have pumped blood into the drama as surely as these characters pump blood into their muscles.

Men arrive every day for 4 a.m. workouts at this garage (which was meticulously designed and lit by D Martyn Bookwalter). They seek a perfection in their looks that’s missing in the rest of their lives.

The owner of the garage, Franny Farina (Nick Mancuso), perhaps realizes the futility of this effort. His 9-year-old stepdaughter Dede (Sally Levi and Sheridan Gayr, alternating), is dying of cancer; he assures her in his bedtime stories that it’s what inside that counts, not the way people look. Franny quit a good job to set up his makeshift gym; it enables him to be closer to Dede. It isn’t explained how he could afford to lose his job’s health benefits.

Dede appears in only one scene and hardly speaks. Dede’s mother Evvie (Meg Foster) also has only one scene of any substance.

The play is mainly about the men: Franny and two of his customers, fat Auggie (Peter Iacangelo) and Fast Eddie (Don Yesso). In fact, it’s Yesso’s Fast Eddie who often dominates the stage.

While the other two men wear sweat shirts from local Gloucester gyms, Fast Eddie wears one from Gold’s, way out in Venice, Calif.--and his flashy pants (costumer: Ann Bruice) also would blend in well at Ocean Front Walk and Windward Avenue. Eddie has been to Venice, and he wants to return. He also has ambitions to become Mr. Massachusetts, at the very least--and, to the untutored eye, Yesso looks as if he might actually qualify.

Eddie has good reasons for wanting to get out of Gloucester. One of 13 kids abused by their father, he has served time in a local prison.

We learn that Eddie and Evvie had an affair, years ago. As a result, there is no love lost between Eddie and Franny. But Eddie keeps coming to Franny’s gym because he respects Franny’s “judge’s eye.” And Franny is willing to accept Eddie’s business as long as Eddie takes precautions to avoid seeing Evvie or the dying Dede.

But then a crisis arises in Dede’s treatment. Her mother and stepfather have given all they can, and now it looks as if only her birth father can serve as the bone-marrow donor.

This is the point where the missing scene belongs. Horovitz fast-forwards past Fast Eddie’s decision-making process. Without giving away the ending, let’s just say that it’s doubtful that Eddie’s mind and conscience would work so quickly.

It’s also unlikely that Franny’s own resentment toward Eddie would fade so fast--or that the two men would decide on the course of action depicted here. It isn’t just a matter of credibility. The drama would be more intense if the crisis were more protracted, especially if Evvie were given a bigger role in the deliberations, or at least an awareness of them.

Horovitz wants us to like his characters too much for his play’s good. This shouldn’t be a major concern--these are already likable guys. While their bodybuilding has its obsessive and vain moments, the underlying anxieties that lead them into their obsession are easy to understand, especially with Dede hovering near death in the next room. The dialogue in the first scenes is occasionally swallowed up in the Massachusetts accents and the bodybuilding jargon. But certainly this cast creates the illusion that they really do work out together every day.

Mancuso carries the weight of his family’s suffering in his face and on his arms and legs as visibly as he carries the actual weights in his gym. Iacangelo is a roly-poly second banana who occasionally gets all serious and brings a ray of clarity to the proceedings. Foster has a stricken smile that would be hard to resist.

Again, it’s Yesso who really drives the play. Best known as the only white guy who worked at “Frank’s Place” in the late lamented TV series of that name, Yesso lists no stage credits in the program. But he struts around the stage as if he owns it, expanding his underwritten role through the force of his presence.

As a director, Horovitz has an eye for subtle but telling composition. If he would only add some more beef to his play, it might be a real contender.

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