Bad Mix Sours ‘Drinking in America’

The land of the free and the brave is a prison for the 14 characters in Eric Bogosian’s one-man show, “Drinking in America.”

No one has stuffed them in a penitentiary.

They themselves have built the bars to keep out that confusing and frightening proposition called life.

Bars of alcohol. Bars of drugs. Bars of sex.

The first to replace Bogosian in the collection of roles, longtime film, television and stage actor Nehemiah Persoff debuts in “Drinking in America” at the Elizabeth North Theatre through July 29.

Good actor. Good material. Wrong match.

Bogosian, who is in his mid-30s, first performed the material in 1986 in a highly successful six-month run at the American Place Theatre in New York City.

Despite Persoff’s obvious respect for Bogosian’s work, watching the 71-year-old actor play a one-time hippie, drugged-out teen-ager and a black street person fantasizing about a limousine is uncomfortable.

It’s like watching an actor use all the crowbars of his craft to try to pry inside a world in which he has never really lived.

Persoff is likely to do better in his one-man show, “Sholem Aleichem” headed for the Hahn Cosmopolitan Oct. 14-23.

Here he strikes gold in only one of the 14 vignettes--but that one, in which he plays a ceramic-tile salesman at an out-of-town convention, is enough to show how good Persoff can be when the material is right for him.

The salesman has just entered his hotel room with a paid escort, whom he has hired for sex. What he really wants, however, is someone to talk to for a few minutes while he drinks. Someone who he can fantasize likes him, respects him, maybe even admires him. Someone unlike his wife for whom he sees himself as a paycheck, a bankroll for shopping sprees.

Persoff captures the reality of that man’s loneliness. He makes you feel it palpably, like a cloud of tears afloat over his head. He even makes you see that invisible girl checking her watch, wondering if the old coot is going to get to the business at hand or not.

But Persoff’s performance in the rest of this show also reveals the weaknesses of the piece.

A more wired performer who could move more swiftly through the fast changes and the clever, street-smart dialogue might dazzle the audience into missing the repetitiousness of the points made by the script.

What gets hammered home here is that the characters are only superficially different from one another.

Some are haves, some are have-nots.

Some escape from life because they are shut out from the good life promised by the American dream on television. Heroin and alcohol give them the illusion of being powerful and strong.

Some escape because they have the good life and something still feels missing. America, lest anyone need be reminded, is not a particularly spiritual place.

But they all sing the same song, albeit in different keys:

“Life is a monkey on my back,” explains the junkie in “God Head.”

Bogosian’s theme is the inverse of Walt Whitman’s celebration of life in “Leaves of Grass.” It’s a black vision, with a ring of truth, but it’s also very narrow.

But should such hollowness really be blamed on America as a country?

Maybe Bogosian could stand to drink in more of America.

“DRINKING IN AMERICA”

By Eric Bogosian. Director is Terry Nicholson. Sets by Edd Serna. Lighting by Matthew Cubitto. Sound by Joanne Silver. Stage manager is Duke Windsor. With Nehemiah Persoff. At 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays with Sunday matinees at 2, through July 29. Tickets are $17-$20. At 547 Fourth Ave., San Diego, (619) 284-2148.