STAGE REVIEWS : Slippery ‘Necessities’ Hard to Grasp at Old Globe

No one can accuse playwright Velina Hasu Houston of tackling easy subjects. In “Tea,” seen here in 1988, she dealt with cultural dispossession. In “Necessities,” her new play that premiered Wednesday at the Old Globe Theatre’s Cassius Carter Centre Stage, the focus is just as slippery: spiritual defoliation in a material world.

You wouldn’t necessarily know this right away. On the face of it--the extreme outer mask--it’s about a self-centered producer’s determination to adopt a baby. Zelda (Jennifer Savidge) is 45, successful, married, impatient and childless. It’s too late for her to have a baby of her own and regular adoption channels grind too slowly, if at all. The only thing that moves at Zelda’s speed is private adoption.

Others might call it child-buying and do. Zelda’s well-balanced Japanese-American friend Elizabeth (Freda Foh Shen), for one. Never mind that Zelda’s husband, Daniel (William Anton), 10 years her junior, doesn’t want a child. Never mind that their marriage is rocky. Zelda forges ahead without him. Money buys everything and what Zelda wants, Zelda usually gets.

What she hasn’t banked on is her inability to clearly identify the target. She wants a baby, yes, but a girl? A boy? Newborn? Unborn? A well baby? A white baby? Zelda hasn’t paid much attention to these questions (though why is one of the play’s larger lapses).

When she places an ad in a Phoenix paper and a parade of young mothers (and, on one occasion, a father) come sailing through her hotel room with demands and surprises of their own, Zelda’s in for a rude awakening. Confronted by unanticipated pressures and choices, she’s not prepared for the sudden percolation of a range of unsettling emotions she never even knew she had.

The implication is that she figured she’d pick a baby the way she’d picked her seven cats at home. But when life at its rawest comes knocking, this tough, in-charge executive, who wouldn’t miss a single trick in any production deal, becomes a basket case.

The rules no longer apply. Just as her star-struck young assistant, Kale (Jonathan Nichols), can’t tell where movies end and reality begins, so Zelda, in the course of one unnerving day, must rethink morality and confront the toughest enemy of all: the demon within.

Like Jane Anderson’s 1989 “The Baby Dance,” also about the minefield of child-buying, the emotions aroused here are provocative, political and chaotic. There is an epiphany and a payoff at play’s end, but getting there is confusing. In remorselessly deciding to paint Zelda as a me-generation monster who eventually fumbles her way into a right decision, Houston leaves lots of room for diffidence about the havoc she wreaks.

The playwright has created a selfish, blundering neurotic, who through her own denials consumes the people around her. But the tortuous path to redemption is paved with dramaturgical potholes.

We are given only fleeting reasons for Zelda’s 11th-hour quest for unconditional love. Although devoted to her friend Elizabeth, she suddenly has to cope with emotions that qualify as “Some of my best friends are multiracial, but . . . . “ Obsessive about work, she nevertheless objects to the same trait in her husband. And after repeatedly bad-mouthing a client, she finds it “immoral” for her young assistant to jump ship and join the enemy.

Are we to love this woman or love to hate her?

It’s not clear, and Savidge, a fine actress, seems as conflicted about Zelda as we are. Some scenes work better than others and the ones that don’t border on soap opera. “I’m going through with this if it kills me,” is Zelda’s foolhardy battle cry. It could be Savidge’s as well.

Foh Shen is the voice of reason as Elizabeth, and Nichols has a pleasant spontaneity as the insouciant yuppie Kale. Anton manages to breathe a human dimension into the semi-philandering Daniel, despite the character’s unconvincing comings and goings that seem designed for dramatic convenience.

But it’s the mothers with babies for sale who have the best lines and make the most lasting impression: Suzanna Hay as the alcoholic Christina in fear of the harm she might do her child; Tara Marchant as the proud, bright, law student Janine; Sue-Anne Morrow, as the fledgling 18-year-old whose unalloyed love for her daughter is the force that sets Zelda on course.

Production values are fine with unobtrusively stylish sets by Cliff Faulkner, nice lighting and costumes by Ashley York Kennedy and Shigeru Yaji, respectively, and appropriate sound by Jeff Ladman.

Julianne Boyd has directed intelligently within the play’s absorbing perimeters, but she might have done more to solve its more nettlesome points. The piece is a work still in progress and Houston and Boyd owe it to themselves and the play’s rigorous ideas to challenge them even harder.

“Necessities,” Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Aug. 25. $17.50-$28.50; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours.

‘Necessities’

Jennifer Savidge: Zelda Kelly

Jonathan Nichols: Kale Smith

William Anton: Daniel Kelly

Suzanna Hay: Christina

Bray Poor: Tommy

Freda Foh Shen: Elizabeth

Tara Marchant: Janine

Sue-Anne Morrow: Mary

World premiere of a play by Velina Hasu Houston. Director Julianne Boyd. Sets Cliff Faulkner. Lights Ashley York Kennedy. Costumes Shigeru Yaji. Sound Jeff Ladman. Stage manager Robert Drake. Assistant stage manager Lavinia Henley.