STAGE REVIEW : ‘Kwangju’: Inert Naturalism From a Novice

James N. Rosenau’s “Kwangju,” at the Odyssey Theatre in West Los Angeles, is a play paved with good intentions that leads straight to theater hell.

Based on the personal life and interrelationships of a New York family faced with the offer of a good government job for the father in Kwangju, Korea, it takes on entirely too many issues--from government perfidy, to marital unfairness, to a 13-year-old daughter’s troubled teens and the deadly effects of cultural difference--all in one dramatically doomed swoop.

Judging from the program notes, Rosenau, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, knew exactly what he hoped to do: show how explosive political events, betrayal and blinding egotism will play hell with our personal lives.

But he is an inexperienced playwright who has written mouthpieces instead of characters, mini-lectures instead of dialogue, and mistakes self-important pop psychology for dramatic impulse. In addition, he injects a maudlin peripheral plot that is never satisfactorily developed.

Enough. “Kwangju’s” inert naturalism simulates reality without ever animating it.

Joan Prather and Tisha Putnam breathe occasional life into the mother and daughter, but Brian Forrest is understandably at sea as the conflicted father, presumably a caring man, but insufferably weak and self-centered as written.

The balance of the cast is below par and production values rudimentary. Director Brendan Dillon either abandoned hope or merely failed to give this intractable piece any shape at all.