STAGE REVIEWS : Innocence Erodes in Jail in ‘La Loma’

Let’s say you’re a nice young person, minding your own business and enjoying a trip in Mexico. One night you’re in a cantina, sipping on a cerveza , when the cops storm in, frame you with marijuana possession, and cart you off. Two years later, you are still in jail.

What would you do?

Most likely, like Jeff in Christopher Woods’ one-character drama, “La Loma,” at 2nd Stage, you’d stop being a nice young person--and you might become an interesting model for a stage character. Woods, who himself was tossed in the slammer 10 blocks from the border in 1971, has gone part of the way in making an artful reassessment of a personal trauma. But dramatically, “La Loma” never quite gets out of prison.

An ad line might glibly trumpet “La Loma” as “Beckett meets ‘Midnight Express,’ ” but that doesn’t suggest the feverish lather that actor Bryan Simon works up as Jeff, the quintessential American naif south of the border on a college photography assignment. He is genuinely shocked that Mexican police would be so nastily corrupt as to find any excuse to throw innocents in jail. He is thunderstruck that the American consul not only appears to lack interest in his case, but is actually part of the corruption. Jeff may know photography (curiously, he never really discusses it), but he obviously hasn’t read the news lately.

As Woods’ experience shows, these criminal police tactics have been going on for awhile, and Jeff’s naivete comes off as slightly incredible. Still, the naivete of Americans abroad often is incredible. Jeff’s survival mechanisms are what really interest Woods, particularly how his ability to hang on is in inverse proportion to his links with civilized behavior.

Soon enough, Jeff devolves from outraged citizen to jail hustler, learning the ropes of this “free enterprise” institution where each inmate provides for himself. Money for sex, money for dope--these are the trades. None of this strikes us, in 1992, as terribly shocking. It’s as predictable as Jeff’s girlfriend eventually dropping him and his visiting sister doubting his innocence. Woods has yet to find either a galvanizing event to shake us up or, with a slight shift in tone, a depth charge into the cavities of the human mind such as Genet found behind bars.

Simon originated the role at his own Waukegan, Ill.-based Stage Two Theatre Company and toured the play through the Midwest, and his time with Jeff shows, particularly as he changes from a scared weasel of a student into a jaded creature resigned to being condemned. Paul Fagen smoothly directs this as well as the shifts from presentational address to interacting with invisible characters.

But the element that most resonates here is the set and light design of Douglas D. Smith, late of L.A. Theatre Center. Making more of less than any small theater design in memory, Smith places Simon in a decaying shell of a cell, and covers it all with tinted lights from every angle. Designers on a budget would do well to study Smith’s achievement, not so much for how he did it, but for how it serves the play.

* “La Loma,” 2nd Stage, 6500 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends March 1. $7-$10; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes.