STAGE REVIEW : ‘Claude’: the Mundane and Poetic

Bleak room with desk. Shadowy lighting. A court stenographer. A hard-nosed cop in street clothes. And Him--a wild, lanky kid in ragged T-shirt and jeans, with longish, angry-looking hair and thin bare feet, recently removed from sockless running shoes.

A stereotypical scene.

There’s been a murder. The kid did it. He’s turned himself in. But the circumstances are cockeyed (aren’t they always?). He’s let himself into the courthouse chambers of Judge Delorme.

Questions: How did he get the keys? Why choose this place? Is he going to compromise the judge (an issue that is raised but never resolved)? Who is he? When did he kill and why?

These are the opening salvos in “Being at Home With Claude,” the second installment in the Rene-Daniel Dubois Festival at Stages Theatre Center in Hollywood.

So far, no surprises, except for Ken Booth’s slivered lighting that follows characters around like a sly dog, and Ned Judy’s chilling mix of minor key sounds and music.

What follows could be a page lifted from “Hill Street Blues.” The tough inspector here (Tony Abatemarco), shirt open at the neck, keeps hammering at the kid, rubbing his weary brow, staring off in the distance, drinking paper-cup-coffee and grabbing at answers.

One of the problems with Dubois’ script is this macho insistence on fishing for information that, to this observer, it seems he already has. Or should have.

Surely the identity of the dead man, found on the floor of his own apartment, would be simple to track; surely this young man’s identity would be too. He is, after all, standing right there. Why badger him so relentlessly to speak his name? How will that solve the murder or reveal motivations?

Those are fundamental plot weaknesses that no amount of forceful acting can resolve, and Abatemarco is nothing if not forceful. Another problem is idiom. Dubois, a Quebecois writer and poet, wrote the original in a muscular, regional patois that doesn’t reproduce in English.

Translator Linda Gaboriau acknowledges this limitation in a prefatory note that invites the actors to fill in the color by listening “for the sound of the characters’ inner and outer voices.”

At Stages, this amounts mostly to the addition of four-letter expletives that feel soft and even gratuitous. They intensify rather than minimize another problem: the unavoidable gulf between the pedestrian circumstances of this inquest and the eloquent avowal of what we discover to have been a most unusual crime of passion.

This matter of untranslatable vernacular is a thorny issue that, at the moment at least, seems unbridgeable. Director Paul Verdier does his level best to stylistically lift the piece into the realm of poetry and abstraction where it belongs, but it doesn’t quite get there until the play’s final minutes of tormented confession.

Morgan Weisser is the young man, Yves, a male prostitute impaled on the shards of his out-of-control emotions: an explosion of love so new to him and so blinding that it propels him into quasi-subconscious homicide.

It doesn’t matter that the love is homosexual love. It could as easily apply to a heterosexual relationship. It’s a matter of intensity, not gender, and the talented Weisser makes it a wrenching display of emotional disembowelment. In brief, he spills out his guts as he recounts the obsessive, mad exaltation that precipitates murder.

That part is mightily impressive, but what precedes it, in its attempt to be theatrical, is too often more postured than compelling and too frequently so soft-spoken that one has to strain in order to hear.

What Dubois has wrought is an experience not unlike the one in the Japanese film “In the Realm of the Senses” and not to be confused with the mundanely negative obsessions of another film, “Fatal Attraction.” (“Being at Home With Claude” has also been made into a film, which recently opened in Montreal to considerable acclaim.)

Ultimately, the play is a serious comment on the deadly nature of a rarefied sexual passion, poetically rendered. It’s an attempt to dissect the uncontrollable impulse to preserve divinity in the moment. But in the plainer language of English, and given the flawed nature of “Claude’s” early construct, some of these sublimations are hard to buy.

It is what it is: Another window into one of the more fascinating minds to cross our path, even when it flirts, as it seems to do most of the time, with a kind of defiant and lyrical insanity.

“Being at Home With Claude,” Stages Theatre Center, 1540 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. (No performance tonight). Ends May 2. $12-$15; (213) 466-1767. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

‘Being at Home With Claude’

Tony Abatemarco: The Inspector

Morgan Weisser: Him (Yves)

Dan Duling: Stenographer

Paul Abatemarco: Officer Latreille

A Stages Theatre Center presentation. Producers Sonia Lloveras, Kay Tornborg. Director Paul Verdier. Assistant director Karen Johnson. Playwright Rene-Daniel Dubois. Translator Linda Gaboriau. Sets Jim Sweeters. Lights Ken Booth. Costumes Ingrid Ferrin. Music and sound Ned Judy. Production stage manager Sindy Slater.