THEATER REVIEW : A Florid Yoakam Can’t Lift ‘Rapture’

Joseph G. Tidwell III’s faintly Oedipal drama, “Southern Rapture,” is more of a Southern capture. Country singer Dwight Yoakam, who owned the rights to the play, captured Peter Fonda to direct it. Fonda captured Sally Kirkland to perform in a featured role, and now that “Rapture” has opened at the MET Theatre in Hollywood comes the biggest capture of all: the audience.

To clarify: Sally Kirkland is not in the play just yet, due to filming commitments that have run beyond schedule. She’s expected to join the production in mid-April.

Yoakam, meanwhile, who plays the central role of Tommy Jo, a young man crushed by the knowledge that he slept with his mother and killed his father, is expected to leave the production shortly thereafter. Fonda has directed two separate casts for the production, presumably to accommodate some of these comings and goings, and anyone who hopes to catch Kirkland and Yoakam in the show on the same night had better check with the box office first.

But the presence of Yoakam, who chews scenery as well as the next guy, and (one predicts) Kirkland, who also knows how to emote with abandon, cannot redeem the tortured, unstructured, self-important drivel by Tidwell that passes for a play. “Southern Rapture” begins each of its two acts with Tommy Jo, pants down, sitting on the toilet, and rarely rises much above that nitty gritty.

It’s not clear where he is. The program says Theroux Sanitarium in Mercy Springs, Miss., but there’s talk about this being Tommy Jo’s father’s plantation. The cell he’s in looks like a cell, but Tommy Jo never leaves it, although the door is not locked. It is--get it?--the cell of his troubled mind.

This setting comes equipped with standard devices (a raging electrical storm in Act II) and its very own collection of stereotypes: a sinister, crop-wielding jail-keeper/overseer, Miss Rogers (the Kirkland role, ludicrously played as a snarling grotesque by Irene Roseen); a faithful retainer, Malachi (the dignified Badja Djola, in an all but shuffling role); a prurient, Bible-thumping Reverend (the cartoonish Joe Unger); and Child Sarah (Vanessa Marcil), a Southern waif from nowhere whose heart, for no stated reason, is set on Tommy Jo.

The stiffened corpse of a long-dead cat is supposed to provide mild comic relief. Smell-o-rama intrudes as Tommy Jo and we catch the same whiff of his dead Mama’s perfume. Lights by Chris Collins intensify or diminish without logic. And Louis Mawcinitt’s scenic design, for no compelling reason, changes from indoors to outdoors with such rumbling complexity that, on opening night, a recalcitrant panel that refused to budge nearly stole the show.

Quite beyond such practical contrariness, the script itself is moribund and offensive. There is little motivation for scene beginnings and endings, none for entrances and exits, and not much point in describing more of the Guignolesque plot. It is trumped-up melodrama, garishly abetted and indulged by all parties--chiefly director Fonda, who appears to have encouraged the foolishness.

Yoakam proves he can shed his hat and image to deliver a real if florid performance as a balding, disheveled young man decaying on the Southern vine. But only hardened fans will want to see him in this, because the play is rampant nonsense--and rampant nonsense that takes itself seriously becomes excruciating, embarrassing, unintentional self-parody.

* “Southern Rapture,” MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford St., Hollywood. Thursdays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends May 30. $15; (213) 660-8587, (213) 957-1831. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.