Theater Review : Drowning in Shallow ‘Sea’ of ‘70s Excess : Director Roosevelt Blankenship Jr. stages an energetic and symmetrical production, but the cast overacts without adding any depth.

The imagery in the title of Peter Dee’s “A Sea of White Horses”--the whitecaps on ocean waves--is pure early ‘70s, when the sea as element was crucial to pop philosophy, just as it had been half a century before to Eugene O’Neill.

Dee’s drama seems just as period specific and cliched. Director Roosevelt Blankenship Jr.’s staging for Eastern Boys Productions, as energetic and symmetrical as he has made it, plays into its period, and, without the actors to bring it any sort of depth, it seems a little excessive and shallow.

Ed Shaw (Michael Aquila) is a wanderer, a nomad who just misses being a hippie because of his lack of concern for anything outside of his own skin. He had a wife and two children, whom he deserted after her death, to live in a forsaken shack on a Florida beach. Before that he had a girlfriend he’d also skipped out on, leaving her with their daughter.

Why any of Shaws’ three children want to find him is a dramaturgical question the playwright doesn’t answer, except for hints at that fuzzy instinctual need to complete the human puzzle. He also doesn’t explain how they all happen to converge on Ed’s cherished privacy during one summer.

But Stephen (Steven Scholl) and Janice (Linda Rose Mongell) arrive, and Janice immediately takes poison, presumably to cure her father-deprivation Angst. They find Connie (Wichasta V. Reese), a half-sister they didn’t know existed.

Nor did they know that Connie and her mother were black. Neither is at all surprised at either revelation. “Oh,” says Stephen, “you’re my sister.” The sibling question and the racial issues might have been explored to the play’s dramatic benefit, but Dee is concerned only with the shallowly probed and silly anger of the children. At last they have found Daddy, and they proceed to scream hysterically at him and at each other. Then they leave.

Even as a period piece, the play lacks shape and focus, and the actors compound its problems by overacting in their simplistic performances, waving arms like windmills and shrieking and rolling on the floor.

Blankenship may have tried to temper this excess during rehearsal, but there’s no way to control actors in performance.

* “A Sea of White Horses,” Ensemble Theatre, 844 E. Lincoln Ave., Suite E, Orange. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m. Ends May 7. $10-$15. (714) 998-2199. Running time: 2 hours, 5 minutes. Michael Aquila: Ed Shaw

Steven Scholl: Stephen

Wichasta V. Reese: Connie

Linda Rose Mongell: Janice

An Eastern Boys production of Peter Dee’s drama. Directed and scenic design by Roosevelt Blankenship Jr. Stage manager: Jim Mongell.