THEATER REVIEW : Currents of Despair Flow Within ‘River’

“Those the River Keeps.” No, the phrase is not an advertising slogan for the fly-fishing industry. Not even the sequel to a Robert Redford film. It’s the name of a David Rabe play, now in its West Coast premiere at the Ports O’Call Playhouse.

So get notions of houseboats and water sports and vacation paradises out of your head. You’re in Rabe country now, where rivers choked with industrial scum flow turgidly through a nightmare landscape. Life is bitter, murder commonplace, a river just a convenient repository to dump the bodies. If you forget the fact that you are doomed, you are doomed.

Consider Phil (Jerry Prager), a former East Coast wise guy who left the mob behind to pursue an acting career in California. Phil is married to Susie (Kathlene McGovern), a bright but childlike yearner who, frantic to have a child, soothes her inner emptiness by diapering her teddy bear. Phil realizes it would be folly to bring a child into such a world, but he is in danger of being infected by Susie’s maternal hopefulness.

But hope is a sickness requiring a drastic cure. Out of the past comes Sal (Jack Thomas), a mob killer determined to lure his old criminal cohort back into “the life.” Sal is the embodiment of all things rotten, a stench from Phil’s fetid past--or from hell itself.

Those familiar with “Hurlyburly” will recognize Phil, one of the main characters in Rabe’s critically acclaimed drama about drugs and desolation on the margins of Hollywood. In “Hurlyburly,” Phil is a human time bomb, ticking in the final countdown of his marriage to Susie (who never appears in the play, but is the subject of frequent reference).

“River” depicts Phil and Susie at a slightly earlier phase in their relationship, when Phil is still trying to tap into his undercurrent of humanity. In “Hurlyburly,” the closest that Phil comes to a humanitarian gesture is committing suicide before he kills someone else.

The appealing but occasionally mannered McGovern portrays Susie as a victim whose smattering of smarts will probably be her undoing. Lisa Cassandra is effectively unlikable as Susie’s domineering friend Janice.

Director Nancy Campbell keeps the action of this “River” flowing but opts for a kinder, gentler production, one that stresses Phil’s humanity over his sociopathy, not necessarily the strongest choice. Prager doesn’t help matters by playing Phil at essentially the same pitch of anguish and confusion with only minor variances in decibel level. Seldom do we sense the reptilian menace that makes Phil the object of our fear as well as our pity.

Thomas, on the other hand, plays Sal straight from the limbic system. Hood-eyed, only vestigially human, Sal is a snake who thinks--and talks--and talks.

The nonstop, propulsive dialogue is sometimes brilliant, sometimes so desultory as to be genuinely pointless. But that’s the challenge--and frustration--of Rabe, whose words, like his characters, drift along in a swift stream of meaningful meaninglessness.

* “Those the River Keeps,” Ports O’Call Playhouse, Ports O’Call Village, Berth 75, San Pedro. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Indefinitely. $18. (310) 548-5798. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.