‘Battery’ Packs a Punch but Needs More Energy

Underneath the rough, intimidating surface of Daniel Therriault’s play “Battery” lies the heart of a pussycat. In his own strained but provocative way, Therriault seeks to find a metaphor for the ways we fight off the mechanistic grind of The System and find a meaningful, organic life. If the Unabomber had channeled his rage away from mail bombs and toward plays, he might have come up with something akin to “Battery.”

At the very least, the play’s fanciful language--even when it turns arch and silly--has it all over the Unabomber’s deadeningly heavy prose style for delivering the message that the Machine Age is a very bad thing. Yet “Battery,” under Jack Gogreve’s direction at the Black Whole Theatre, never comes off as a jeremiad, but as a drama of shifting alliances and power--power measured by verbal dominance.

Rip (Patrick W. Day) is definitely in control at the start, running his own electrical repair shop and playing boss to his one employee, Stan (Chad Gabriel). Stan is, well, slow, always a mental beat behind everyone around him. Rip’s dominated girlfriend, Brandy (Kathryne Dora Brown), believes Stan to be mad. He isn’t, even though he slugs her when he’s left alone with her in the shop.

Everything Rip says is infused with machines: His description of sex is like Al Unser Jr. recalling a run at Indy. Stan stumbles over his words, and Brandy seems hopelessly in Rip’s verbal shadow. This guy rocks his own world, and no one can stop him.

Therriault’s most audacious device is also Rip’s: something called “The Treat Machine” (actually a jerry-built shock wave device), which Rip made with Stan in mind. The aim is to set Stan’s brain right, with Rip assuming he’ll have a clearheaded, loyal employee at therapy’s end.

Instead, the zapping Stan receives at the end of Act I results in something very different for Act II. Rip’s ultimate power tool really does clear out Stan’s cobwebs, and like the son growing up, Stan gets set to make it on his own. Even worse for Rip, so does Brandy.

This is the diagram of Therriault’s story, but it doesn’t convey the play’s time-warping, rhythmic pulse, which reportedly could be seen and felt at an earlier production by the Actors’ Gang. The thrust is lacking in the present production. If Gogreve urged his actors to increase their own verbal punch, this version might realize the kind of rock ‘n’ roll energy the play demands.

In the effectively suffocating confines of the Black Whole’s boxy, narrow stage (given depth by set designers Chad Bell and Todd “Onyx” Seller and Tiffany J. Shuttleworth’s fluorescent-heavy lights), there’s palpably rising tension between Day’s rapping, funny Rip and Gabriel’s rattling, nervous Stan. Early on, each actor in the triangle often lapses into mannerisms in lieu of digging deeper. In later scenes all of them find emotional riches, and we finally get a sense of what kind of charge “Battery” can deliver.

DETAILS

* WHAT: “Battery.”

* WHERE: The Black Whole Theatre, 5920 Van Nuys Blvd., Van Nuys.

* WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Ends May 4.

* HOW MUCH: $8.

* CALL: (818) 559-1263.