Flawed ‘Fifth Horse’ Draws Main Strength From Script

“I am a man!” cries Zoditch, the protagonist of “The Journey of the Fifth Horse” at Los Angeles Playhouse. “I am not a nobody!”

Of course, Zoditch is a nobody, a literary nobody in the Bartleby or Gregor Samsa mold. But the real irony is that playwright Ronald Ribman was able, in this period piece set in the late 19th century, to create a structurally complex, emotionally satisfying drama around this delusional cipher.

Partly based on Turgenev’s story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man,” Ribman’s 1966 play is perhaps best known for yielding an Obie Award to a then-unknown Dustin Hoffman, who created the role of Zoditch. Still, the script’s virtues are plain, even in a production plagued by weak direction and some ill-fated miscasting.

Zoditch (John Bigham) has for 12 years labored as a reader in a St. Petersburg publishing house. As the play begins, the owner has just died and Zoditch is angling for a promotion from the company heir, Miss Grubov (Laura Otis). But a superior disgraces Zoditch by ordering him to read a manuscript that had already been summarily rejected.

The manuscript turns out to be the diary of a late landowner named Chulkaturin (Matt Walsh). As the diary (and its onstage enactment) make clear, Chulkaturin’s life contrasted vividly with Zoditch’s. After a brief but intense love affair, the country squire grew ill with consumption, sadly concluding that “my life has been superfluous . . . a fifth horse attached to the coach of life.”

This tale does not move Zoditch, however, who resolutely sees Chulkaturin as a simpleton. Yet the reader’s existence is if anything more banal and hopeless than the diarist’s. Disgusted with his job, Zoditch plots to leave it all behind by marrying his zaftig, sex-starved landlady Katerina (Christine Deaver). This leads to a romantic rendezvous as comical as anything in a Feydeau farce.

Alas, director Jim Hatch’s mounting lacks the momentum and visual imagination necessary to underscore the emotional nuances of Ribman’s dialogue. Given the subject matter, the bland blocking and awkward transitions are even more noticeable than they otherwise might be. Zoditch’s daydreams require some theatrical magic to distinguish them from his otherwise drab existence.

The cast members range from adequate to worse, with Bigham churning out pure bombast as the ill-tempered Zoditch. Walsh, meanwhile, manages a few moments of dignity as the depressive Chulkaturin. The believably shabby set is by Dave Robinson.

* “The Journey of the Fifth Horse,” Los Angeles Playhouse, 1625 N. La Brea Ave., Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends June 29. $15. (213) 882-6912. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.