A Usually Reliable Company Disappoints Its ‘Neighbors’

When it incorporates amateur actors into its productions, as it sometimes does, Cornerstone Theater often transforms inexperience into gold. This unusual company knows how to focus nervous nonprofessional energy by placing it securely into a finished, anchored context.

Unfortunately, this alchemy never occurs in “Los Vecinos: A Play for Neighbors,” playing in a large, chilly room at the Community Service Organization of Boyle Heights.

Things at first look promising, during an informal meet-and-greet that occurs before the play begins, with the audience waiting in the downstairs lobby. A dozen articulate and charming neighborhood children, divided into angels and devils, come down to mingle and initiate discussions about good and evil--the angels wearing white feathers and sparkly paint, the devils in business suits.

But the play loses focus almost as soon as the drama begins, and not only because of haphazard lighting. “Los Vecinos” has a messy, thrown-together quality in its writing and direction that proves disastrous for a production with as many adult nonprofessionals on hand as experienced actors.

Adapted by Luis Alfaro (a recent MacArthur fellow) and Diane Rodriguez (who also directs), “Los Vecinos” is a loose takeoff on a traditional Mexican play in which shepherds wander in search of the newborn Christ child. In this version, the “shepherds” are a group of Angelenos made homeless by an earthquake.

They band together to go in search of a mysterious light. As they traverse the spacious wooden floor on the second level of the community center, they adopt a wise homeless man named Desplazado (a masked Christopher Liam Moore), whose function in their community is, typically, never explicated in any kind of satisfying dramatic way. Further, they are buffeted by an ongoing fight between Sen~ora Angel (Maricela Ochoa) and a business-suited devil, Luzbel (Armando Duran), whose differences are shockingly uninvolving. Indeed, these two never seem to engage at all but just simply state their separate, predictable, cases.

Luzbel believes the city is not worth rebuilding--it’s a place that “was already in decay . . . without heart” and Sen~ora Angel exhorts the travelers to find the light within themselves and within their city. The jokes are too general to be very effective. The most pointed jab of the evening was, to this viewer, limp and easy--Luzbel gets Gov. Pete Wilson on the cell phone to tell him he’s doing a great job with affirmative action.

Major events of the play--a love affair between the attractive Caridad (Mayte Grajeda) and Vato (Rodrigo R. Suarez); a devil’s curse on Desplazado, which causes him to be set upon by the band--all seem to exist in space, without cause or consequence. When good and evil finally fight it out with each other, the fight resolves for no apparent or textual reason other than good always wins. No internal motor drives the story; actions have a child’s arbitrative feel--it happens that way because I say so.

Omar Gomez stood out among the nonprofessional actors; he possesses the jolting, physical confidence of a comedian and has a sweetly oblivious, everyman quality similar to what Gunnar Bjornstrand brought to Ingmar Bergman films based on similar tales of wandering. Musicians Shishir Kurup, David Markowitz and Danny Moynahan play some lovely songs, both traditional and new, those created by Kurup, Alfaro and Rodriguez.

“Los Vecinos: A Play for Neighbors” is rare for Cornerstone in that it actually looks like a community production.

* “Los Vecinos: A Play for Neighbors,” Community Service Organization, Upper Hall, 2130 1st St., Boyle Heights, Wednesday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Sunday, 3:30 p.m. Ends Sunday. Pay what you can. (310) 449-1700. Running time: 90 minutes.