‘Wilderness’ Loses the Frontier Trail

In “Haunted Wilderness” at the Victory, playwright Willard Simms is trying very hard to say something about the myth of the American frontier and the hubris of those who pit themselves against the cycles of nature. However, despite the most frenzied efforts of director Jules Aaron and his cast, one is hard-pressed, at play’s end, to extrapolate a point from Simms’ mind-bendingly muddled saga.

Set in the Rocky Mountains in both the mid-19th century and the present, Simms’ drama mingles melodrama, racial stereotypes and New Age sentimentality into one dizzyingly pointless jumble. In the first act, we meet Jimmy Derbrucke (Tom Ormeny), a drunken mountain man who runs an isolated saloon in the Rockies with his Chinese lover (Julie Ow) and his loyal but mute Native American compadre (Carlo Allen). Haunted by the Spirit (Briant Wells) of his own wild and woolly myth, Jimmy allows himself to be exploited by a cunning developer, Wally Wallington (Gary Carter), whose flouting of the natural order precipitates a tragedy.

Act 1 contains chatter so fantastically anachronistic that we sense Simms might have intended his piece as a darkly comic parody. However, Act 2, which is set in a present-day strip club populated by the latter-day counterparts of the characters introduced in Act 1, misplaces any hint of irony in its struggle to be mystically profound--a losing battle valiantly fought by a game cast.

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* “Haunted Wilderness,” Victory Theatre, 3326 W. Victory Blvd., Burbank. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Indefinite. $18-$20. (818) 841-5421. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.