Sellars & Co.’s ‘Los Biombos’ Is a Play in Need of Direction

Internationally renowned theater and opera director Peter Sellars has a new show in town, but there is no evidence that he, or anyone, directed the production of “Los Biombos/The Screens” at the East L.A. Skills Center in Lincoln Heights.

This 3 1/2-hour epic gone wrong is an adaptation of Jean Genet’s “The Screens.” That sprawling, bawdy 98-character play, Genet’s last, centers on a roguish Algerian itinerant and his adoring but despised wife. The play floats freely from the earthly woes of the characters to the land of the dead, where the deceased are as hard-boiled as the living. Here adapted by Gloria Alvarez, with Peter Galindo, Lynn Jeffries and Sellars, “Los Biombos/The Screens” is now set in an apocalyptic Los Angeles in the midst of a race war. The Algerian Said becomes the Mexican Saul, and the French-Algerian war a street fight between racist national guardsmen and a guerrilla Chicano-Mexican army.

The cast is populated mostly by first-time or inexperienced actors. The dialogue, heavy-handed and lacking in Genet’s soulful nihilism, is delivered with the “my line, your line” rhythms unique to amateur theatrics. After half an hour of this, anyone without friends and relatives in the large cast will be champing at the bit. Three hours later, the will to live is a gift no longer taken for granted.

To make matters worse, the characters often appear with doubles, so that two actors alternate the same line or speak it simultaneously. Through this technique, Sellars probably means to show the universality of the characters. In fact, he only demonstrates the universality of bad acting.

Staged “environmentally”--which in this case means “with all the awkwardness found in nature”--the play takes place in a cavernous room on the second floor of the East L.A. Skills Center. The exposed beams and pipes are encrusted in a ghostly white substance that gives the place the look of an industrial petrified forest. Audience members are shuttled around the space by usher-guides as they travel from one scene to another. Anyone lucky enough to snare a folding chair packs it up and carries it along.

The artist known as Gronk designed the screens that Genet called for, in this case large paintings endowed with a raw energy that serve as backdrops and are manually hauled around the room throughout the evening. Sellars uses them at times in attempts at either poetry or humor. Should someone mention a video camera, a painting of an eye is carried past. Occasionally the glimpse of a better show can be briefly seen. When Shishir Kurup, as a racist lieutenant, delivers a pep talk to his soldiers, he employs energy, irony and pacing. Our ears perk up, unaccustomed as they are to these things.

Kurup is a member of the Cornerstone Theater--which along with a theater collective called los undocumented and the East L.A. Skills Center--produced the evening. Other Cornerstone regulars show up as well, but their professionalism barely registers in the sprawl. Much too infrequently, an amateur actor, such as Eric Moseley, cuts through the haze with a natural flair for the spotlight.

Sellars achieves moments of striking visual imagery in the unusual warehouse-like setting. One scene, in which a conversation is echoed down a long passageway by a series of actors, hints at an original theatrical mind at work. But another, in which a group of the dead recite their crimes while a loud funk band called the Blues Experiment wails and a woman writhes, is simply excruciating. Pete Galindo and Bill Rauch, artistic directors of los undocumented and Cornerstone, respectively, are credited with co-direction.

Beyond the overwhelming problem of using nonactors to field material of this scope and length, the play lacks nuance in all but a few places. Genet’s military men were wild burlesques; Alvarez’s are bigoted in a tedious, B-movie way.

One rare, arresting scene shows Saul in court, where a series of unfortunates are dragged up in front of a philosophical but stony judge (Ibrahim Saba), who announces to the petty criminals, “I’m simply a mechanism that buries you where you want to be buried.” But this scene too is marred by a tin dramatic ear. When a prosecutor equates Saul’s theft of clothes with planting a bomb in a federal building, one senses Alvarez and her collaborators invoking contemporary references while failing to coax any meaning from their invocation.

* “Los Biombos/The Screens,” East L.A. Skills Center, 3921 Selig Place, Lincoln Heights. Thursday to Saturday, 7 p.m.; Sunday, 3 p.m. Ends Feb. 1. Pay what you can. Running time: 3 hours, 30 minutes. (310) 449-1700.