Reaping Volatile Returns in ‘Yield of the Long Bond’

“Yield of the Long Bond” is a tense, gloomy philosophical treatise on love--earthly vs. spiritual, vulgar vs. polite, real vs. professed. It’s also a play that changes, as swiftly as a thunderstorm, into a whodunit, a murder mystery. In the second act, the mystery clears up almost as quickly as it blew in. In its final moments, the story morphs again, this time into a melancholy and romantic cautionary tale.

If this sounds like a play with structural problems, it is. But there is some good writing amid some ponderous writing, and fine acting throughout.

Playwright Larry Atlas works hard to keep us on our toes and to remind us that things are never what they seem. Andrew J. Robinson, the meticulous director, imposes a great deal of thought and carefully calibrated timing on a story whose yield is not as profound as it paints itself to be.

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Thanks in part to Robinson’s control of the play’s freighted atmosphere, “Yield of the Long Bond” achieves a kind of baleful grandeur, despite a first act that takes too long to set up its dilemma and a second act with credibility gaps. As always at the Matrix Theatre in West Hollywood, the production features two different casts.

Paul Rosario (Ian McShane, also Gregory Itzin) is a hotshot Manhattan investor, a man worth $400 million, or thereabouts. The arrogant, foul-mouthed Rosario is in serious danger of facing prosecution for insider trading and stock manipulation. On the advice of his lawyer-cum-lover Ellen Kastner (Anna Gunn, also Julia Campbell), he decides to make a sizable charitable contribution, hoping to build goodwill and character references as potential mitigating factors in a court of law.

Since Paul can’t stand children or hospitals, Ellen steers him to the Parish Project, run by a priest named John Shelley (Byron Jennings, also David Dukes). Shelley wants to “promote thought in a thoughtless environment” and commission a newsletter and a book about spiritual life, for which Paul, the nonbeliever, will foot the bill. Jennings does a great job with the problematic role of the priest; he shades Shelley’s humility with a nagging suggestion of panic at his own inadequacy.

As Paul and Ellen, McShane and Gunn convey the volatile connection of mismatched temperaments. He is dark and eruptible, she willowy and calm. They have the potential to anchor, or else wipe each other out.

In Gunn’s effective portrayal, Ellen has the aura of a beautiful, stricken deer. In her gray suit (with a skirt so short that no lawyer, other than Ally McBeal, could wear it), she embodies the kind of woman with whom a priest would fall instantly in love, or with whom a powerful moneyman would live to sexually degrade. She can point one knee in and change from a sleek feminine ideal to a schoolgirl, unsure of herself. But from any angle, Ellen’s life is a sad one, a woebegone one, and she remains a strangely passive creature throughout.

This is one of those plays where the characters always seem theoretical. They turn in and out of the drama, participating in it, remembering it, commenting on it. Theoretical characters often work in plays that are primarily puzzles.

But the puzzle in “Yield” is too easily solved, and the turns in reality are more the result of the playwright changing the ground rules rather than guiding us to a new way of seeing things.

* “Yield of the Long Bond,” Matrix Theatre, 7657 Melrose Ave., Hollywood, Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends July 17. $20. (213) 852-1445. Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes.