Personal Dramas Perfected

James McLure’s “The Day They Shot John Lennon” is a title as loaded with meanings as director Emilio Borelli’s revival at the Gene Bua Acting for Life Theatre is loaded with fine actors.

Amid the vigil forming across the street from the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West where Lennon was killed, various mourners engage in their own little dramas.

The title sounds misleadingly like the title of a play Sean Lennon might write. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 24-year-old songwriting son suggested last year to the New Yorker that his legendary father was killed by the U.S. government, not by lonely, deranged Mark David Chapman, who confessed to the murder.

The title also suggests that the play is about Lennon’s shooting on the night of Dec. 8, 1980, but McLure’s play is set on Dec. 9. And it isn’t about the murder but concerns the people mourning Lennon’s death.

Legal secretary Fran (Lea Anne Wolfe) mulls things over on a bench as hot-shot ad man Brian (Jerry Lambert), who’s amazed they were both at Woodstock, hits on her.

Teens Sally (Rachel Kempel), Kevin (Jason Marsden) and Mike (Alexander Polinsky) are in the kind of empty yet emotionally charged dispute that only teens can have.

Elderly retiree Morris (Patrick Desmond) doesn’t know John Lennon from Jack Lemmon, a fact that aspiring stand-up performer Larry (Antonio David Lyons) finds so absurd that he can’t help talking to the old guy.

Vietnam-vets-turned-petty-thieves Silvio (Vasili Bogazianos) and Gately (Steve Gundler) hover in the background, waiting for a sucker to rob.

Perhaps that’s what McLure means by his title--Lennon’s vision of peace, love and understanding is shot down by his supposed fans, and the corpse is still warm. A more interesting take, and the one that Borelli (a San Francisco theater veteran who goes back to the earliest days of the Eureka Theatre) and his actors embrace, is that despite the legend of Lennon that brings people to this spot, they are the central characters of their own personal dramas.

The cast is so captivating, we soon forget about Lennon and worry about the living. Each actor does what any good actor must: immediately stakes his or her character’s claim to an identity and explores his or her inner life with passionate directness.

McLure’s sense of character types and his keen skill at writing dialogue are the starting points for an ensemble in which there is not one weak link, a rarity in Los Angeles.

It’s really an ensemble (except for the play’s one misjudged though climactic scene) of four strong groups, each with its own voice. Wolfe and Lambert play out a smart, ironic game of get-to-know-you, while Bogazianos gives weight to the ultra-alienated vet and Gundler’s hollow man tries to work up some courage.

Desmond’s hilarious nose for timing works beautifully off Lyons’ rough urgency. Kempel, Marsden and Polinsky play a roundelay of teen angst that perfectly conveys youth’s painful self-involvement. And not one of them, bless them, has a conspiracy theory.

BE THERE

“The Day They Shot John Lennon,” Gene Bua Acting for Life Theatre, 3435-20 W. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Fridays-Saturdays 8 p.m.; Sundays 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 22. $11-$13. (818) 754-4453. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.