‘Gorilla’ Can’t Ape Hollywood

Charles Higham tells us in his new play, “Fighting the Gorilla” at Two Roads Theatre, that Hollywood is a mean and rotten place full of nothing but mean and rotten people. As truly awful as the play--which Higham seems to intend to be a comedy--is, its lowest quality is Higham’s sense that his insight into Tinseltown’s meanness and rottenness is something fresh.

Not only is this “Gorilla” tired (the title is a cleaned-up version of an endlessly repeated phrase in the play, which means getting one over on the moviegoing audience and having a hit), but this ground has been worked and reworked by a long list of authors, from Nathaniel West and George Kaufman to Howard Korder and David Mamet. Indeed, black comedies about the movie business were such a trend in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that they long ago exhausted themselves.

“Gorilla” is so unfunny yet so wrapped up in itself that one wonders if Higham, for many years a prolific and best-selling celebrity and show business biographer, was aware of the long-gone trend. Even from the standpoint that this look at the rise-and-fall-and-rise of a young coke-snorting Hollywood Turk is a gloss on the career of the late producer Don Simpson, nothing here will offer the Two Roads audience--typically a well plugged-in crowd--any news.

And although Hollywood loves to laugh at itself, the laughs here are few and far between. Hank (Matt Southwell) comes on to us in direct address like a sleazeball at a bar, and we quickly want nothing to do with him. He’s house-sitting for action flick producer Sam Fowler (Bob Sherer) and catches Garth (Eric Benz) breaking in to leave his spec script on Sam’s desk.

They’re both bisexual (Higham strangely implies throughout that almost everyone in Hollywood is), and when Sam returns early from Cannes, things turn into a dysfunctional, three-way, slightly homoerotic pitch session.

Higham also aims for farce, especially when Sam’s Disney-based wife, Dawn (Deen Richards), shows up and Sam wants to conceal that Hank is in the house. Dawn turns out to like Hank’s script ideas and proves to be his means to the top.

By Act II, Hank has turned into a pint-sized version of Simpson without his Jerry Bruckheimer, though Dawn and Garth have become partners in some unexplained business relationship.

Such a lack of specifics, which could make for some great comedy, dulls the feeling that we’re inside Hollywood’s inner sanctum. This is combined with a depressingly crude handling of the material’s farcical and ironic elements (typical is Sherer unamusingly playing Sam’s identical twin brother Harvey in Act II), and a misplaced glee with scattering expletives, which only proves that there’s a real art to writing dirty.

Director Joen Nielsen Lewis’ awkward hand with his actors suggests an uneasiness with material that isn’t ready for prime time.

Double that for the cast, led by the nonengaging Southwell, who disinterestedly plays his antihero, and Sherer, who should be several times funnier than he is. Not for a second does Donald Wayne Jarman’s set look like a power producer’s den; but then, not for a second does this play feel as if it has Hollywood’s pulse.

“Fighting the Gorilla,” Two Roads Theatre, 4348 Tujunga Ave., Studio City. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 29. $15. (818) 761-0704. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.