A Patchwork Effort Unravels in ‘Coke Stories’

Playwriting by committee is more dangerous than screenwriting by committee, because a play can’t be fixed in the final cut.

That’s the problem with “Coke Stories: An ‘80s Flashback,” at Hunger Artists Theatre in Santa Ana. It is credited to four authors: Kelly Flynn, Jami McCoy, David Scaglione and the obvious nom de plume E. Jacque Mugwump.

The result is like a patchwork quilt made by group effort. Some of the patches are ornate, embroidered with detail; others are scraps sewn in to fill out the empty spaces.

There is no plot other than: This is what the characters were like when they were young, wild kids, and here’s what they’re like years later, in a support group for young adult drug abusers.

In Act 1 we see them in a basement rec room playing a popular game of the time--passing a bong and getting stoned, while one of their mothers is making lunch for them upstairs. They move on to a club, where even less happens.

Act 2 is the group encounter session, and we see what has become of them, which generally isn’t much.

Interspersed are monologues, popular with writers who haven’t learned to write dialogue, and which show us only how their stoned states are affecting them. Most of these monologues are colorless, and under Melissa Petro’s careless direction, they’re also overacted and static.

There are three exceptions, but since it’s impossible to know who wrote what, credit can’t be given for the effort.

Tamara Hoffman, as freaked-out Sal Gilpin, delivers a machine-gun riff listing all the drugs she takes, and how it’s the living end. She, and the writing, are funny and desperately indicative that you shouldn’t mix drugs and naivete. Later she’s the leader of the group, as addicted to self-help meetings as she was to drugs.

As a numskull pseudo-macho nut named Ray, Mark Coyan reels off a surrealistic nightmare about his career as kids’ party clown Fisto, who gets invited to the wrong party because of his name and winds up with a lifelong sexual hang-up. It’s tense and terrifying but relieved by his admission in group that a Barbie doll in his pocket is getting him back on the almost-straight-and-narrow.

Although Jason McBeath’s monologue in Act 1 doesn’t do much to build his character (Donny) or his story, his Act 2 group-session monologue--now that Donny has given up drugs and become a cop so he can keep his neighborhood safe from the Mexicans and boat people he thinks are ruining it--is a taut and lucid condemnation from a bitter young man who vehemently tries to do the right things but for all the wrong reasons. McBeath’s reading is powerful and haunting.

*

The best moment in the evening is not a monologue. How a meaty chunk of dialogue got in here boggles the imagination, but at the end of the second act, bride Angel, after snorting a few lines of cocaine, rises in her sparkling white gown for a conversation with one of her bridesmaids, Candice.

Candice is accustomed to Angel’s carrying-on, for this is the fourth wedding for Angel. This time, Angel’s last-minute doubts result in a declaration of love for Candice, which Candice neatly sidesteps, but not before Lorena Ramirez as Angel, and Kimberly M. Fisher as Candice--and the writer--have provided some solid reasons for expanding it into a longer play about the frantic 90 minutes these two share before the walk down the aisle.

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* “Coke Stories: An ‘80s Flashback,” Hunger Artists Theatre, 204 E. 4th St., Santa Ana. 8:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Sunday. $10-$12. Ends Aug. 8. (714) 547-9100. Running time: 2 hours.

Mark Coyan: Ray

Kimberly M. Fisher: Candice Young

Tamara Hoffman: Sal Gilpin

Jason McBeath: Donny

Lorena Ramirez: Angel

A Hunger Artists world premiere presentation of a play by Kelly Flynn, Jami McCoy, E. Jacque Mugwump and David Scaglione. Director/scenic design: Melissa Petro. Lighting design: Bryan Schulte. Sound design: Martin Carrillo. Choreography: Susy Davis. Stage manager: Jill Johnson.