Emphasis on the Lurid in ‘Broken Hearts’

Anyone familiar with Michael Kearns’ work won’t be surprised that his staging of “Trafficking in Broken Hearts” at the McCadden Theater opens with a man waggling his bare backside at the audience. It’s a vintage Kearns moment--in-your-face and blatantly gratuitous.

Gratuitous, also, is much of Edwin Sanchez’s melodrama about a repressed homosexual lawyer, a Puerto Rican street hustler and a beautiful but deranged white runaway. The determined emphasis on the lurid is a detriment--yet there’s a stylistic starkness in the play’s execution, a gritty minimalism in direction and dialogue that balances the excess.

Other dichotomies abound. In some respects, the play is a vintage romantic potboiler--only with one gender in the mix. Certainly, the way the lawyer Brian (Seth E. Cutler) anxiously protects his virginity brings to mind Doris Day at her most reticent. And Bobby (Hunter Lee Hughes), the gorgeous blond youth who arrives in New York with few possessions except some silk thong panties and a carving knife, projects the gasping mock sexuality of Marilyn Monroe.

The center from whom all romantic entanglements radiate is Papo (Fernando Gasca), a male prostitute for whom Brian represents a “gateway to the white world,” that halcyon other-reality where people eat regularly without peddling themselves for the privilege. Although a bit one-note, Gasca’s Papo is defiantly scrappy and unapologetic, a survivor who respects himself when no one else bothers.

Deni Ponty’s set, Jerry Browning’s lighting and Darien Martus’ sound re-create the flickering, cacophonous squalor of Times Square. Although the play is set in the present, this is a down-and-dirty Times Square, pre-Disneyfication, an almost allegorically scummy lower depths where these characters struggle for elemental human contact and drown for love.

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* “Trafficking in Broken Hearts,” McCadden Theater, 1157 N. McCadden Place, Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends March 25. $20. (323) 969-2481. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.