‘Razor’s Style and Focus Not Sharp

“Family Razor”--terrific title, less than terrific play.

Playwright-director Dana Vitatoe is exploring perhaps the most traditionally cherished territory of American drama: the family kitchen and living room and the screwed-up inhabitants who stomp around from room to room.

Written 10 years ago, the play was even at that point going against the trend in U.S. family playwriting, which was to go as black and absurdist as possible. Vitatoe tries to present the Balentine clan in Cleveland’s working class southeast area, circa 1980, without comment, and observe their tragedy unfolding.

Without comment is one thing; without focus or style are other matters altogether. The characters remain stubbornly flat, so that once they’re presented, they tend to change very little during the story’s course. This is nothing, though, compared to the play’s severe dialogue problem. To say that it requires a major rewrite is itself a major understatement.

Jean, the mother (Kathy Miller), is trying to hold down her unruly fort, but three of her four kids seem to have been born with some extra teenage delinquent genes. Marsha has run away so far that her only appearance here is an unheard voice on the other end of the phone.

Mary Ann (LT Fusaro) is 18 and pregnant and has escaped her detention school. Billy (Rod Sweitzer)is an even looser cannon, a high school dropout who fools around with guns, drugs and fast cars. Only clean-cut Bo (JR Esposito) is a good kid, and he takes it to the other extreme--a winner both in the classroom and on the football field.

The writing here is crude enough that it’s awfully easy to see what’s coming. When Billy and Bo, for example, talk about guns and hunting, it’s served up with all the subtlety of flashing red lights at a railroad crossing.

More problematic, though, is dialogue so wooden as not to be believed, as when nosy Aunt Sylvia (Erika Stoner) insists that she’ll go to court to forcibly adopt Mary Ann’s baby. Like several other moments in the play, what should be an emotionally devastating conflict is made almost laughably implausible.

This may also be a case of the playwright’s taking on one job too many. As director, Vitatoe tends to allow scenes to play out much too long, and his cast has major believability problems, starting with Sweitzer, Esposito and Fusaro, who are visibly much older than their characters, with Esposito not looking for a moment like a high school football player.

Miller’s performance is lethargic to a puzzling degree because it dampens sympathy for a woman who clearly needs one good break in her life. There’s sharp casting, by contrast, with J. Anthony McCarthy as Jean’s big, beefy and caring boyfriend, Leo. But during such crucial scenes as Billy’s overdose and the tragic conclusion, any semblance of credible staging goes out the window.

The company behind this, Zeitgeist Theatre Company, is surely among the Valley’s most prolific and energetic, but this is not the kind of material that plays to the group’s strengths. Its previous show, “The Water Closet,” is just the sort of funny, raucous theater that’s up the company’s alley. Dramas tending toward bathos like “Family Razor” are a dull shave, indeed, at least in this company’s hands.

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BE THERE

“Family Razor,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Thursdays-Fridays, 8 p.m. Ends April 14. $12-$14. (818) 506-8518.