Worthwhile Trip to ‘Lower Depths’

When you walk into the Empire Theater in Santa Ana and gaze at the mess on stage, you might gasp: “They’re doing some old Sam Shepard one-acts!” But you’d be wrong. The play is a century old, and was as unusual in its day as early Shepard.

Maxim Gorky’s play, “The Lower Depths,” is a work more like a piece of music than a drama, with the hard edge of socialist philosophy clawing at its core. A large group of society’s outcasts lives in a dingy basement, and plays out its dreams, failures, fantasies and dilemmas in the true vehemence of sociopolitical dramatic experimentation. The form was expanded later by the Group Theatre and others as the century rolled on.

Rude Guerrilla’s production is an update by artistic director Dave Barton, based on suggestions made to Gorky by Anton Chekhov. Gorky wrongly refused his ideas. Chekhov was the better craftsman, and “Depths” is a better piece of theater for the alterations.

What doesn’t always work is the updating. In this version, penniless nobility shares a dark basement with the common people, each paying $40 a week to the building’s owner--almost $2,000 a month. Maybe they could have rented a nice house in the Valley. The Landlord and his wife, Beverly Hills-types whose only concern seems to be the harassment of their basement tenants, also seem out of place. If Barton deleted the two characters and set the play in an abandoned house, it would work better.

Fortunately, Barton’s direction of the work is solid. The sense of pending doom follows the action, and the vignettes, which allow each actor in the large company five minutes of prominence, are tightly woven into the fabric of the whole.

If a few of the actors aren’t able to muster the darkness and depth of detail necessary, enough do to make it a worthwhile evening.

Of special note are Susan Shearer-Stewart as the Bag Lady, giggling in a foggy sense of happiness; David Beatty as the Trashman, giving up his claim on life long before his life gives him up; Andrew Neinaber as the Gambler, taking each moment as it arrives, on a chance; and especially Stephen Wagner as the Actor, drowning in a vortex of drugs, but finding one moment of light as he remembers his favorite poem, which he delivers beautifully to an empty room.

Also of note are young Erin Green as the Runaway, who lives a fictional life because it’s all she has, and Sally Norton as the blind Convert who is Gorky’s voice of wisdom and experience, although there are too many moments when it’s clear she really isn’t blind.

*

“The Lower Depths,” Rude Guerrilla, Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends June 9. $12. (714) 547-4688. Running time: 2 hours.