Strong Cast Shores Up Uneven ‘Cuba’

Even after Reinaldo Povod’s “Cuba and His Teddy Bear” has run out of gas as a drama, director Arthur Hartunian’s cast keeps pushing it uphill at the Whitefire Theatre, emboldened with old-fashioned determination that the show must go on.

There’s something both dated and elemental about Povod’s 15-year-old play about a Lower East Side drug dealer named Cuba (Robert Gallo) trying to protect his meek teenage son Teddy (Erik Alexander Gavica) from the cruel streets. Dated, because depictions of a cocaine-addicted Gotham are now a vintage part of the Reagan era; elemental, because the father-son conflict here is as durable as Greek drama, and no less tragic.

Cuba’s home life is what takes up Act I, and it’s enough to sustain remarkable interest--and enough to give Hartunian’s committed actors a strong foundation. The spectacle of the everyday interaction between Cuba, Teddy and Cuba’s dealer partner Jackie (Ralph Martin) is a strange, rich landscape for actors to explore; and Gallo, Gavica and Martin have clearly studied the map in detail.

Here is Cuba, preparing for his next deal as if he’s going to the office (as Teddy, more like a wife than a son, irons his dad’s shirt and picks out his underwear). Here is Jackie, openly snorting coke in front of the boy, yet treating him like the godfather he is. Here is Teddy, compelled to obediently follow Cuba’s instructions, aware that while his father wants him to lead a good life, he is also dealing death outside their front door.

The contradiction is the play’s juice, squeezed from the poisonous fruit of a family tree gone rotten. It’s ideal playwriting material, but more than one plot device becomes a major distraction in the second act to everything that was developed in the first. The tension that has been built up slackens the further we get from the central family, as peripheral druggies invade Cuba’s living room, until the play seems to become an experiment in depicting entropy on stage.

Even these good actors can’t pull off that trick. And though Gavica is miscast as Teddy (a character teased about being too “white,” yet played by an olive-skinned actor), he understands every bit of the teen’s gnawing frustrations with the horrifically complex life he finds himself locked in, sometimes roaming the stage like an innocent, penned-in creature.

Gallo, by contrast, is all solidity, until Cuba’s world comes crashing down so fast that his only emotional option is to put a gun to his head. It’s an operatic role that Gallo underlines with a sense of a father’s best intentions. The supporting cast struts around playing their cliched street types, but Martin brings a strangely cheery flavor to Jackie--gruffly likable one moment, menacingly all-business the next.

*

“Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends Dec. 17. $12. (818) 625-6968. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.