‘Secrets’ Explores Youth’s Vulnerability

The journey from innocence to experience is a grueling progression.

For a young person of ambivalent sexuality, the trip can be particularly perilous.

Set in 1962, Larry Maraviglia’s “Little Secrets” at the Space Theatre explores the vulnerability and potential cruelty of adolescents and young adults.

Don (Will Heermance) is a sheltered scholarship student just arriving at Northern Florida University in Orlando for his freshman term. As ill luck would have it, Don’s new roommate is Jarrett Sinclair (Al Sol), a manic, mannered upperclassman with a host of affectations and a sadistic streak.

The intellectually supercilious Jarrett presents himself as a wealthy and dissolute young man about town. The truth is far more sad and prosaic, but when Jarrett bullies Don into admitting an early homosexual affair, Jarrett uses Don’s fear of exposure to make Don his unwilling slave.

If that sounds kinky, it is. It’s no coincidence that film buff Jarrett adores “Strangers on a Train.” The plot of Maraviglia’s taut psychological drama echoes that of the film. Jarrett, the malevolent stranger, himself of dubious sexuality, blackmails Don and seizes control of his life.

But Maraviglia is playing for larger stakes than mere suspense.

There’s a deeper, malevolent layer to Jarrett’s sick game, the sense that, particularly for young men of Jarrett and Don’s pre-Stonewall generation, homosexuality carried with it heavy freight: suicide, scandal, shame and madness.

The performers, including Mike Winiarski as Don’s jock pal Tim, are engaging, if a bit overblown.

The less than stellar staging, by Sol and Lance W. Lane, tends toward the obvious.

A little underplaying would do wonders here, not to mention trimming a few blatant anachronisms.

References to mushroom burgers, cappuccino and panic attacks seem out of place in this otherwise deft period piece.

“Little Secrets,” Space Theatre, 665 N. Heliotrope, Hollywood. Fridays-Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends April 7. $12. (323) 414-5440. Running time: 2 hours.