Fast and furious

As a work of drama, Tim Robbins’ “Embedded,” now playing at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood, is something of a work in progress. It’s sketchy and sometimes seems semi-focused, with too many cardboard cutouts being passed off as characters and the kind of energetically slapdash staging that your kid brother might’ve cooked up in the basement on a rainy afternoon.

But as a piece of theater, “Embedded” is as snarlingly eloquent as a garage-rock guitar solo. Despite some screeching rhetorical feedback that occasionally drowns out its message about the clear and present danger facing America’s fourth estate, it makes its case as a rowdy and engaging polemic.

Skirting the line between bracing agitprop and preachy overkill, this uncompromising show, which Robbins also directs, runs the constant risk of stalling out on its own verbal and visual hyperbole. But fueled by the author’s outraged intelligence and a boisterous cast of 13, it stays in motion for a briskly amusing, intermittently disturbing 1 1/2 hours, flattening any potential counter-arguments or troublesome nuances in its path. We’re not talking G.B. Shaw’s “Arms and the Man” here, but something closer to an extended political-satire sketch set to the Clash’s “London Calling” -- before it became a jingle to sell Jaguars. (Appropriately, the play is dedicated to the late Clash frontman Joe Strummer.)

This scorched-earth dramatic strategy has a definite upside. Robbins, in case you hadn’t heard, lately has been one angry hombre over what he regards as the Bush administration’s hurried and ill-considered attack on Iraq -- or “Gomorrah,” as it’s jocularly referred to here. The Hollywood star’s outspokenness has led the right-wing chattering classes to practically paint a bull’s-eye on his back.

But instead of skulking off to a dark corner, Robbins has snapped back at his critics with a play that’s about as fair and balanced as a three-legged hyena. The yelps you’ll be hearing for the next 4 1/2 weeks will be coming from conservatives who don’t like it when the bleating-lamb left suddenly bares its canines.

Unapologetically partisan, “Embedded” takes aim both at the Bush White House and the purportedly “liberal” U.S. media, which it depicts as falling in lock-step with pro-war propaganda as dutifully as Camp Lejeune grunts. Savagely witty and incisive at his best, as he demonstrated with his 1992 feature film “Bob Roberts,” Robbins scores several direct hits here, particularly in the play’s early rounds.

The show’s comic centerpiece, and single best idea, is a masked chorus of paunchy, cadaverous White House advisors with names like Rum-Rum, Woof, Pearly White, Gondola and Dick, as in Cheney. (The gruesome false faces are credited to Earhardt Steifel.)

Checking their datebooks to launch the march on Baghdad (“Babylon”), giggling at lefty peace slogans and reciting a litany of excuses as to why they never served in battle, this grim cabal pronounces the ground rules of patriotic conformity with chilling vehemence. Its members also take turns whipping themselves into a frenzy of carnal intensity whenever the name of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss is mentioned.

While the good ol’ boys gear up for war, burly Col. Hardchannel (V.J. Foster), a self-styled David Merrick of drill instructors, puts a platoon of “maggot journalists” through boot camp as if he were a Broadway producer whipping a bunch of chorines into shape. Later, the scribes fan out across Iraq -- flirting, boozing, trading cynical war stories and gradually discovering that the rah-rah narratives they’ve been fed by the Pentagon don’t resemble the muddled conditions on the ground.

Punctuated by Adam H. Greene’s propulsive lighting design and high-decibel blasts of Edwin Starr’s “War,” Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” and Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” these fast-cut episodes alternate with somber depictions of U.S. soldiers taking tearful leave of their loved ones, walking desert patrol, nervously riding shotgun through hostile streets and being forced to make split-second life-or-death decisions, with tragic consequences in one case.

Unfortunately, despite the cast’s earnest labors, few of these characters materialize for more than a moment as actual human beings. Most remain one-dimensional personifications of points of view, and the abrupt gear-switching from parody to pathos occasionally gives the show a herky-jerky rhythm.

A glowing exception is the fictitious character of Jen-Jen Ryan who, not unlike the real-life Pfc. Jessica Lynch, finds herself being lionized by the media for heroic deeds she didn’t actually do. Kaili Hollister’s anguished portrayal of a courageous young woman trying to resist being turned into a symbol gives the play its emotional heart and soul.

But like a crack special forces unit, “Embedded” is most effective when it’s on the attack. Though it never manages to convincingly dramatize how reporters can convert from star-struck cheerleaders to steely-eyed fact-finders, it cannily blends in actual reportage by the likes of BBC reporter John Simpson and Alan Feuer of the New York Times to convey the agonized business of trying to ascertain truth in the most trying circumstances.

War is hell, we tell ourselves, yet time and again humanity finds new ways to strut down that fiery path. With “Embedded,” Robbins gives practically everyone hell for joining in the parade.

*

‘Embedded’

Where: The Actors’ Gang, 6209 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood

When: Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m.

Ends: Dec. 21

Price: $20-$25

Contact: (323) 465-0566, Ext. 15 or www.theactorsgang.com

Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes