The stated raison d'etre of Loading Dock Theatre is "creating original plays that explore the extremes in human behavior."
Its current offering, a co-production with Wild Project and playing in the Wild Project's East Village theatre, is The World Premiere of WAR DREAMER, a piece by company co-founder Leegrid Stevens.
The story, simply stated, follows the path of a female veteran who is dealing ineffectively with combat post traumatic stress disorder, further complicated by a brain injury.
Her predicament would certainly appear to afford many opportunities to demonstrate the company's raison d'etre, PTSD being characterized by a state of delusional hyper-arousal, intense response to stimuli, anxiety, hallucinations, and volatility.
Of course, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's harrowing and poignant characterization of tormented Tommy Burgess in Kimberly Peirce's 2008 war-themed film STOP-LOSS comes to mind as a fine example of how this can be written and portrayed.
The script of WAR DREAMER demands a strong actor to anchor it as the vet in question, and Loading Dock has done well to cast Erin Treadway in this high-responsibility role.
Ms. Treadway, with playwright/director Stevens a Loading Dock co-founder, is an actor of many gifts and skills, not least of which is a secure vocal production that withstood the rigors of screaming for the better part of two and a half hours at the end of a performance week, with no sign of vocal fatigue, and no loss of either quality or projection.
Treadway's work is meticulous in detail, and rigorous in its execution, all characterized by an energetic impression not dissimilar to Colleen Dewhurst's majesty.
She is definitely a fire-starter, and I would be happy to see her grapple with and conquer a tough O'Neill script.
Treadway's excellent work was supported with varying degrees of success by an earnest ensemble of actors.
Outstanding among them was Shawn J. Davis as the vet's thwarted love interest, whose torment was a mirror to hers.
An actor of discernment, Davis' work was unique in the WAR DREAMER cast by reason of his ability to portray an inarticulate, even bestial, character in such a way that we understood his situation and felt compassion for his dreadful emotional double bind. Bravo! In lesser hands this character would have been disposable cardboard.
Delightful character work from Miles Purington as The Boss and E. James Ford as The Doctor gave the proceedings a welcome lift.
Designer Jevyn Nelms, who has recently been praised to the sky on these pages for her outstanding work in SHE'S GOT HARLEM ON HER MIND at The Metropolitan Playhouse, paid characteristic attention to both silhouette and detail, and dressed the cast with such regard for character that there were times it seemed the clothes themselves were doing the acting.
WAR DREAMER is directed in a confusion of styles, perhaps a result of overkill from too many cooks. Directing credit is shared equally by playwright Stevens and co-director Jacob Titus, with the addition of Movement Director Jonathan Taikina Taylor.
On the plus side, the linear development of the story was counterpointed by a number of truly beautiful tableaux, perhaps inspired by Derek Jarman's WAR REQUIEM imagery, which were poetic visual gestures summarizing the romance and pathos of the vulnerable footsoldier.
In addition, two episodes were exceptional from the standpoint of script, design, performance, and direction all coming together as they might: in Act One, (in the absence of a script in hand I must paraphrase) the "I am a veteran" sequence, and in Act Two "I will kill the child."
But these positives could only go so far, and did not save the play by any means.
The lean economy and dynamic explosiveness of these two sequences, in fact, cast a harsh and unfavorable light on far too much of the other stage happenings, which were hopelessly prosaic, often no more than functional, and apparently taken from some shabby Directing 101 textbook.
The first act in the performance I saw was impossibly slow-paced and, after the initial shock, meandered and bumped noisily along from one bland cliche to another, with precious little happening other than repetitive exposition and some sadly predictable plot "twists" taking the place of character and story development.
As I saw it, this deadly Act One had at least five plausible ending points before finally grinding to a halt after almost 90 minutes.
Importantly, the script as a whole does not by any means address the range of extreme behaviours associated with PTSD, and our very fine leading lady was restricted to only three or four of a possible ten.
For something that represents itself as NYC downtown cutting edge, the WAR DREAMER vibe is quite harmless and non-confrontational - a LIFETIME miniseries emotionality that is quite bourgeois actually - something that might have been crafted in a series of Saturday afternoon hobby sessions when comfortably seated with a mug of steaming herbal tea in the art studio of a renovated Rhinebeck barn.
One has to wonder how downtown artists like Spalding Gray, Lee Nagrin, Tom O'Horgan, and Charles Ludlam, who lived and worked in the East Village and Noho, might have greeted WAR DREAMER, playing as it is on their turf.
Artistic control was conspicuously absent in a number of the actors' performances; three were inaudible or unintelligible - even in the intimate 89-seat theatre - and a fourth was both inaudible and unintelligible.
Outrageous.
There is absolutely no excuse for this kind of lapse, given the high level of the available acting pool in New York City.
In addition, accents came and went at random, sometimes within the span of a single sentence, and the accents themselves too often ranged from the garbled twang of some mythical American hee-haw heartland, to something akin to Kiera Sedgewick's Chief Brenda Johnson, even to an unintentionally comical replication of Mr. Haney in GREEN ACRES.
With a staff list a mile long and a production obviously more than well-enough funded, why did no one think to engage a dialect coach?
In the absence of anything like a coherent author/director programme note - a major omission, especially for a World Premiere - I must offer a surmise, albeit unwillingly.
From all appearances, Stevens has apparently conceived WAR DREAMER as a kind of mini-Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk - in which action, words, music, and effects play round robin with each other, sharing primacy and responsibility interchangeably.
There's only a very slim chance of this working nicely for anyone other than a mature Master, even in theory, and in its current under-defined state, WAR DREAMER fell victim to massive amounts of compensatory overproduction which not only robbed the script of what potency it had, but obscured the action onstage, and burdened the resources of the little theatre with oppressive scenic and sonic clutter.
The fault, however, does not lie with the theatre's limitations, but the small, fussy, ultimately style-less, conceptual dimension of the choices made by those in charge in order to meet the demands of the script, and whose ambitions might just outstrip their talents and abilities.
The Finale, uncharacteristically and shockingly underwritten, requires a series of special effects which in this production landed with a resounding thud, looking like film strip content scooped up from the cutting room floor of Ed Wood's PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, absurd gimmickry taking the place of serious writing.
After a very long preamble, there was no climax, certainly no resolution or catharsis or revelation; only the same psychic shriek that had dulled with unvarying repetition into a background monotone over the better part of three hours.
None of this evasion of responsibility was worthy of either stated intent or subject.
I propose that Stevens has written not a play but the first, very verbose, draft of a film script.
In my opinion WAR DREAMERS is a dead end as a live performance piece, but might have a chance for life if given the opportunity to utilize the radically expanded resources available when making a movie.
Of course, massive cuts and rethinking would need to take place....but twenty percent of something would be better than a hundred per cent of nothing.
Moving on...
As for Wild Project...
Pictures don't lie, even when you want them to.
As I approached Wild Project's performance space on East 3rd Street between Avenues A and B, I saw to my dismay that it does indeed look like its photos.
A visual aberration for that part of The East Village, the theatre is housed in a salvaged industrial building which has been transformed into a glaring white and silver cube, looking like nothing so much as a Long Island City pop-up sales office hawking cheaply constructed, over-priced condos in the flimsy tower across the street.
There is no public area to speak of, with awkward and inadequate ingress/egress.
I wondered how it could possibly have made the Fire Department/Public Assembly inspection codes.
What passes for a lobby is small and airless, and the lines for tickets and the hopelessly unsanitary restrooms - in a facility where masks were mandatory - were easily confused.
The youthful front-of-house staff was clearly inexperienced, with only one exception, and were in a visible panic about how to guide the small group of fifty or so audience members waiting for the theatre doors to open.
Late seating is permitted, apparently by house policy, and the numerous latecomers in the performance I attended were unescorted by ushers and disruptive as they fumbled for seats in the dark.
With no front of house supervision to stop them, some audience members saw fit to bring and devour their lunch during the performance.
The theatre and gallery spaces are quite active with rental clients, and appear to be filled with a typical overly ambitious commotion - festivals, etc - that rarely amounts to much.
The revelation of the theatre interior itself, however, was worth the trip.
Splendidly designed and well-equipped, with neutral, unpretentious decor, excellent acoustics, better than average sight lines, and sufficient leg-room, I wondered how the same people who scored so high on the interior could have made such a callous blunder on the exterior.
The audience were not by any means down-towners. They were forty-, fifty-, and sixty-somethings, and looked as though they really belonged at a Theatre Row music theatre workshop but were moonlighting with a challenging field trip to the East Village no-man's land.
There was only a handful of young people in the house - I counted eight - all but one of whom left at intermission, along with almost a third of the audience.
This was in sharp contrast to The KraineTheatre at KGB's one block over, where 35 and unders were climbing over each other to attend the 2023 ESTROGENIUS FESTIVAL.
This is the part of my review where I would endorse a company's fundraising efforts if I felt they were worthy of support...
There is no information in the program or on the company website that Loading Dock is a 501 (c) (3) not-for-profit corporation, nor does that appear to even be pending, and there is no mention of their using a temporary fiscal sponsor while they achieve nfp status.
The contributions they solicit, therefore, are not tax-deductible, nor is there any word on getting investor points for one's donation, as is customary in commercial theatre.
Importantly, not-for-profits must make publicly available a yearly audited financial statement detailing not only the sources of funding but how the money was spent.
Loading Dock is under no such obligation.
There was also no list of Individual, Corporate, Foundation, State, or Federal contributors posted anywhere I could find.
One therefore might conclude that Loading Dock, like certain vanity projects I could name, is a privately funded operation and perhaps a tax shelter for dillettantes who have for some reason decided that they want to be involved in the theatre.
Or something worse.
I would like to be wrong about this.
But meanwhile, caveat emptor and hang onto your wallet.
Buyer, beware.
And do hang onto that wallet.
