An American Nightmare

AS YOU WALK into the Loeb Ex before the beginning of When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?, you are confronted by a reconstruction of a sleazy small-town diner and an actor dressed in greaser attire with a tattoo that says "Born Dead" on his arm smoking a cigarette as if it were a joint. Somehow it seems like a good time to go home and watch George Scott ground into double plays.

Moreover, when you scan the program and see that this show has a "costumiere" (how pretentious!) and that it is the last production of the apprentice theater (no mainstage pros here), it doesn't look too promising.

Mark Medoff's drama takes place in a small western town in the late '60s and explores the illusions and alienation of American life. Medoff's vision is a dark one, and his play operates on a cynical, pessimistic energy. His characters are all trapped and they can't figure out how to escape. Medoff's message is that they never will. Attendant on this basic theme are chilling caricatures of conventional morality, marriage and love, as well as a wholesale shredding of the notion that human dignity has any meaning. The play depends heavily on characterization, and one senses that if someone filled in the background which is only hinted at in the dialogue, you'd understand it a lot better.

The play lives or dies with the lead characters: Red Ryder, a young man trapped in a small town in New Mexico who puts on a James Dean, grease-and-tattoos front of tough independence to hide his inability to break free of his oppressive life; Teddy, a disaffected, belligerant hippie who passes through the small town; and Richard, a rich businessman whose suave manner belies his actual spinelessness.

The two acts of the play are set in a greasy spoon diner in a one-horse New Mexico town. The play opens with Red Ryder boldly announcing his plans to leave his stifling job as night man at the greasy spoon and hit the big time. He vents his frustration by bullying the pitiful, obese, waitress, Angel, who is quite apparently in love with him, though he scorns her.

We are also introduced to Lyle, the good-hearted, simple-minded proprietor of the gas station across the way, and Clark, the mercenary owner of the restaurant.

The next to arrive are Richard and his wife, Clarisse, pulling up their Cadillac for a meal. Richard is cool, successful and wealthy, everything Red Ryder wishes he were and is not. Clarisse is a concert violinist with an $11,000 violin which Richard has bought for her, more to ensure her dependence on him than to show his love. At first, she is little more than an extension of Richard, he gets her everything he thinks she wants without listening to a word from her.

Things start to roll in earnest when Teddy arrives with his girlfriend, Cheryl. Very soon, the psychopathically hostile hippie has alienated everyone, shattered their self-made fronts, and catapulted them into a nightmarish movie which he directs between outbursts of violence and brutal degradations of the other characters. Teddy bears the thematic weight of the play, battering the egos of Red and Richard with his brutality and cynicism until they have lost their illusions and their dignity and are forced to confront the truth about their vanity and foolishness.

Red Ryder is at times a brutal, violent play. Teddy savages and humiliates his victims mentally and physically with relentless sadism. He is so belligerent that one wonders how he could have been driven to such a state of mind, and Medoff offers no real explanations. Teddy is a war veteran and a "disaffected youth," but somehow this does not adequately explain his attitude toward humanity. All too often he becomes more of an authorial mouthpiece than a coherent character, and when he says at the end that he wishes he could be sorry for what he has done it really seems as if someone is forcing Teddy to act the way he does. The scene in which Teddy directs Ryder to gallop around the restaurant like a cowboy and threatens to force him to make love to Angel on the counter while calling the terrified boy a "fag" and "queer," is psychic and physical torture reminiscent of the rape in Deliverance.

THE BRUTALIZATION OF Richard and Clarisse is no less disturbing. Teddy totally exposes Richard's selfish cowardice, intimidating him, wounding him with a pistol shot, and then molesting and threatening to rape his wife. Richard cannot bring himself to do anything but fume. When Clarisse finally explodes in rage at Teddy after his rape threat and demands that Richard stop him, Richard can only mutter that he might do something if she were raped. Their bond is shattered by the end of the play, as Clarisse makes it clear that she will be free of Richard's now groundless domination.

Yet if Medoff's play is difficult and taxing, so are parts of the Ex production.

The major problem lies in the total inconsistency in the quality of the cast. Kevin Grumbach as Teddy is at times too erratic in his mood shifts, but overall carries the show with his portrayal of the psychotic hippie. Within seconds of his entrance, he galvanizes the cast, powerfully projecting the twisted alienation of his character. His movements are dynamic and his madness becomes truly chilling in the second act. When he pulls up Clarisse's shirt screaming "Tits, tits!" he horrifies with his intensity.

Charles Weinstein as Richard competently handles his difficult character, managing to convincingly portray his progression from self-assured control to violated dignity, a movement crucial to the play's effectiveness.

Unfortunately, the other characters are not in the same league. Roger Lipson as Red Ryder is just not up to the demands of his role. Right from the start, when he sits at the counter reading Playboy, perusing the centerfold as if it were The New York Times, sucking his upper lip noisily and smoking a cigarette as if it were the first one he had ever seen in his life, he generally fails to establish himself as a convincing character. Director Leslie Rose obviously has no idea what a real redneck is like, and neither does Lipson. Throughout the play Lipson fumbles lines, drops his cigarette and slips in and out of character. He is markedly better in the second act, when he is being pushed by Grumbach, but his first act scene with Susan Silverberg as Angel is painful. By the way, Silverberg is barely able to deal with her subtle part, and delivers nearly all her lines the same way.

Donald Campbell as Lyle does a creditable job conveying the good intentioned fool's inability to comprehend Teddy's evil, and he manages the only consistent hick in the play.

Raene Rau as Clarisse just doesn't have the vocal power necessary for her crucial outburst against Teddy, but in general she tries very hard to make her character believable and sympathetic. Marilyn Chan as Cheryl is simply lost in the shadow of Grumbach, managing to look attractice and little else. Bruce Rodgers as Clark looks like a preppie who walked into a Wild West show by mistake.

The technical aspect of the production was a bit sloppy: it took about five minutes for the clock on the wall to come on after the scenes started, but in general the ambitious set, complete with real jukebox, was fine.

The overall impression one gets of this play is that the company, with aforementioned exceptions, is in over its head. Rose seems to have no real idea how to convey what the play is about, and seems to have let the actors work out their parts as best they can. This is not an easy play to follow, and the audience needs as much help as it can get.

Still, despite the limitations of the company, and despite an audience which laughed at all the wrong places (one woman was apparently tripping, since she laughed all through the play), the apprentice crew manages to send you out of the threater affected and even troubled. Granted, this is the least one can expect of serious theater, but not every production meets the challenge.

Thanks to some fine performances, this is an interesting, if obviously amateur, evening of theater. The cast does try very hard and its short-comings are due to inexperience rather than incompetence. Red Ryder would not be worth seeing for $3.50, but at the usual Ex ticket price--free--you might want to check it out.