“Defiled” starts amid a cool, chaotic burst of lights, sound and Tom Waits-infused tension.
Sirens wail, choppers whir, bullhorns blare and the flashing colored lights lining every window in the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art’s intimate loft theater make it seem as if the very building we sit in is surrounded by emergency equipment. We’re in a university library, and a sprawling bomb that’s strapped to a pole looks big enough to bring down entire city blocks.
You are not watching this explosive standoff play out from a distance. Theatre13 director Judson Webb makes you a hostage-eye witness to it.
It’s a nifty way to start a play.
But things never come close to matching that level of palpable urgency again. Instead, the next 90 minutes of blah blah blah talkiness becomes a slow energy drain that strains credulity.
The library is getting rid of its Dewey Decimal catalog cards, which have been made obsolete by computers. But Harry Mendelsson, a library drone who’s awfully young to be a technophobe, believes for reasons that never hold much water that these cards are better and faster research tools.
Aging flatfoot Brian Dickey (Steve Grad) is a folksy “Colombo”-like detective who’s been sent in to talk Harry down. And talk … and talk … and talk. It takes Brian about 80 minutes to even think to ask, “Hey, Harry, you want to save the cards? Why don’t you just take them home with you?”
It’s unfair to expect two actors to maintain a believable sense of imminent and ongoing danger when the bomb is just window-dressing for playwright Lee Kalcheim’s real intent, and it’s not saving defiled index cards. “This is about the loss of the grandeur of man,” Harry (Philip Van Scotter) tells us smugly. But saying it doesn’t make it so.
There is a serious situational disconnect when in 90 minutes, Brian never even so much as glances at Harry’s gigantic, jerry-rigged bomb, which any real cop would be conspicuously assessing at every opportunity – if only to determine if it’s real.
This isn’t so much a tense negotiation as “When Harry Met Brian.” They sip coffee and klatch about relationships. Harry rants about how America is getting dumber and more homogenous. That we’re undereducated and over-entertained is no news flash. But to Harry, it’s all the computer’s fault. Parents, you’re off the hook.
Unless you happen to be in the nearby vicinity. In that case, he’s fine with taking you out, along with the building, books and index cards he supposedly so loves.
That’s what bugged me most about “Defiled.” More than the absurdity of patching through a call from the co-ed who dumped Harry 15 years before. More than the theater company’s passivity of execution.
“Defiled” joins “tempOdyssey” as the second new play in a week with bomb-wielding “protagonists” who are willing to kill innocents just to serve some personal existential crisis.
When dozens, even hundreds, of real people are dying in random bombings daily in Iraq, it’s hard to rally around another loser with a specious beef.
“Defiled” | ** RATING
DRAMA|Presented by Theatre13| Written by Lee Kalcheim|Directed by Judson Webb|Starring Philip Van Scotter and Steve Grad|At Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th St.|THROUGH NOV. 25|7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays|90 minutes, no intermission|
$13-$15 |303-443-2122 or bmoca.org
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-John Moore
This article has been corrected in this online archive. Originally, due to a reporting error, it misspelled the name of actor Philip Van Scotter, in one instance.
