The last place you might expect to see a story about ethical ambiguities and personal responsibility play out is in the lobby of a Manhattan high-rise apartment during the graveyard shift. But that’s just one of the unexpected charms in Kenneth Lonergan’s humble and (eventually) engrossing drama, “Lobby Hero.”
And, with all due respect to a rising small theater company, some might say one of the last places you’d expect to see performances this uniformly excellent might be Golden’s Miners Alley Playhouse, which may one day look back at “Lobby Hero” as a seminal production in its history.
“Lobby Hero” is a seemingly unassuming character study that lulls you into thinking you’re witnessing an ambling, ordinary slice of life, only to reveal itself as a complex examination into tainted motives and doing the right thing.
The basic outline: Slacker Jeff (Jeff Haas), who got kicked out of the Navy for smoking pot, has reached a dead-end: He’s now a graveyard security trainee. His wholly by-the-book boss William (Cajardo Lindsey) finds himself in an ethical conundrum when his brother is charged with murder, and William considers providing a false alibi. This is a more difficult choice for someone whose entire world order is premised on truth.
Browbeating, philandering cop Bill (Jude Moran) often visits the apartment house where Jeff works – or more specifically, he visits his married paramour who lives upstairs. Each time he leaves his smitten trainee, Dawn (Susan Scott), waiting in the lobby with Jeff.
To be honest, the “genius” label that was tagged to Longergan’s play in 2001 fades a bit with each successive viewing, but director Terry Dodd’s staging makes for essential theatergoing for the marvelous performances he has elicited here – and for how he has elicited them.
Dodd’s production is a near-perfect alchemic amalgam of venue, material, ensemble and technical support. Most wisely, he gathers an outstanding quartet of actors – but rather than unleash them, he dials them down to fit the space. He turns them inside themselves. You can almost hear Dodd, named The Denver Post’s best director for 2006, saying to his cast: “The smaller your voice, the greater your power.” Perfect advice for a theater as intimate as the MAP.
Specifically, it’s the soft-spoken work of Lindsey and the wrenching honesty of Scott that resonate down to your organ tissue. Lindsey is so engrossed in his internal self, and he displays such a natural, whispering ease, he might as well be performing for the screen.
Scott is a cauldron of conflict in her head and with her hands. Her naïve attraction to Bill is necessarily punished, but she’s also a conflicted rookie who in just three months on the job already has overcompensated for her physical limitations by violently beating a perp to blindness. As Scott conveys in nearly every masked word and gesture, this Dawn is a walking wound in blue. And while the character slowly breaks down, along with her moral code, the actress remains in total control of her descent.
And anyone who knows the firecracker work of Jude Moran can tell you this guy’s got the power to unleash cannonballs on command. But as the bully cop who lords both his physical and sexual power over his partner, that’s an ability he wisely portions out only selfishly here – and therefore to maximum effectiveness.
The wild card in all of this is the lanky Haas, the least-veteran actor of the group, but upon whose slight shoulders the production ultimately rides. The actor doesn’t at first seem in the same league as his castmates, and physically the actor seems wholly inadequate to believably convey ex-Navy. But while his antithetical approach to Jeff as a total twerp seems initially misguided, he turns unexpectedly and disarmingly winning.
Dodd gets a sleek, elegant lobby set from Sarah Roshan that is diminished only by sightline problems caused by a pesky pole, and he offers up a sweet Bruce Springsteen soundtrack.
A few more productions like this one, and we may be talking about MAP in a whole new class in the Colorado theater food chain.
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
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| “Lobby Hero”
DRAMA|Miners Alley Playhouse, 1224 Washington Ave., Golden|Written by Kenneth Lonergan|Directed by Terry Dodd|Starring Jeff Haas, Jude Moran, Cajardo Lindsey and Susan Scott|THROUGH JUNE 17| 7:30 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays|2 hours, 25 minutes|$18-$20|303-935-3044, minersalley.com
