Theater Review
O K, so there’s these four morphine addicts, three of them ex-cons, and they’re all shooting up in the foot or the leg in a dingy room full of Formica way the heck up in Canada someplace, and there’s a lot of tension in the room but one guy thinks he’s really clever, see, and he comes up with this foolproof scheme to rip off a bank – it’s very tricky and it involves ATM machines – and he convinces the other three to go along except that – human nature being what it is, especially as incarnated in these four psycho junkie morons – things go awry and …
Such is the terrain, the small-time loser world of “High Life,” a new play by Canadian Lee MacDougall now in its New York premiere at Primary Stages. The play’s action – colorful, petty cons botching a tricky scam – suggests and derives from a genre of crime story best represented today in the drama of David Mamet, the fiction of Elmore Leonard and the cinema of Quentin Tarantino.
It sometimes seems, indeed, that the scent of Tarantino is everywhere: His “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” are the most imitated films of the decade. But “High Life,” despite the claims in its own publicity, is not completely Tarantinoid. True, its characters do talk about favorite films, but the script doesn’t have the preening, formalistically playful, self-congratulatory air of QT. It’s much closer to the tone of Mamet’s “American Buffalo” and to the theme of Gus van Sant’s druggie film, “Drugstore Cowboy,” a tragicomic chronicle of desperate dopers fudging one robbery after another in the U.S. Northwest.
“Drugstore Cowboy,” though, was relaxed, loose, mellow. Under Casey Childs’ ferocious direction, “High Life” is compressed, claustrophobic, edgy, angry. The tiny Primary Stages playing area represents, in Walt Spangler’s set, an apartment and a car. The four guys racket around the apartment like colliding pinballs.
In a long, brilliant scene, they’re squeezed together like atoms in a 1972 sedan outside a bank. It’s these packed, bomb-like spaces and the relentless rhythms that make “High Life” a powerful theater experience.
MacDougall’s play, while containing a number of fine comic riffs, pretty much stays within the conventions familiar in material of this kind. He seems determined to stay on the surface of his Mametian bebop rhetoric; like the dopers themselves, the script avoids dealing with the psychological and psychosexual issues it repeatedly brings up.
The cast is first-rate. Dick is the ringleader, the mastermind who comes up with the preposterous and chancy scam; John Bedford Lloyd plays him as an articulate and persuasive grown-up boy given to locutions like “Having lived most of our lives inside, we deserve this” and “As disciples of the evil morph, we go through a lot of money.” He’s amusingly houseproud, too, insisting on coasters on the Formica.
Bug is the hothead; Isiah Whitlock Jr. gives us a paranoid cretin ever ready to explode, but he shows some gentle, human moments between outbursts.
The group’s goofball is Donnie, whom David Greenspan, a brilliantly stylized comic actor, turns into a screechy, chirpy, fluttery hypochondriac. Greenspan takes Donnie’s behavioral tics way out beyond caricature into a zany poetry. He hits vocal notes and assumes elbows-crossed postures all his own. He’s like a caged bird on speed.
If these three are ex-cons living by insider codes, the new recruit is a fresh-faced junkie named Billy. He’s been chosen, as Dick constantly reiterates, for his good looks – so that he can charm the bank’s pretty teller.
As Matthew Mabe subtly and slyly plays him, Billy seems at first a typical neophyte. He’s an eager pupil to Dick; he’s instantly antagonistic to Bug; he’s oddly protective of Donnie.
But Mabe’s Billy turns out to have a dark and violent agenda of his own. Mabe’s long come-on to the (unseen) teller, a woman called Alma Amore, starts out as a seductive spiel but turns suddenly into something else, a moment of soul-bearing despair.
Dick and Bug’s favorite tune – their private anthem and a source of much arguing over who stole the tape – is Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” a song that, arguably, romanticizes lowlife. But MacDougall, Childs and the excellent cast do not romanticize these guys (even if they do not go as deep as they might). They make them very funny and very pathetic.
“High Life” by Lee MacDougall at Primary Stages. With John Bedford Lloyd, Isiah Whitlock Jr., David Greenspan, Matthew Mabe. Directed by Casey Childs.