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review There was an accident Friday night at the Court Theater. The casualties included seven actors and a well-intentioned director. They were trapped in a vehicle that spun wildly out of control: a remarkably unfunny play called "Asylum," penned by a Los Angeles actor-playwright named Brett Rickaby. You couldn't have seen it coming. In 1998, this same Brett Rickaby wrote a strong first play, "70 Dollars to a Bus Ride Home." (Maybe you saw it at the Hudson; it was nominated for a BackStage West Garland Award.) A "spiritual thriller," it concerned a young actor who was studying to become a minister, and who was really studying himself in the process. "Asylum" is a universe removed from "Bus Ride Home." It's an absurdist play owing debts to Sartre, Ionesco and early Shepard. This is very arduous territory to traverse, and very dated ground to revisit. As the lights come up, we see two young men in a white room, in outfits approximating straitjackets and sanitarium clothes. Inmate #1 (Jamie Denton) and Inmate #2 (Brian McDonald) soon engage in childish, adversarial roughhousing, and when a character named Sister enters -- dressed in a nun's habit, no less -- the nature of Rickaby's play becomes clear. Then someone named Golden Boy (Gary Dean Ruebsamen) arrives. Golden Boy has returned from the outside world; everyone envies him for escaping the asylum, and one of the other "boys" may get the chance to go away with him. They can't otherwise leave, for a brutal, alcoholic Guard (Don Mandigo) and nattering Nurse (Diana Kay Cameron) keep watch over the young charges. Didja get all that? This asylum, man, it's actually...(gasp)...a family! Whoa, dude, that is so heavy! Actually, maybe it is pretty heavy. But the writing renders it boorish, obnoxious and one-dimensional. The play is billed as a "psycomedy" and that would seem to imply that we would laugh during the proceedings. But on this night, no one laughed much -- except for a group in the back whose constant, nearly automatic guffawing made several other audience members look over their shoulders in suspicion. "Asylum" tries hard. Too hard. It has plenty of horseplay, volume, cursing and blame; it's in love with its own anger. What "Asylum" lacks is wit and humor to balance that anger. You spend 15 or 20 minutes deducing the context of the story; once you find it, Rickaby asks you to exult in that context instead of the characters. The characters themselves are distinguished primarily by their ugliness; you look desperately for some variation. Director Harvey T. Jordan directs the talented cast about as well as can be imagined, but they're up against a wall. Only Erin J. O'Brien, who was seen in much better circumstances in South Coast Repertory's "Freedomland," draws any nuance from her character (the aforementioned Sister). Eric Lange manages a laugh or two in the role of Bum. This is actually the second production of "Asylum," following its Stockton world premiere. (That's correct: a Stockton world premiere.) A third production would seem a longshot. "Asylum",
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