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review "Please don't let me live! Spare me that pain!" So wails the tortured writer Neil Wallace in William Mittler's new play, "Decadence". By intermission, you may find yourself screaming something very similar. For death may seem a welcome alternative to the relentless histrionics of Mittler's excruciatingly overwrought and under-realized play. "Tedium" would be a more fitting title here. Writer Wallace is, we're told, a successful novelist in 1920s London. Suffering from terminal writer's block and brooding to the point of catatonia, he has been unable to string more than a few words together for the past several years. Instead, Neil spends his days forlornly slurping wine and staring vacantly out his windows. His equally listless chums drop by and lounge about, languidly boozing and commiserating on the pointlessness of existence and which party they should go to next. Pretty compelling stuff, yeah? Are we screaming yet? "Decadence" lurches clumsily between ham-fisted Deep Symbolism and shallow individual self-absorption. It wants to explore both the bitch-goddess muse that beguiles The Artist, and the ardent promise of creativity doused by life's indifference. It succeeds at neither. The play's attempt at capturing the tragedy of the post-WWI "Lost Generation" quickly gets lost itself in Mittler's confused plotting and his inability to discern the definitively bored from the definitely boring. Director Amber Jackson and her brave band of Stages actors try mightily to bring immediacy and purpose to this hapless blob of group ennui. Particularly, Pamela Pedder sustains a convincing working-class persona with her wannabe writer Hermine; the ever-estimable Patti Cumby brings her usual magnetic presence to the sketchily-written French journalist Juno Morpheus, and Michael M. Miller finds both self-loathing and flickering hope behind the glib sneer of the one-note painter Chris Lake. If only the flimsy characters of "Decadence" were worthy of the flesh-and-blood talent portraying them. |