‘Delirious’
Stage Review: ‘Delirious’ Time With ’80’s Hip-Hop Generation
by Lawrence Christon of The LA Times
Susan Dietz has given J. Bunzel’s “Delirious” first-rate production values at the Pilot Theatre, but they only postpone our gradual realization that nothing much is going on inside Bunzel’s energetic depiction of the fast times of the ’80s hip-hop generation.
“Delirious” is a throwback to the ’50s genre of stories about crazy mixed-up kids. Instead of Jim Backus playing the surly authoritarian parent whom everyone considers square, here we have Russell Johnson playing Mr. Richfield, the cynical rich Dad who doesn’t have time for his son Nick (Cyril O’Reilly), who, naturally, is turning bad from the absence of love and attention.
And instead of Sal Mineo doing his wounded-bird role, we have Stephen Nichols succumbing to the terminal despair of being misunderstood — he plays a gay who gets no respect. The setting is the Richfield house in the Santa Monica Mountains (Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral’s superb set and lighting design give us that familiar gorgeous view of the Valley from Mulholland Drive), where Nick and Hart (Nichols’ role) host a cocaine party.
Coke is the draw and the fuel for an assortment of characters perpetually on the make (under Ron Link’s direction, everyone’s entrance resembles Dancing Barry jerking and twirling through the Forum during a Lakers’ timeout).
The major difference between “Delirious” and its ’50s forerunners is that lost innocence here is a foregone conclusion — this is one dumb but calculating milieu of greedy, aggressive, ignorant young people who live to party, and to do coke. Bunzel is skilled at capturing a lot of the surface manifestations of these lives.
But when things start getting serious, you sense the playwright groping for Meaning, at which point “Delirious” looks like an overheated Movie of the Week (it doesn’t make sense for the hard-bitten Rastafarian dealer, Real Cool, to get dewy and maternal when Hart slashes his wrists — the shock is so great that Lawrence-Hilton Jacobs loses his Jamaican accent).
Bunzel’s coke-charged post-teen zombies might be more affecting if they weren’t so smug and banal, or if the play took a harder look at what’s inside them. Whenever anyone comes up with a self-explanation, it’s a howler. (What are we to make of tennis pro Didi’s fear of the nuclear destruction of Beverly Hills?)
“Delirious” plays like a docudrama on the evils of cocaine, without a narrative or a framework beyond the depiction of an observed but unexamined milieu. Addiction plays almost never make first-rate drama; they tend to get bogged down in the spectacle of indignity and decline. Their obsession with the addictive substances as a root instead of a manifestation squeezes out the one thing that lends drama its legitimacy and appeal: character under duress.
That’s the case here, at least, and Link’s direction has this generally convincing-looking cast whipped into such a frenzy that character is further flattened, though Eddie Velez is a memorably sleazy tough guy salesman, Nichols underplays Hart gracefully, and Dan Gerrity is touching as an actor who’s never going to make it. O’Reilly does as well as he can with a role that has little depth.
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