Theatre in Review: A Loss of Roses (Peccadillo Theater Company)

	Deborah Hedwall, Ben Kahre. Photo: Michael Portantiere

Companies like Peccadillo do us a favor when reviving rarely seen works from the not-so-distant theatrical past. Almost always, these are of interest and, in many cases, plays of real quality are brought back to life, proving that yesterday's flop was merely ahead of its time. But sometimes a flop is forever, which would seem to be the case with A Loss of Roses.

The play that broke William Inge's decade-long success streak, A Loss of Roses was withdrawn after only 25 performances, with devastating consequences to the author's self-confidence. (It wasn't all downhill from there; a year later, he won an Oscar for his screenplay Splendor in the Grass, but never again in his lifetime did he have a Broadway success.) It would have been exciting to report that A Loss of Roses is on a par with Picnic or The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (or even Natural Affection, a not-really successful piece with a number of moving passages). But these Roses are sadly wilted; the script contains many scenes that seem like bad parodies of William Inge's writing.

As is usual with Inge, we are in small-town Kansas, this time in the '30s. Kenny Baird, a 21-year-old grease monkey, lives with his widowed mother, Helen, who works as a nurse; their relationship is a tangle of ambivalences and Freudian complexes. Helen, whose husband died rescuing Kenny from drowning, has never found a spousal replacement; Kenny, it is strongly hinted, is subconsciously bucking for the job. He resists leaving home, even when Helen encourages him to find better work in a nearby town. He clearly resents Helen's nursing career, and openly wishes that she would stay at home and make him home-cooked meals. "Love, like anything else in this world, doesn't mean anything until you earn it and deserve it," says Helen, implying that Kenny isn't a patch on his late father. Just in case we haven't gotten the picture, Kenny all but makes a pass at Helen while sitting on the sofa with her, earning a furious rebuff. In another red flag of psychological distress, Kenny is also a bit of a kleptomaniac.

Adding to their domestic tensions is the arrival of Lila Green, who, many years earlier -- so long ago that Kenny barely remembers her -- worked as a kind of au pair for Helen. Lila is now a small-time actress in her late 30s; her latest gig, with a two-bit touring company, has fizzled, and Helen has agreed to let her stay on, trading housework and cooking for her room and board. In an early warning sign that Inge's invention is flagging, Lila arrives accompanied by the members of her troupe, a prize collection of stereotypes from Central Casting. There's Mme. Olga St. Valentine, who strikes exaggerated poses and speaks in a grand dame voice; Ronny, a mincing queen who devours Kenny with his eyes; and Ricky, the thin-moustached lounge lizard who is Lila's man of the moment.

While Ricky returns to Kansas City, allegedly to drum up work for him and Lila, the atmosphere in the Baird household thickens. Kenny, displacing his incestuous feelings, starts making eyes at Lila. "I like you because you're a little older," he says to Lila, in one of many paging-Dr. Freud moments. She resists him at first -- not least because he is so obviously inexperienced with women and she has been around the block more times than she cares to admit -- but she eventually gives way, if only to avoid Ricky, who returns with a plan to put her into stag films. But Inge -- who, like Tennessee Williams, wrote so eloquently about the consequences of unsanctioned desire in the conformist world of mid-century America -- here takes a surprisingly schoolmarmish tone; not for the first time, Lila finds out what happens to girls who give their favors away for free.

It's possible that a sensitive and finely attuned production might get more out of this rather enervated tale of suppressed desires, but Dan Wackerman's production suffers from miscasting in two of the three major roles. Deborah Hedwall, a specialist in problematic mothers, is a fine Helen, quietly signaling her worries about Kenny under her talkative, everyday manner. Helen long ago made the decision to hold her son at arm's length for fear of igniting a situation that couldn't be ignored, yet she is uneasy with that decision and Hedwall illuminates this conflict with tremendous subtlety. But the play's lengthy, tedious exposition, which takes up all of Act I, never catches fire because of the fundamental lack of tension between her and Ben Kahre as Kenny. Their scenes of bickering over the breakfast table should bristle with unspoken grievances and longings; instead, they constitute so much drearily snappish conversation. Kahre's performance is devoid of longing; he never begins to suggest Kenny's wounded, conflicted nature. One wonders what the young Warren Beatty, who created the role, was like.

Even more damaging is the Lila of Jean Lichty. Lila should be a tad blowsy and out of place among these upright Kansans -- it beggars belief that Helen would allow such a creature to move in with her sexually confused son -- but she should also have an underlying sweetness and sadness. Lichty makes her into a strident bottle blonde who appears to be forever on the edge of hysteria, always offering the most operatic reading of any given line. The actress' brassy vocal delivery becomes at first monotonous then an active irritant. That Kenny would fall for this garish creature simply isn't credible, even given the psychological background that Inge has so laborious put in place.

Other aspects of the production don't really gel, either. The production design, by Harry Feiner, renders the Baird house in skeletal fashion, an approach that is perfectly appropriate. However, this simple design is backed by an enormous drop depicting part of the town, the landscape beyond it, and an enormous sky, which is constantly transformed by lighting and projections. This spectacular display of times of day and atmospheric conditions is so attention-getting that Inge's drab characters practically vanish in front of it. Marianne Custer's costumes and David Thomas' sound design are more in keeping with the play's modest scope.

The script contains many other oddities, including the fact that Helen stays out all night -- at a revival meeting, no less -- only to be stunned and shocked to learn that Lila and Kenny have spent the night together. There is also a little girl whose two brief appearances scream "symbol," and a final speech, by Lila, that references the title and daintily underlines Inge's view of sex as a transaction doomed to end in disillusionment and ruin. In other plays, he made the same case far more excitingly; in A Loss of Roses, he rather makes the point in the drabbest manner possible.--David Barbour