UCSD Student’s Play Doesn’t Make the Grade

LA JOLLA —  “Imagine a small, wind-whipped island off the Carolina coast where a powerful secret weapon has been developed by private enterprise,” the press release begins. “Imagine the fate of the weapon, as the inhabitants and developers struggle for power.”

Good advice, because whatever you imagine is bound to be better than what you will get at “Dickson: Old News from the New War,” playing at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts through Feb. 7.

Even keeping in mind that it is a new play by a graduate student in the playwriting program at the UC San Diego Department of Theater and is, in fact, Reid Jensen’s thesis for his master of fine arts degree, this work manages to stupefy with its utter lack of cohesion, clarity, character and art. There were more complex and interesting productions offered at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre’s recent Young Playwrights festival for writers 18 and under.

Jensen’s story, such as it is, revolves around an Ollie North-type character who is masterminding the development of a secret weapon in the small town of Dickson that will save America from Communism--if it doesn’t kill Dickson’s residents first.

But what are you to make of a play in which three young adults, who capture this weapon by yelling and waving their arms around, refer to themselves with dead-straight self-importance as “three people who have in their power the ability to change the world.” And where a mayor named Mary Delano (the spiritually bankrupt descendant of an idealized Franklin Delano Roosevelt?) who was sexually seduced into backing the weapon, has to apologize to them in the end: “I thought because you were kids that you must be wrong.”

It all adds up to a turgid brew that is politically correct and dramatically inept.

One thing to be said for the actors, all graduate students in the school’s theater department, they march into the disaster with all the gallantry of the soldiers in the Light Brigade. Within the limits of what they have to work with, Tom Nelis stands out as the gung-ho, smooth-talking, slickly moving Ollie North-like Puckett, and Karen Vesper reveals a wickedly seductive sense of humor as Loretta la Ford, the girlfriend of one of Puckett’s backers.

The director, Ralph Janes, does not bring any unifying vision to the scattered images, and alternates disconcertingly between having the characters facing the audience as they converse, and then turning toward each other. Similarly puzzling is John Murphy Jr.’s set with its piles of sand atop a floor painted blue with white clouds like a sky.

V. Nadja Brost’s costumes suit the male stereotypes of the tweedy scientist, the crass, pot-bellied moneybags and the conservative Marine but not very imaginatively, and the outfits seem downright arbitrary and uninteresting when she dresses the women. Brenda B. Berry’s lighting and Stephen P. Erb’s sound are erratic.

The idea of offering a season of student-written plays is a laudatory one, but the better work would have more of a chance with audiences if scripts like this were left to the workshop. After all, what can you say about a production where the closest thing that passes for insight is the discovery by one character that Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”?

But that is the kind of revelation that fits the play. After ruining an evening, why not ruin one of the most beautiful lyric poems in history?

Performances at 8 p.m. today and Saturday; last performance is at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Mandell Weiss Center for the Performing Arts in La Jolla.