| Lushly staged 'Billy the Kid' suffers from incoherent script PAM KRAGEN Staff Writer Like a peyote trip gone bad, the La Jolla Playhouse’s "Collected Works of Billy the Kid" takes the audience on a strange journey through musical interludes, rambling poetry, and explosions of violence, yet manages to tell precious little about the legendary outlaw himself. The gorgeous production, co-directed by Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff and his new associate director, Kate Whoriskey, lavishes its fine cast with a enormous, multilevel Western set, and expert lighting and special effects, but falls short in delivering a cohesive or coherent script. For all of its more than two hours of poetry, songs and stories, playwright Michael Ondaatje’s script seems much ado about nothing. Ondaatje has said the 1971 play was never intended as a biography of the New Mexico outlaw. Instead, the character of Billy is simply a device used to reflect man’s obsession with violence. In that way, the script works. The audience follows Billy as he carouses, drinks, fornicates, fights, sleeps, commits acts of violence and riffs on bizarre alcohol- and sunstroke-induced visions, but never finds a reason to care about him, even when watching him die not once but twice. The play’s more interesting characters are Billy’s cronies and betrayers, who tell gripping tales of violence against dogs, horses and humans. Stripped out of the script is any explanation of who Billy is and why he ends up first fighting with ---- and then against ---- the "sane assassin," oddball outlaw-turned-sheriff Pat Garrett. The play, which is told mostly through flashbacks (Billy is killed in the first and last scenes), explores and then explodes myths. Garrett is idealized as brilliant and mysterious but instead seems just silent and stupid. Legend says Billy never held anything in his left hand but a gun, but he’s seen using it to carry liquor bottles, caress a woman’s thighs and play a guitar. Billy was written up in dime store novels as a cold-blooded, heartless killer but here he's more boyish and rebellious than anything else. Ondaatje’s poetry runs wild in the script, with characters delivering overlong violent soliloquies on everything from Garrett’s vomiting binges to drunken rats devouring a chipmunk and crazed chickens ripping pulsing arteries from a dead man’s neck. The play’s longest piece of poetic prose is Billy’s hallucinatory rant, caused by dehydration and sun exposure when Garrett's posse chained him, hatless, to a horse for five days and drove him across the Carrizozo desert to a waiting jail cell. The excruciatingly long poem culminates with Billy imagining his penis being pulled by a giant hand through his body and planted on top of his head and the shouted refrain "I've been f---- by Christ!" Buoying the violence and visions, fortunately, are a good number of comic one-liners and McAnuff’s lovely score of Western harmonies backed by guitars, piano and harmonica. The songs have a simple beauty and wry humor. In "These Are the Killed," Billy matter-of-factly lists all of his victims. In "Poor Young William," we hear about the darkly goulish side show surrounded Billy’s near-headless corpse. "Moving Across the World on Horses" and "Sniffing Wind" benefit from beautiful three-part vocal harmonies. As Billy, Shawn Hatosy has a surprisingly sweet singing voice and boyish charm, but not the evil intensity you'd expect from a young man who bragged (probably falsely) that he'd killed 20 people before his death at 21. The fine actor Gary Cole is given precious little to do with his thinly drawn character Pat Garrett. Sean Bridgers gives one of the show’s best performances as Tom O'Folliard, Billy’s doomed pal who describes in one spellbinding story how his jaw was nearly blown off in a shotgun accident. The lanky Brian Vander Ark, as Billy’s posse mate Charlie Bowdre, can act as well as play the guitar and sing beautifully. San Diego Repertory Theatre regular Mike Genovese delivers a multilayered performance, both comic and sinister, as Billy’s betrayer Wild John Chisum. Susan Berman is oddly flat and unemotional as Chisum's niece, Sallie. Nicole DeHuff plays Billy’s prostitute girlfriend, Angela Dickinson, as a Wild West valley girl. Mark Wendland’s blue-wood Old West town stage is a wonder of trap doors, fire pits, moving stages, catwalks, water troughs and beds. Robert Perry’s moody lighting enhances the set’s layers and crevices. Catherine Zuber's costumes and Michael Roth's evocative sound design add texture and feel. "Billy the Kid" runs two hours, 10 minutes, with intermission. There's enough action onstage that you won't ever get bored during the play but you will probably leave the theater wondering whether you liked it or not. The play includes violence, strong language and partial nudity and is strictly for mature audiences. |