‘Bash’ could have benefitted from outside director

New American Theatre Project's "Bash" is more of an acting exercise than a play.

Neil LaBute's 1999 off-Broadway drama gives us three short one-acts, two of them monologues, that get us inside the heads of three murderers.

In "Iphigenia in Orem," a salesman (Will Sturdivant), talking to an unseen visitor in a hotel room, speaks of the death of his child. The closer he gets to the truth, the nearer he seems to be to his own self-destruction.

"A Gaggle of Saints" presents a young WASP couple (Megan Bartle and Johnny Miles) who re-create radically different versions of a night that culminated in the fatal beating of a middle-aged homosexual.

And in "Medea Redux," a woman in prison (Bartle) explains the logic in electrocuting her son in a bathtub.

This is heady stuff, and it obviously needs a director to keep a careful eye on tone. The trouble is, this production doesn't have a director. Bartle and Sturdivant directed each other and Miles and artistic director Wayne Wilson tweaked things near the end of rehearsal. So, of course, the production has no singular point of view, no unified rhythms, no controlling hand. It's disappointing that the group would seem to have so little appreciation of what a real director can contribute to a theater experience.

Sturdivant as the salesman can be enjoyed for his physical precision and expressive speaking voice. But he doesn't create a character. The monologue doesn't go anywhere. He plays the ending from the beginning.

Miles looks like a middle-aged man, which makes his role as a college-age killer seem more like a career-criminal. And he's too cerebral. We don't believe he's lived through the horrific events that he speaks of.

Bartle is the only performer who suggests her chatter is the result of the thoughts of a flesh-and-blood person. She makes the dialogue her own.

There's no set, except for a few pieces of nondescript tables and chairs. There's little evidence that the people involved gave much thought to how visuals might have helped accent the dramatic events. But then, when actors make the mistake of thinking that acting is all that counts in a play, a disrespect for visuals and direction is almost inevitable.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.