Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Adam Rapp, a prolific playwright and novelist, won attention recently for his play “Red Light Winter,” which received quite divided reactions from writers and audiences; it was a love it or hate it proposition. The chief fact to be gleaned from Rapp’s new play, “Bingo with the Indians” is never to place a clock radio center stage. No matter what goes on around that clock, it’s just about impossible to keep your eyes away from it and ponder the time dribbling slowly by. Rapp’s play runs a little over an hour and a half, and it feels sluggish, amorphous, inanimate. The playing space is also a problem; half the time a scene is staged so that those audience members seated in the center have to move their heads back and forth, tennis game style, to keep up with what’s being said and by whom. Finally, you wind up staring at that damned clock again, center stage.

“Indians” takes place in a motel room, where various theater people act out loud and always-tiresome power plays with each other. In the most cringe-worthy scene, an amiable stoner (Evan Enderle) is slowly coerced into sex by an affectless stage manager (Rob Yang). It’s a pointlessly nasty, graphic scene that fails to create any real tension and betrays the physical commitment Enderle gives to his sweet-hearted character. Cooper Daniels and Jessica Pohly play their actor and director characters on a single, monotonous note of loud, unrevealing aggression, and Missel Leddington, who plays Enderle’s damaged mother, is asked to carry a very hackneyed speech about the darker-than-dark darkness in a theater. As a director of his own work, Rapp hasn’t helped his actors shape or modulate their performances, and as a writer, he winds up his play with some embarrassingly pretentious thoughts on illusion versus reality. Judging from this work, Rapp has a definite voice of his own, but it’s a sordid, unreflective voice that needs to pull back, open up some windows, and let in some air.