Balin in Gilead

Written by Lanford Wilson

Directed by Paul Dervis

At the Alley Theater

through October 24

WHAT IF Brecht's entire Threepenny Opera were crammed into a single time and setting?

Or what if the "Skid Row" number from Little Shop of Horrors were an hour-and-a-half drama?

Or what sort of play might Lou Reed have written in the mid-1960s if he had become a playwright instead of the Velvet Underground's chief songwriter?

If you can imagine such a beast, such a beast, such a hybrid of music and cacophony, of art and sleaze, of brilliance and banality, then you have some idea of what Lanford Wilson's Balm in Gilead is like.

Wilson's walk on the wild side is set in a New York City greasy spoon. This diner serves as an oasis in the urban wasteland for more than 20 outcasts and losers of every stripe--hoods, hustlers, whores, queens, dykes, drunks, punks and junkies.

WILSON aims for verisimilitude in his diner's atmosphere, which means that all 22 characters are often talking at once. It takes some time for the audience to learn which conversations to listen to at any moment, or even which character is which. Still, most of the characters, like musicians, have in their dialogue recognizable themes and rhythms. Director Paul Dervis deserves praise for his orchestration of this symphony of fear and loathing, keeping it somewhere between the rigidity of a baroque set of variations and the looseness of a free-form jazz improvisation.

Individual soloists do emerge for the occasional aria. Notable among these is Dopey (David Frisch), a heroin addict who steps out of the diner and into the audience to explain the psychological motivations of other characters. There is also a chorus of drunks and junkies who offer a street rap about their lives, which consist mainly of waiting for the next drink or the next nickel bag.

Balm in Gilead continually invites these musical analogies, even down to Wilson's ironic use of a title of an old spiritual for the play's title. The Alley Theater takes the analogy one step further with Emery Davis' score, itself a mixture of various musical styles, which plays in the background during the entire show.

INTO Balm's society of antisocials, whose only law is "me first" stumble two comparatively well-off and friendly misfits. Joe (C.J. Nolan) is a middle-class hustler looking for a piece of the drug-pushing action, and Darlene (Jacqueline Grad) is a woman unaccustomed to the "big city" (she's from Chicago) who is looking for an office job. It is no surprise that they are attracted to each other, and their relationship, though there is not enough compassion or love in it to call it a romance, offers the only hope in the play that anyone will overcome the entropy that afflicts them all.

But that hope diminishes as it becomes painfully obvious that Darlene and Joe are simply too weak to cope with life on the street. Darlene's weakness is an overpowering naivete, which Grad conveys with nervous energy, a squeaky voice, a too-loud laugh and a skyward gaze. She is usually effective, though her histrionics sometimes reach the point of parody and make her look like Ellen Greene's skid-row princess in Little Shop of Horrors.

Nolan is less effective as Joe, whose weakness is a staggering indecision, particularly over whether to sell or to return the hundreds of pills he borrowed on consignment from a vengeful drug kingpin. Nolan conveys this indecision mostly by sulking and pouting.

The other actors succeed in creating realistic characters even before the show begins as they ad lib in character on the stage while the audience is being seated. Later, when 22 of them are talking at once, the actors reinforce their characters through gestures, imaginative costumes, and for Tara Dolan's world-weary hooker, lots of perfume.

Today's jaded audiences may not find Balm as shocking as did those who saw it when the then unknown Wilson first produced it in 1965. Still, the Alley Theater production commands attention because, at its best, it displays the sweep and energy of a symphony orchestra--or perhaps the Mahavishnu Orchestra. At its least, Balm in Gilead is an entertaining evening of voyeurism, a chance to go slumming without going farther than Inman Square.