Ben

by Jon Dorf

directed by Scott Schwartz

at the Loeb Experimental Theater

I didn't want this job. I couldn't see the point in reviewing John Dorf's Ben since nobody can see it now, whether they want to or not. "Review it for the actors," my editor said. "They'll read it."

OK. For the actors, and for the record, the acting was pretty good. Henry Wiley did a good job as the title character, a homeless teenager. He managed to be alienated and troubled without being sullen. Older actors James Morgan and Connie Dawson gave especially lively readings as a restauranteur and a bag lady, respectively. Most of the other parts didn't get much stage time, but everyone was consistent and fairly appealing. I wouldn't mind watching them again.

The play itself was more troublesome. I hope that Jon Dorf's next play will be, as it ought, shorter and better. These two things are linked: the overwhelming fault of Ben was that it was too damn long. Dorf tried to capture the relationship between Ben and the Baxter, the restaurant owner, by making their dialogue strained, which led to deliberate pauses of up to 40 seconds between lines. Yes, I did time it. I had nothing better to do. Moreover, the restaurant guy was supposed to be a windbag, and Dorf went at the job too eagerly. His monologues were written to be really, really boring. Dreadfully boring. Without Morgan's skill in the part, I might well have started screaming in pain. As was, I discovered that you can rearrange the letters in "Jon Dorf" to spell "no fjord," and the letters in "Loeb Ex" to spell "eel box." By such means did I cling to sanity.

The larger issues? The relationship between the homeless and rest of society was dealt with much too glibly. There was a lot of "Hey, Harvard, you don't see all this and it's right in front of you." Yeah. Dorf's vision wasn't really revelatory or shocking; his homeless characters were conventionalized to a sort of bland pissed-offedness that no number of references to Au Bon Pain could infuse with reality. And the seamy side of it all--the drug abuse, the prostitution that gives Ben a chance at quick money--felt like it came from the Young Adult section of the library.

The staging was conventional too, at least for the Loeb Ex. There was a lot of ordinary self-consciously weird stuff, flashing lights and dream sequences and bursts of music. Bit actors would sometimes go from being people to furniture to symbolic monsters, in a matter of seconds. Sometimes it was hard to tell which was which, but it never really mattered. More stuff that could have been cut without hurting the play any. There was one appealing scenery idea, putting pizza boxes on top of trash cans to serve as restaurant tables. That was cool.

What is comes down to is this: I didn't enjoy Ben, but that won't change anything in the world. The lights came up, the audience applauded enthusiastically, and Ben's brief life was over. It had decent acting and cool posters. Now there will be other plays, some, no doubt, by Jon Dorf. Time marches.