Hurlyburly

Hurlyburly is a big portrait of small-time Hollywood decadence circa the early 1980s. Four guys loosely connected to the entertainment business sit around a living room generously provisioned with joints, cocaine, pills and booze, of which they partake all day and night. The men are cynical about their careers, though only one of them actually seems to work. They’re extremely bitter toward their respective ex-wives, they know next to nothing of the kids they’ve fathered, and they quickly exploit any woman who’s incautious enough to cross their path. They’re highly aware of trends, narcissistic in the extreme, too smart by half, and they haven’t an ethical bone in their bodies.In short, they are the sort of selfish monsters that we’re often told infest the movieland swamp—and, in Hurlyburly, we see them gnaw and snap and sun themselves for about three hours. David Rabe’s script uses great oozing effusions of substance-influenced, motor-mouthed, argumentative dialogue as these guys cut each other down or slither off for sex with a momentarily available female. Paradoxically, the smirking depravity, laced with brainy though paranoid rat-a-tat speeches, is incredibly funny at times, as the four men smile and act like buddies while taking whatever they want.

One critic wrote that Hurlyburly is a play that isn’t so much directed as conducted, and that description makes sense in terms of this production, directed by Ed Claudio. He gets strong performances out of Martin Lain and Michael Begovich in particular—the former nervously bingeing on drugs and yammering, and the latter using a cool, devil-may-care attitude to great effect. Anthony Silva and Mark Heckman round out the quartet.