Great Idea Finds Arena in War Games

Playwright B.K. Willerford has come up with a great idea for a play: Put nine African American National Guardsmen in the woods during a war games training, make sure one of them is insane, and see what happens. His problematic title--”N---- With Attitudes . . . and Big Guns”--can’t be fully printed in a family newspaper, but the offending word is actually at the heart of the matter.

The play tries to explore the perceived hierarchies among black men, including those who think with their own heads and those who follow along.

As directed by Pamela Hall at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, Willerford’s drama recalls some of the physical, high-charged work that made the late Company Theatre one of L.A.’s most exciting ensembles, while fostering an uneasy, sustained mood of dread. That mood, though, is too often broken by some dubious dramatic choices revealing that the play is, after all, a work in progress.

The story operates in the shadow of Joseph Conrad, with Master Sgt. Cobb (Ty Granderson Jones) a variation on Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” a skilled military man whose bitterness has eaten away at his mind and soul, and whose paranoia has convinced him that his white superiors refuse to give him the promotions he expects. Out on patrol with two loyal privates (played by Luis Beckford and Layon), Cobb makes it up as he goes along and impulsively decides to take prisoner a trio of Guardsmen lost in the woods.

These three, along with another trio who come upon them, are faced with a real problem. Cobb is working with live ammo, a violation of the war games rules, and refuses to allow a wounded sergeant (Kent Washington) to be taken away for medical care. The problems get worse when the jittery armed soldiers, out in the elements during a lightning storm, gun down a white farm boy mistaken for a forest creature. (Here and elsewhere, light designer Joe Morrissey supercharges the action with every effect a small theater can muster.)

Willerford aims to push things to the breaking point, where the logic of Cobb’s madness leads to murder. The logic works dramatically; and the finale, with Cobb utterly collapsing from the inside in a terrifying verbal aria by Jones, is a kind of exclamation mark on everything Cobb has done.

Much of the stage business in between, though, hardly works at all. There are timeouts for guy talk (leave the kiddies at home) that feel more like filler or comic relief than anything to do with the play. There are also some unfortunate lapses into preachy, on-the-nose dialogue that obviously state what would better come across as subtext--especially the core theme of how the divisions between African Americans are at least as great as the divisions between the races.

The casting choices themselves make this point without underlining. Just look, for instance, at the contrast between strongly intimidating Layon and the skinny “uppity n-----” played by David Wendell and Wil Bowers, whom Cobb despises. Stoller is saddled with the weakest business as the wounded, hallucinating, babbling sergeant, while Mark Frazer and Beckford deliver portraits of men who seem penned in by circumstances.

Staginess is always a problem for the war genre (which almost always seems to play out better on the page or screen), and that’s the case here. Still, Dave Moore’s set, full of ominous colors and dirt, is an evocative, symbolic use of space. It’s so good that the Whitmore-Lindley folks might do well to preserve it and quickly put up a play by Samuel Beckett.

BE THERE

“N---- With Attitudes . . . and Big Guns,” Whitmore-Lindley Theatre Center, 11006 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends July 9. $18. (818) 761-0704. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.