Hurlyburly: Coke is tough, being a man tougher

The Living Room’s electric revival of Hurlyburly caps a spring theater season that has hummed with masculine energy. Director Bryan Moses’ production exposes a male angst so manic and so thick that you picture the stage crew hosing testosterone off the walls after every performance.

David Rabe’s unwieldy endurance test of a play follows four 1980s film-industry professionals and the women they pass around like joints. In the sparse Los Angeles bungalow where all the action takes place, the diet is simple: cocaine, liquor and self-loathing.

That lifestyle has taken a toll on Eddie, an emotionally infantile casting director who rants about Vegas and the Middle East while snorting a heroic amount of blow. It’s hard to find much in Eddie to love, but veteran Kyle Hatley captures a paranoid vulnerability that both lures and repels. He’s enthralling.

Screenwriter Artie (Tim Ahlenius) overcompensates for his insecurities with confident airs and “gifts” like Donna, an up-for-anything teenager he delivers to his friends as a “care package” for them to treat like a blow-up doll.

Forrest Attaway is brilliant as Eddie’s friend Phil, a struggling actor who swaggers around the bungalow, looking for blood whenever he perceives a slight against him. He’s violent, particularly toward women, but he still longs for his ex-wife and coos over his new daughter.

Mickey (Rusty Sneary) is Eddie’s fellow casting director, the yin to his yang. He alone among these fractured men seems immune to the anxiety that racks the group. Nothing shakes his deadpan cynicism and practiced ease. Sneary delivers Mickey’s lines with the smooth, confident air of a pickup artist — this guy belongs in Hollywood.

The sparse, intimate set on the Living Room’s first floor keeps the focus on these four personalities, and Moses keeps Rabe’s slick speeches from flagging. Hurlyburly plays out like a coke-fueled fever dream, and the actors mostly keep up with the grueling pace that it demands. Saturday’s show ran three hours and 45 minutes, with two 10-minute intermissions.

Not that you’ll be checking your watch. Act II, especially, races along. Eddie has called on Bonnie, self-proclaimed “drug person” and exotic “balloon dancer,” to be with Phil. She saunters around with a drink in one hand and a joint in the other, flirting and doing lines with an alacrity that even Eddie might admire. Katie Gilchrist brings dignity and strength to the role; Bonnie might be the gang’s go-to good-time girl, but she’s able to match their energy and eloquence without sacrificing humanity. (There’s also great work by Natalie Liccardello, as Eddie’s “dynamite bitch” of a girlfriend, and by promising newcomer Alice Pollack.)

Bonnie’s entrance marks a turning point in Rabe’s script, and as the booze flows, tempers boil. Eddie gets steadily drunker (and crueler) over the course of the act, and Hatley captures his slurred speech and ambling gait perfectly. “We all know we don’t mean shit in one another’s eyes, finally,” he says, desperate to wound.

Hurlyburly depends on the strength of its performances, and the cast here hits so hard in the first two acts that the final third of the play is a bit of a letdown. This is largely built in: Rabe’s script doesn’t really take the characters anywhere new. Eddie starts the play as a coke fiend falling to pieces and ends the play … as a coke fiend falling to pieces. Rabe riffs on a few potential sources for Eddie’s existential angst — the neutron bomb (remember that this is the 1980s), infant-formula dependency in the Third World — but nothing coalesces satisfactorily. The result is a finale that feels unfocused and muddled, with an energy like the weapon he rails against: indiscriminately destructive.

By then, though, the Living Room’s production has churned out big laughs and raw emotions at furious speed, kicking up an intellectual and emotional whirlwind. If nothing else, this Hurlyburly is a potent reminder that cocaine is a hell of a drug.