BLAM!

by Toby Zinman

I don't know why the umbrella title for these two plays is Blam! since there is nothing even remotely exciting or shocking about either one. Self-Indulgence would be a more accurate title, since both plays seem to enjoy talking just for the sake of stringing words together — rarely have I sat through an emptier two-plus hours. The first hour (feels like three) is "Sleep Study" by Betsy Herbert, and she may found have a marketable cure for insomnia. It is the account of a 12-day NASA study in sleep deprivation. There is a cot center stage, with three video monitors above that show the same film clips slightly out of sync, apparently intentionally, although not meaningfully. We are treated to a moronic orientation video, which lasts a full 15 minutes, detailing anal thermometers, food choices and an extended analogy of the subjects as go-carts. Various characters emerge, revealing more of the author's patronizing attitude toward working-class women and black men than anything else. There is a long film of a driving test on day number eight; by day 10 she babbles a long nonsensical dream, washes out of the experiment and the show ends. The potentially fascinating subjects of sleep, space travel and people's various motives for participating in potentially damaging experiments are never touched on.

The second play, "These Are the Deb Tapes," is about a young woman's experiences when her schizophrenic father runs away from his halfway house and is missing for months. Her desperate attempts to find him, her worry, her love and her guilt all get lost in the pretentious fragmentation of the play's confused structure. At first I thought that the two microphones, three tape recorders and three video monitors were supposed to represent the fragmentation of a broken mind, but nothing that interesting or purposeful emerges. There is a long introductory song which is embarrassingly bad, and a long Blake recitation which is embarrassingly useless. If Deb Disbrow thinks this even approaches Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," she is sadly mistaken.

The plays' similarities extend beyond pointless rambling: Both are solo shows, performed by their authors, using the all-too-prevalent device of "direct address," which often strikes me as an excuse to sidestep the difficult demands of the theatrical medium. In both plays, the actors attempt to convey different characters by changing their voices — but this is so poorly done that it is frequently impossible to distinguish one from another. If David Disbrow, who directed both, actually exerted any influence over either performance, it is not visible.

BLAM! $#151; Through July 3, Eastern Union Theater Company at Walnut Street Studio Theater, Ninth and Walnut sts., fifth floor, 215-732-6372