Jesus Hopped the "A" Train

Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train: Hard Time

Hyde Park Theatre, through Aug. 23

Running Time: 2 hrs, 35 min

Perhaps the most deflating experience you can have going to the theatre is witnessing a youthful, enthusiastic, and highly capable ensemble wasting its talents, and our time, on a play that is overstuffed with sound and fury but signifies nothing.

The artists of this Mainline Theater Project production have committed completely to their characters, to the play, to the very essence of theatre -- the open invitation to share a story with the community, the thing that makes theatre the last social art form. From the friendly actors lingering in the alley over a cigarette as the audience arrives to the pleasant and helpful house staff, Mainline exudes that familiar Austin sensibility that combines a welcome informality with a serious commitment among the performers, who give it their all. Sadly, what they have given their all to is a long-winded, superficial, ultimately unenlightening story of ruined life in the New York City criminal justice system, complete with the Hollywood-ized cast of the Sadistic Guard, the Weak-but-Nice Guard, the Ambitious-to-the-Point-of-Fatally-Flawed Girl Public Defender, the Holy-Roller Serial Killer (African-American), and the Crushed-by-the-System First-Time Felon (Latino). Squandered lives? Heroes? Victims of the system? Who really cares? The script reeks of old news in these days of Camp X-Ray, the scorching-hot holding "pens" of Iraq, and the wholesale assault on the Constitution by Messrs. Ashcroft and company. There's prison, and then there's prison.

Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis doesn't seem to know whose story of his five characters is most compelling, so he works all of them -- at length and into the ground. Guirgis writes drawn-out, circular speeches with artificial climaxes and forced dramatic twists. Illogical character developments force the obtuse plot along its lurching path, and the evangelical undercurrent that might provide a ray of light to the grim proceedings instead winds up a bludgeon of justification and shifted blame in a play that just never seems to end.

If you can stomach the overlong speechifying and lack of imagination in the plot, you can at least marvel at the actors' commitment to their characters. As problematic as the writing is, each actor embraces the story of his or her character and makes a huge effort over the course of the play. Sedrick Keeler is unstoppable as the born-again serial killer Lucius Jenkins, achieving a sense of age mixed with increasing desperation. Is he really finding Jesus? Or is he clinging harder and harder to any belief in a world of frayed sanity? Jose Marenco gives Angel Cruz honest-to-goodness street cred (with language that would char the ears of younger audiences). Ben Wolfe offers a single dimension to sadist guard Valdez, but blame that on the writing; for Wolfe, usually playing nice guys or fanciful characters, it's a sharp change of face. Joshua Painting plays "good" guard Charlie D'Amico with effective simplicity. And in the worst-written role of the lot, Elissa Linares manages to find some heart in compelling stories that help illuminate the doomed lawyer Mary Jane Hanrahan's wrong-headed choices.

Director/co-set designer Jeremy Sexton doesn't seem to have a sense of the play's arc, and the visually provocative design that he and R. Bryan Peterson provide is flawed in a way that undermines the play's reality-driven world: The cell doors sometimes open on their own. And while shouting is no doubt inherent in a painful prison world, in the intimate Hyde Park space it's just painful. Their huge commitment to the cause marks Mainline's artists as ones to watch as they continue to make theatre. Next time, may the chosen vehicle have as much depth as the participants have heart.