Not since Late Night Theatre staged Sweet Charity in a former strip joint has there been a better match between venue and play than Gorilla Theatre's States of Shock at the El Torreon Ballroom. The play unfolds in a coffee shop and, with the audience members sitting in circular booths or at cafe tables, it's as if they're fellow diners not meaning to eavesdrop. Alas, everything fortuitous about this synergy evaporates once the play begins.
Sam Shepard's antiwar diatribe brings five people into a diner called Danny's. Two weirdly connected military vets carry on as if they've escaped from an asylum while, across the restaurant, a grumpy middle-aged couple kvetches about their delayed order of clam chowder. And there's a fumbling waitress whose inability to carry a tray is perhaps the clunkiest metaphor ever staged. It seems the older vet's son was killed in the Gulf War, and he's brought one of his son's wounded peers to the diner to mark the anniversary of that death -- with banana splits, no less.
States of Shock has the subtlety of a bullhorn; it's less a slice of life than an unwieldy slab of text. There's nothing to recommend it except perhaps as an example of how a playwright like Shepard has the clout to get such ponderous writing published.
And this production is painful on several levels, due to the room's unforgiving acoustics and Robin Zeplin's misguided direction. Playing the brusque, militarily dressed Colonel, lead actor Walter Winch assaults the audience and his lines by consistently screaming -- a problem that should have been easy to fix because no one else on stage produces such a clamor. As the younger grunt, Tom Jones periodically blows a whistle that pierces eardrums like a knitting needle. Zeplin seems to believe that maximum volume creates maximum meaning -- which might work if the play had any meaning to maximize or if the cast had the ability to bring any life to its lines. But the score is zero on both counts.
In light of the current state of things, a scene in which three of the five characters strap on gas masks has the potential to be a frightening mirror of the times. But the acting is so poor and the production's energy so phony and inert that the only burning question States of Shock arouses is "When will it end?" Answer: 65 minutes after it starts.