Third and Indiana

Arden Theatre Co., 40 N. 2nd St., through May 4, 922-8900.

I liked Steve Lopez's novel, Third and Indiana. It's not Great Literature, but it has the gritty authenticity of a world observed by a professional observer, as Lopez, a journalist, is. It has something more than moral outrage over drug-dealing teenagers and neighborhoods forfeit to maniacal gangsters and children murdered; moral outrage, after all, is a buck a bushel. The novel has convincing characters who have inner lives, thoughts, habits of mind, superstitions, quirks, unresolved wishes, complicated guilts. Its plot is exciting and rushes onward, powered by narrative drive. It is filled with odd and disturbing visual images and shocking violence and desperate repetitions. Novel stuff. Not stage stuff.

Aaron Posner, who both directed and adapted the novel (aided by Bernard Gray, a teenager who helped him with the street slang), was quoted by Daisy Fried in her recent City Paper cover story as saying, "A play is the inverse of a book." That means, I guess, that if you jump genres, forcing something to be something else, "inversing" it, turning it inside out, you run the risk of losing the value of the original, the very thing that appealed to you in the first place. If Third and Indiana was going to become anything other than the novel it is, it should have been a movie, not a play that proceeds by fits and starts, interrupted over and over by scene changes and intermissions, by entrances and exits. Then, even if you had lost the depth of the characters, you could retain the relentless pace to its terrible conclusion, with lots of cinematic visuals and a big cast and a real sense of place — urban, dark and panicky.

The story revolves around Gabriel (Gueshill Gilman Wharwood), a North Philly teenager, a sensitive artist who deals drugs. He has run away from home. His mother (Joilet F. Harris) rides her bicycle through the neighborhood every night looking for him, aided by a naive, earnest priest (Scott Greer) and a tough cop (H. Michael Walls). Gabriel's boss, the neighborhood druglord, subtly named Diablo (Elvis O. Nolasco), is evil incarnate, a sadistic, stylish cobra. Meanwhile, Gabriel meets Eddie (Paul L. Nolan), a schnook from South Philly, who has left his family and gotten himself in trouble with the mob. His pal Mike (John Lumia) conceives a plan to rob the mayor's corpse of a diamond ring which, when they fence it, will solve everybody's problems. Right.

The caricatures rather than characters pander to every prejudice in the audience; the Italians are ridiculous cartoons, the African Americans are either vicious or victims, and every crucial scene of emotional or moral crisis is broken by a laugh line, effectively trivializing the characters and their ordeals. There is a great scene with the house movers, and the fight choreography (Darla Max) is effective. John Lumia is hilarious. Elvis O. Nolasco is terrifying. Everybody else ranges from OK to amateur. The cornball conclusion sentimentalizes this shallow show and left me feeling I'd just watched an afterschool special with bad language.

— Toby Zinman

Place Your Free Classified Ad

browse the current issue

view issue as pdf

Current Issue

Blogs

Music

DJ Nights
Rock Listings

City Paper

Interact

Join the Mailing List

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%