Hopeless Nights, Dreamless Days

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

SLAB BOYS by John Byrne

For all their vaunted coolness of acting technique, the British seem to demand that their plays make heated arguments. The enemy may be imperialism, fascism, racism, even male chauvinism or the belabored-to-death class system, but an enemy there must be. Americans often make a hash of British plays, mangling not just the accents but the invective. Sometimes, though, an American director's instinctively naturalistic approach, evoking a slice of life, can soften a didactic play and give it newfound emotional depth.

That happy circumstance has befallen Slab Boys, a burst of bitter memory from Scottish Playwright John Byrne about the hopeless nights and dreamless days of young men who grind dyes in the "slab room" of a carpet factory near Glasgow. When first produced in New York, off-Broadway in 1980, the play seemed a programmatic denunciation of the social order, as personified by two pompous functionaries and by a blazered young prig who was passing through the slab room on his foreordained way up.

As reconceived by Director Robert Allan Ackerman, however, the play is a dark comedy that chronicles the ceaseless small betrayals committed against one another by the discontented. The working-class victims suffer most from their own lack of drive, discipline and vision. The functionaries are somewhat pitiable; the scion of privilege is doltishly well meaning rather than imperiously smug. As a result, the play is more poignant and its eruptions of violence truly unsettling.

The themes of privation and sardonic defiance are conveyed at first glance. The set, designed by Playwright Byrne, is the slab room, dingy as a tenement, yet spattered with paint as cheerfully as a Jackson Pollock canvas. The only ornament is a poster of the slab boys' hero, the rebel without a cause, James Dean. Standing beneath it, a young man studiously paints a watch onto his wrist. He soon makes plain what the audience guesses: in this knockabout environment, even a watch is an unattainable badge of advancement.

Slab Boys is drawing an uncustomary Broadway audience, many in leather jackets and punk haircuts, perhaps because the cast features leading exponents of baby-faced macho: Kevin Bacon (Fenwick in the movie Diner), Sean Penn (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), Jackie Earle Haley (Breaking Away) and Val Kilmer.

Bacon, a notably venturesome and versatile young actor, wavers in and out of a Scottish brogue but ably blends charm, petulance, wit and selfishness as a would-be artist who counts on his talent to lift him up. Penn persuasively portrays a clever lad who is so defeated that he cannot imagine a light, or even an end to the tunnel. The two young men's high-kicking, cruel humor works better in the play's free-form first act than in the second, which is overladen with plot. But at every moment they capture the futile bravado of the out-but-not-down, and make the play seem a substantial addition to a season largely devoid of both humor and social conscience.

--By William A. Henry III This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.