Heartbreak Hot 1

THE RESIDENTS of the decaying Hotel Baltimore sit in the lobby all day long, waiting for the end. While the wrecking ball has yet to demolish the once-grand lodging house, the hotel's human mulch pile has already begun rotting amid the vinyl sofas and plastic chairs.

That is all they do. In Lanford Wilson's off-Broadway hit, the inmates and their equally downtrodden keeper yell, moan, squawk and whimper at each other for about two hours. When the play ends, their home is one day closer to its demise: so are they; nothing else has changed. Because the play has virtually no plot, it relies entirely on its characters to propell it along and keep its audience interested. And because the actors in this Dunster House production make the residents neither believable nor interesting, Hot I Baltimore makes for an almost unrelievedly dreary evening of theater.

As the play opens, the omens seem propitious enough. Director and set designer Brian Sands has endowed the wood-panelled Dunster dining room with just the right touch of seediness--probably not too difficult given the age and condition of most Harvard dining halls.

A harried desk clerk (Peter Howard) is making wake-up calls and morosely entertaining the predictable series of complaints about noise, lack of hot water and general decay. (It sounds more and more like a Harvard House.) Enter a pint-sized pixie of bountiful energy and non-stop chatter. She is never given a name, though she becomes the play's main character: her anonymity seems intended to make her a sort of Everywoman. The character blends saint and sinner both with startling speed, making for a difficult role. Jennifer Raiser does not pull it off. In her earnest enthusiasm, she tramples many of her own lines as well as those of other cast-members. Her incessant whine grows tiresome as we see her change from an apparently naive waif (inexplicably wearing a Harvard sweatshirt) to a hot-pantsed hooker.

As more characters filter into the lobby, it becomes increasingly obvious that the Baltimore has turned into a flop house. (The missing "e" in the title shows not only how the neon sign has fared, but also hints at the new raison d'etre of the establishment.) Two or more stock hookers-with-hearts-of-gold wander in, complaining about the hot water and "business." They fare little better than Raiser, particularly Ann Diamond as April, who seems to have been given the role solely for her alarming shock of blond hair. Her arms flailing with almost every line, she demonstrates her remarkable unsuitability throughout, but particularly when confronted with a cigarette--ain't no hooker who smokes like that. Sarah Slusser at least has a better part to work with as Suzy, the hooker with dreams of domestic happiness, but she, too, slips into a come-up-and-see-me-some-time-big-boy caricature.

Wilson has created one character of more than passing interest and, fortunately, the role features Hot I Baltimore's best performer. Jackie (Melissa Franklin) is an aging and angry hippie, who wants to take her sickly brother (John Gersten) to Utah where they can make a new life growing natural food. With a wonderfully husky voice, Franklin creates a character of suprising complexity: the world traveler who says she's seen it all and then buys 20 acres of Utah real estate from a radio ad; the flower child who steals from an old man. She has the good fortune to have the best lines in the show. When asked where she'll stay in Utah, she says, "The country's gone to shit; there's always a motel." But Franklin's insightful portrayal only makes the shortcomings of the rest of the cast more painfully obvious.

HOT L BALTIMORE's script holds a scarcely concealed elegiac tone, accentuated by the date of the action: Memorial Day, 1972. Wilson's cast of losers looks nostalgically at the trains that pass through nearby Union Station, but they live in a world that doesn't care about the past, that churns up the present and those who live in it, and then spits them out, forgotten. It's the old Cuckoo's Nest Syndrome; the inmates at the Hot I know what's going on, but no one is listening.

The script does indeed have a richness that this production, with its cadre of ill-suited performers, cannot mine. When the cast at Dunster House talks (usually yells) at each other in that delapidated old lobby, there is much worth hearing. But the performers don't seem to care what each other have to say. And that, as Wilson tries to point out, is precisely the problem.