Theatre Review —

A Scotch Broth, And The Dog

Is Good

By Julie Stern

NEW HAVEN — “Well it’s like scotch broth,” said a friend recently as six of us were sitting at a table trying to articulate our feelings about the play we had just seen, David Rabe’s The Dog Problem. The work is currently in production at Long Wharf Theatre.

She went on to explain, “Scotch broth is when you take barley and lamb and add them to all the leftovers you have that you don’t want to go to waste, and cook them up into a nice healthy main dish soup. Only you can never finish it and you still end up with leftovers.”

The Dog Problem started life as a 15-minute comic sketch about the Mafia putting out a contract on a dog. After it was retooled into a one-act play in 1998, the director, Scott Ellis, urged playwright Rabe to turn it into a full-length work, requiring the addition of a whole lot of barley and lamb.

There are shades of Mamet and Albee here (in their early years), the confrontational in-your-face kind of weird conversations that made me bored and uncomfortable in The Zoo Story and American Buffalo — only I enjoyed this play a whole lot more. In these dialogues the characters do listen to each other.

The characters inhabit the mean streets of New York’s lower east side, where a marginal loser named Ray manages to offend Teresa, the sister of a Mafioso-wannabe named Joey, by allowing his dog to be present at their one-night-stand. Seeking to avenge his sister’s honor, Joey accosts Ray on the street and threatens him. However, feeling that this isn’t sufficient, he turns to his Uncle Malvolio, a genuine gangster, for help.

An invalid in a wheelchair, Malvolio welcomes the opportunity for some diversion. He decrees that Ray will be given a choice: his own life, or the dog’s; one of them will be shot by Malvolio’s personal bodyguard and hitman, Tommy Stones. Chuckling, he explains, “Of course we wouldn’t actually whack the guy — just make him think we will, enough to make him choose the dog. Then for the rest of his life this guy will have to live with the knowledge that he betrayed his dog, whom he loved, because he was a coward. Can you imagine a worse punishment?”

This leads to a scene of excruciating psychological cruelty that ends the first act, taking the play out of the comic mode of Godfather parody and turning it into a study of a culture of amoral viciousness.

In the second act, Ray has married Teresa and they are expecting a baby. The plot revolves around Ray’s erstwhile friend, a drifter named Ronnie, who has some kind of paranormal power that enables him to know things about other people.

Malvolio, who is worried about what awaits him after death, demands an audience so that Ronnie can help him. This leads to a tangled late night confrontation in a park between Malvolio, Ronnie, Ray, Tommy Stones and a local priest on his way to mass.

The acting, with Joe Pacheco as Ronnie, Larry Clarke as Ray, David Wike as Joey, Victor Argo as Uncle Malvolio, Tony Cucci as Tommy Stones, Andrea Gabriel as Teresa and Michael Kell as the priest, is uniformly impeccable. And there is Ed the dog (the consensus of the ladies’ room was that nobody was sure what the play meant, but everyone loved the dog!).

Scott Ellis’ directing is tense and on target and Allen Moyer’s sets, a moody evocation of what the playbill calls “Urban Nighttime,” is very effective, like an Edward Hopper painting brought to life.

When playwright Rabe was dealing with the Vietnam War (Streamers, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel or the Sean Penn movie Casualties of War), he had more to actually say. The Dog Problem is more of what Graham Greene used to call “an entertainment.”

But as with Greene, whose entertainments were just as gripping and stylistically perfect as his serious novels, you can enjoy anything David Rabe spins out, because he is that talented a writer.

So this is definitely worth seeing — for the acting, the production, and the startling twists and bends of the plot. Just don’t worry about its meaning.