''Dark Rapture' fails to light up stage

By: Randy Dotinga - For the North County Times

With all the hard-boiled detectives and leggy dames taking up space, film noir has never really had much room for emphasis on plot. When audiences couldn't figure out the convolutions of the classic movie "The Big Sleep," they weren't alone. Author Raymond Chandler wrote the thing, and even he admitted he hadn't the foggiest idea what was going on.

So it's no surprise that "Dark Rapture," a stage-bound tribute to film noir, is hard to follow. What's surprising is how the play, now in a flat production at Palomar College, is almost entirely lacking in the other noir necessities ---- menace, intrigue and lust.

"Dark Rapture" tells the story of a wealthy man who goes missing ---- along with $7 million ---- in the wake of a late-1980s brushfire in Northern California. His wife, who's having an affair with a studly stuntman in Cabo San Lucas, comes back to trouble. Meanwhile, a man who may or may not be her husband travels from Seattle to Key West, creating mysteries of his own.

This is as clear as it gets. There's also a Cuban or two, a couple Turkish-hating Armenian hitmen, and some sort of conspiracy involving the Kennedy assassination.

The playwright, an occasional TV writer named Eric Overmyer, mangles his laugh lines and creates incredibly improbable dialogue: "History is a living wound," intones one of the hitmen, while musing about the Armenian genocide. How many hoodlums sound like they have Ph.D.s in philosophy?

A top-notch production might have made some sense out of all of this. But while Palomar had no problem putting on fantastic versions of the sprawling "The Who's Tommy" and "The Laramie Project" last year, the small scale of "Dark Rapture" seems to have thrown the theater department off its game. Background music drowned out the actors, the set blocked the audience from seeing titles on a projection screen, and the costumes failed to place the play in the 1980s. It all combines to make the two-hour play seem quite a bit longer.

Thankfully, a handful of performers comes to the rescue. Among the men, Ryan Balfour is the most appealing, bringing some real spirit to his role as a tough guy who's intrigued by the missing man's wife.

The women are the best of the bunch, providing some badly needed energy and sex appeal. Tara Donovan is a standout as a saucy Key West barfly, full of so much vivacity that it's as if she walked in from a different play.

Anabella Casanova, blessed with a marquee-friendly name, is good as the wife, while Mollie Samocha adds spice to the difficult role of a Cuban bombshell who must bare nearly all onstage.

With their sizzling performances, the women give a hint about what "Dark Rapture" might have been, if only the playwright had realized that there's more to noir than murder and mayhem.

© Tara Donovan. All Rights Reserved.