Strutting in the Lower Depths

By RICHARD CORLISS

BALM IN GILEAD by Lanford Wilson

In the realm of today's performing arts, energy is an overvalued coin. Its name is invoked to trumpet every gonadal excess from heavy metal to slasher movies.

It is used as a populist club to pulverize the old elitist verities: grace, wit, precision, proportion, coherence. No walking of the fine narrative line for the apostles of anarchy, whose police-siren song goes like this: Wake up, pal! Get out of your fusty drawing room and hit the streets! The Aristotelian unities are dead! Modern life is chaos, and this time around, art is life set to a whomping backbeat that never lets up. When society has fallen apart, don't pick up the pieces, just admire them where they fall.

Energy -atomic, unharnessed, virulent -abounds in Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater Company revival of Balm in Gilead, the Lanford Wilson dope opera that was first produced in 1965. The set may depict a grungy, all-night coffee shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, but it soon takes on the sulfurous glow of the lower depths: a rush-hour subway car, say, some time during World War III. Junkies, hookers, drag queens, derelicts, ganefs and hit men rub up against Joe (Danton Stone) and Darlene (Laurie Metcalf), a couple too amiable or dense to survive the Nighttown scene till morning. "They every one of them steal," one denizen grumbles, and steal they do: money, drugs, a cup of coffee, a shred of strutting self-respect, another minute of free-for-all banter before collapsing in sleep or death.

Stage-managing the zoo-parade is a strung-out addict named Dopey (Gary Sinise), who looks and acts like a guerrilla refugee from the Twilight Zone. Sinise is one of the founders of Steppenwolf, an admirable community of switch-hitting theater folk in business for a decade and lately receiving wider acclaim for their Manhattan transfers of Sam Shepard's True West and C.P. Taylor's And a Nightingale Sang ... The director of Balm in Gilead is John Malkovich, who now seems on the springboard to stardom with his roles in Broadway's Death of a Salesman and the film Places in the Heart. In his liberal adaptation of Wilson's text, Malkovich has shown some up-front ingenuity: spotlighting or freeze-framing a conversation, orchestrating the Ivesian symphony of invective, offering instant replays of the climactic murder. But chaos still reigns. It is as if the frat brothers from Animal House, instead of Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, decided to put the show on right here.

Actors love to appear in this kind of play, whether it is a tattered valentine to eccentricity like The Time of Your Life or a dopers' tone poem like The Connection or this dated, indifferent travelogue through the seventh circle of hell. An actor can both inhabit his character and stand outside it, flashing signals to the audience that say, "I'm not really this lowlife, but it's fun to pretend." Perhaps that is why the audience at off-Broadway's spacious new Minetta Lane Theater, where Balm moved last week after a successful run at the Circle Rep, looks to be enjoying the play a bit too much for its own good. They are sharing not a drink of human dregs but a celebration of show biz in all its volcanic, specious theatricality. Such are the seductions of energy.