Clean Alternatives: A Review

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When is a play not a play? This approximation of a Buddhist koan – an inscrutable question meant to induce meditative states – is what you may be left with after watching Clean Alternatives. The answer, for those who don’t have time to meditate right now, is, when it’s a mess.

Brian Dykstra’s three-person comedy actually tries to be several plays at once. It borrows its profane, grasping male characters from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and its triangular structure from another Mamet play, Speed-the-Plow. At various times, it also tries to be a vaudeville act, a soul-baring confessional, a political manifesto, and a demonstration of rap-style slam-poetry (which is to say, bad poetry delivered very angrily). What it never quite manages to become, however, is a coherent or plausible piece of theatrical writing – in other words, a play.

Dykstra’s plot is strictly a matter of convenience. It involves the efforts of a couple of high-priced, bottom-dwelling corporate attorneys to gain control of an environmentally friendly company’s pollution credits for the filthy-dirty enterprises they represent. The company’s president, a young woman, rejects their overtures, then accepts them, and finally reneges for good, but not before one of the lawyers falls for her while simultaneously suffering a crisis of conscience about the damage he’s doing to the world.

But enough storyline already. That’s not what Clean Alternatives is interested in. What it really wants to do is yell at us for two and a half hours about perfidious conspiracies between politicians and big business, their corrupt enablers at the Environmental Protection Agency, and the complicity of an American public that believes money is the only worthwhile objective in life. Dykstra tries to put some of this over with a light touch, but he’s so angry and sour about it all that he ends up with that most unfortunate of theatrical paradoxes: a comedy that isn’t funny.

This puts Yellow Taxi’s director and cast in a tough position. Suzanne Delle directs with dispatch and efficiency, but she overscales things too much of the time as if in a search for laughs that just aren’t there. Doug Chilson plays the turncoat lawyer, Mr. Slate, as two different people; first the brash confidence-man with an answer for everything, then, suddenly, the searching corporate refugee, yearning for love and atonement. He looks confused about which person he really is. As Jackie, the young woman, Nadia Taalbi gives a performance characterized mostly by opaque serenity, an attitude that seems bizarre until it becomes apparent that Dykstra has neglected to provide her with any character to play. After that, her listlessness is at least understandable, if not compelling.

The play’s most heroic performance belongs to veteran NH actor Scott Severance, who empties his considerable bag of tricks, and spends prodigious amounts of energy, trying to make something of the play’s dominant character, Mr. Cutter. Severance almost succeeds in turning Cutter into a human being, but when your playwright is only interested in actors as mouthpieces for ideological rage, there are limits to what you can do.

Clean Alternatives will run in downtown Nashua’s beautiful Hunt Building through April 19. If you’ve ever wondered what a script co-written by Michael Moore, Snoop Dog, and the Greenpeace Board of Directors would be like, this one’s for you. For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.