A HYMN WITHOUT
THE HALLELUJAH

A polished, well-acted drama that never quite ignites

Hymn by playwright Lolita Chakrabarti is a well-crafted piece, with detailed characters and dialogue that is enunciated with sincerity. Drina Durazo of Lower Depth Theatre, in collaboration with The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble’s Sally Essex-Lopresti, has mounted a slick two-man drama, which director Gregg T. Daniel has staged with a deft touch and stunning attention to detail. The crew at the Odyssey Theatre has performed to the high standard one would expect of LA’s premiere Equity Waiver venue for the last half-century. A tip of the hat to set designer Stephanie Kerley Schwartz, costume designer Wendell D. Carmichael, and a “big tip” to Donny Jackson for his subdued but evocative lighting work.

And neither actor Jason Delane nor Chuma Gault can be faulted for any flaw in their performances or accused of the least deficiency in talent.

Hymn presents all the “Snap and Crackle” one desires in a…

Excuse me, I meant to say, all the “Snap and Crackle” that could possibly…

Uh-oh…  Houston, we have a problem. Someone forgot to bring the “Pop.”

And that someone was the playwright.

The title, Hymn, is misleading. Though a church service bookends the work’s ninety-five minutes, the piece boasts scant religion; the title is just a play on those personal pronouns that seem to be all the rage nowadays.

Benny (Delane), a man beset by the usual demons, whose closet excludes any proper suits due to the many skeletons, comes to a memorial service to meet for the first time the respectable and successful Gil (Gault). There, Benny springs on Gil, who is grieving for his recently deceased father, that they share that grief and that father.

My suspicious mind jumped to how this “con” would unravel, but unravel it never did.

Next, I began to seek the conflict such an extraordinary event would naturally generate. That was like looking for a lemonade stand in the Gobi Desert. In “A Note From the Director,” Daniel calls Hymn “deceptively simple.” He is wrong; it is just straight-out “simple.”

Gil and Benny like each other, and the audience likes them. We all could have ended up around a campfire singing “Kumbaya” if someone had brought the marshmallows.

Nothing is blatantly wrong with Hymn, except that it is just exasperatingly unexciting. Theatre should be, needs to be exciting.

Some might defend this work as a “slice of life.” Well, in my experience, even the slightest slice of life tends to be rather messy, chaotic, and noisy. All of which can make for good theatre. With Hymn, the “slice of life” Chakrabarti has placed on the Odyssey’s stage is a teacup.

But it’s a very pretty teacup.

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photos by Cooper Bates

Hymn
Odyssey Theatre Ensemble and Lower Depth Theatre
Odyssey Theatre, 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd
Fri* and Sat at 8; Sun at 3
95 minutes with no intermission
ends on June 14, 2026
for tickets ($35+$3 credit card fee), call 310.477.2055 ext. 2 or visit Odyssey Theatre

for more shows, visit Theatre in Los Angeles

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