HOWLER

Steve Yockey’s new play isn’t new, and it isn’t a play.

The first contention first: Part of a new promotional concept of “rolling world premieres” designed specifically to hype theaters and the scripts they mount, Wolves already played in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Tempe last year. This isn’t a tour; it’s four different productions at four different theaters. And yet this Celebration Theatre production is billed as a world premiere. The billing sells tickets, and the fact that four theaters have produced this show makes it much more likely to get published with the name of the world premiere theater printed inside the front cover. Win-win for everyone who doesn’t have to sit through it.

Matthew Magnusson, Andrew Crabtree and Katherine Skelton

The second contention: This isn’t a play, it’s a first act, a one-hour sketch packed with banal characters, clunky dialogue, and (generously) half a story. A gay man brings home another gay man, whom his jealous, paranoid gay roommate murders. Par for a Steve Yockey effort, Wolves includes some extremely late-arriving supernatural elements that add nothing to plot or mood and contradict previously introduced themes and motifs. This piece of writing is yet another example of a thing produced regionally not as a workshop but as a ready-for-the-boards show, when in fact it’s so muddy and incoherent and brief and ugly that if Steve Yockey hadn’t written it, nobody but the most aggressive pro-queer advocate would have considered mounting it. There’s no exploration of relationships, no story, no point.

Nathan Mohebbi and Matthew Magnusson

Director Michael Matthews is stuck here with a lame and halting script and does the best he can. His love for the writer’s work (Mr. Matthews recently directed Mr. Yockey’s Very Still and Hard to See at the Lex Theatre) shows in the care he takes to stage this thing as if it were a play. He frames the laugh lines and the shocks and abets Mr. Yockey’s theatricality with some of his own. He directs the actors, to the varying degrees that they can take direction, toward real motivations and characters. Without help from the script, though, the actors achieve at best one-dimensional portraits of life, which is more than the playwright has done. At least, in accordance with the new vision of co-artistic director Michael A. Shepperd, everybody keeps his pants on in this Celebration Theatre production.

Matthew Magnusson, Katherine Skelton and Andrew Crabtree

photos by Matthew Brian Denman

Wolves
Celebration Theatre in Hollywood
ends on May 5, 2013
for tickets, visit Celebration