Greedy
Karl Gajdusek’s dark comedy travails through the scheming intersections of five unscrupulous individuals willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy their own selfish desires. Plundering one of the worst aspects of the human condition—greed, the play itself suffers from a grasping excessiveness in its entangled plot.
A cryptic phone call to Paul (Kurt Fuller), a doctor with his own professional troubles lures him into a trap laid by Keira (Maggie Lawson), a hustling freeloader who trolls the internet in search of her next easy mark while mooching off her ineffectual brother Louis (Brad Raider). The get-rich scheme is very much like those offshore pleas for help everyone finds in their spam folder. But Keira goes the extra mile by sending the gullible doctor a token for his troubles, a Nazi medal from her father’s collection worth a couple thousand dollars. For Paul, this gesture of good faith validates her troubling story rife with glaring holes and emotional sensationalism.
It’s said that a fool is born every minute, and while Paul may be a fool, his second-wife, a Bosnian minx, Tatiana (Ivana Milicevic) is anything but. With her biological clock ticking, she hears of an abandoned baby at the hospital where Louis’s butch bride, Janet (Amanda Detmer) works as a security guard. Over the course of a couple of visits, Tatiana manipulates Janet before offering her a suitcase full of cash, $100K. Gajdusek doesn’t make it clear however if Tatiana emptied her husband’s bank account or received enough cash advances from credit cards she’s stealthily squirreled away. Either way, she threatens to leave Paul should he ever become poor. When she finally has her baby, that’s exactly what she does.
The issue of the $100K doesn’t add up if you try to follow the money in this play. After a couple of clandestine meetings with Keira, Paul professes his love for a woman he hardly knows. He arranges an exchange of $100K in trade for her valuable Nazi memorabilia. But when Keira admits to her fraud, Paul refuses to believe her and the play falls apart at the seams. We’re left with two suitcases, a broken, disenchanted good Samaritan and a shocking conclusion that garners a few gasps but isn’t worth the trouble it takes to get to this final scene.
Under James Roday’s smart direction, the cast does their level best to make this unbelievable plot and characters seem at the very least plausible. Raider and Lawson nuance their toxic relationship with touches of uncomfortable sexuality but dynamic power plays. Milicevic and Fuller respectively find strains of cruelty and credulity in their scenes. Most of the laughs come from Detmer’s mannish deliveries and bravado.
The intimate space authentically lends a cramped, claustrophobic feel to Kurt Boetcher’s detailed set split between the shabby digs of Louis and Janet’s book-stacked home and the more luxurious space of the doctor’s living room. Rain plays an interesting but undeveloped role in the play, but the sound effects by John Zalewski goes a long way to enhance the mood.
It’s a shame that this play did not live up to the Red Dog Squadron’s successful “EXTINCTION” production last year. The company seems to be following a rather bleak theme here about the murky underbelly of humanity and while the talents of this company lend well to these twisted psychological characters, “greedy” did not leave much to be desired.
“greedy”
Runs through Jan 29
Thurs, Fri, Sat & Sundays at 8pm
El Centro Theatre
804 N. El Centro Avenue
(Be advised that Vine is under construction)
Hollywood, CA 90038
www.reddogsquadron.com