by Maria Staiano-Daniels
Daily Lobo
It's a fact of life - Hollywood will mess you up.
David Rabe's play, "Hurlyburly," now showing at Theatre X, joins classics like "Sunset Boulevard" in depicting the strange, destructive life that the land of illusion and artifice seems to foster.
Director Jeff Anderson said "Hurlyburly" is about people struggling to fit into society while living in a way society rejects. The play charts the dysfunctional relationships and drug habits of a group of friends, almost all of them in the movie business.
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"They're refusing to belong, even though they want to," Anderson said.
The lynchpin of the group is Eddie, a washed-up casting director who owns the apartment where the play is set.
"He's almost like the godfather of the group. Everyone comes to see him or to be around him," said Ryan Cook, who plays Eddie. "He's kind of like the central point of the group. He's also the most on edge."
Cook said he found Eddie's emotional intensity exhausting at times.
"I hit every human emotion possible in three hours," Cook said. "Anger, happy, sad, drunk, high. Any emotion you can name, I hit it."
Actress Kristen Simpson, who plays a stripper named Bonnie, said the intensity of "Hurlyburly" was one of the factors that attracted her to the play.
"I like the extremes of it," she said. "I think it's interesting to see people being so desperate and so angry and so high."
Simpson said not many plays have the emotional range of "Hurlyburly."
"It's nice to have this kind of range and to be able to freak out, kick someone in the face and be OK," she said.
Anderson said he particularly enjoyed the blend of realism and absurdity.
"It's a realistic play for sure, but the characters are kind of absurd. They're way over the top. I like the mix of the realistic world they're in and the absurdist way the characters are brought to life," he said.
Anderson said the play's three-hour length and complicated script were the most serious challenges for him and the cast.
"There's lots of lines where if you just read them, it doesn't make much sense," he said.
Simpson, a graduate student in dramatic writing, said if she took "Hurlyburly" to her professors, they would make her cut at least 40 pages of it.
"The dialogue is really wordy and doesn't contain a lot of punctuation. It goes on for pages with just these commas," she said.
Simpson is confident the play will entertain despite its length.
"There's definitely going to be some sore legs, but it moves very quickly, and it's interesting," she said.
Simpson said the audience will be able to empathize with the issues the play presents.
"No one in this show has a real family, and I think for college students that's something that resonates very clearly," she said.
