Inn crowd

Checking into Williamstown's Hot l Baltimore

by Steve Vineberg

THE HOT L BALTIMORE

By Lanford Wilson. Directed by Joe Mantello. Set design by John Lee Beatty. Lighting by Kenneth L. Posner. Costumes by Laura Bauer. With Becky Ann Baker, Mandy Siegfried, Sara Gilbert, Lois Smith, Helen Hanft, David Wohl, Thomas Sadoski, George Hall, Justin Long, Cyndi Coyne, Sam Rockwell, and Carol Woods. At the Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, through July 16.

In Lanford Wilson's The Hot l Baltimore, a crew of disparate characters gather in the lobby of a magnificent old wreck of a hotel that's doomed to be torn down in a month. Almost all of them live or work there -- managers and desk clerks, retirees, transients, whores who turn tricks out of their rooms. The title refers to the building's (symbolic) crippled neon sign. Despite the specifics of its locale, this is a barroom play, in the manner of The Time of Your Life and The Iceman Cometh; it's about tattered lives striving to find salvation through some kind of temporary connection. The young dope dealer shows up in search of his grandfather, a retired train man who checked out a year ago and has apparently disappeared. The 19-year-old hooker who's been in every state of the union and can't even settle on a name for herself -- the program refers to her simply as "The Girl" -- latches onto his quest; turning up this missing old man becomes her mission. A woman attempts to persuade the manager not to evict her crazy son. In a subplot cribbed from Of Mice and Men, a pair of siblings, misfits, make plans to farm garlic on a plot of land they've just bought, but it turns out to be desert.

This isn't a terribly original play, but the New York Drama Critics Award-winning 1973 production at Circle in the Square ran for three years, and you can see why: with its motley assembly of down-and-outers and its criss-crossing narrative arcs, this kind of drama has a built-in appeal. Eliminate the heavy-handed commentary on the dilapidation of the American community (which actually doesn't seem to have gotten much worse since the Depression-era settings of The Time of Your Life and Of Mice and Men) and what you have is two hours of behavior -- just as in Wilson's earlier Balm in Gilead, which takes place in an all-night diner. The way to make these plays work is to capture the natural rhythms of the characters' lives through their interactions, so that the audience feels it's dropped in on them. That was John Malkovich's triumph in his legendary mid-'80s revival of Balm in Gilead for Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. But though Joe Mantello, in staging The Hot l Baltimore for the Williamstown Theatre Festival, was obviously influenced by the Malkovich production, and though he's working on a dream of a set by John Lee Beatty, he doesn't succeed in creating the mesmerizing ambiance the play cries out for. He pulls it off only once, in a scene where the Girl (Mandy Siegfried), listing off every city she can think of, tries to guess where the dope dealer (Thomas Sadoski) hails from. Here the rhythms are so magically right that for a moment time seems to stop while these two strangers are caught in the charming web of something that's not quite seduction and not quite friendship.

There are so many good actors wandering around Beatty's gargantuan set that the production winds up being diverting despite its shortcomings. As April, the eldest of the three whores, Becky Ann Baker has the sashaying tough-broad role, and though she didn't erase my memory of Conchata Ferrell in the original, her gutter-mouth wisecracking is entertaining. David Wohl, Sam Rockwell, and Carol Woods are all convincing as the hotel employees; in particular, Rockwell (whom I admired last year on screen in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Galaxy Quest) does such detailed work in an underwritten part that I felt I could sketch in this man's life outside his job. There are lively contributions from George Hall as the hotel's oldest resident, who fades out as the play progresses, and Justin Long as the naive kid brother (the Lennie character in the Of Mice and Men episode). As his overprotective sister, Sara Gilbert, so touching and funny as Darlene on TV's Roseanne, is disappointing: she seems physically ill at ease and she doesn't create a character. Neither, I was surprised to see, does Lois Smith, who plays a resident with a psychic gift. And Mandy Siegfried, with the largest role, does the least with it.

On the other hand, Helen Hanft, recognizable from movies like Next Stop, Greenwich Village, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Moonstruck, is riveting as the mother who pleads for her (off-stage) son. She and Rockwell accomplish what Mantello's production fails to: they suggest entire lives merely glimpsed in the two hours' traffic of Wilson's play.