"Asphalt" - written by Adam Somers and co-directed with his father, Jack Klugman - would be a better play if only it could make up its mind.
As presented in a brief tryout production at the Jewel Box Theatre in North Hollywood, it is part show-business satire, part dissection of a dysfunctional family, presented in styles that hopscotch from absurdist fantasy to kitchen-sink realism to screwball comedy to cutting social commentary.There's not much holding it together except Gibson Frazier's riveting performance in the central role - and not much to call attention to it in the first place except the presence of Klugman (a k a Oscar Madison on "The Odd Couple" and the title character on "Quincy, M.E.") as co-director and executive producer.
The play's events may or may not be a hallucinatatory flashback on the unlucky life of Stuyvesant Brooks (Frazier), a 24-year-old actor whose only paying gig so far is wearing a bigfoot costume at a Los Angeles-area amusement park. Caught in a downward spiral of events, he gets fired; his live-in girlfriend - tired of his "poor me" attitude - announces she's been seeing someone else and heads out the door; and his overbearing father, Blake Brooks (Charles Cioffi), announces he's about to cap a bitter divorce by marrying a shrill young starlet (Maria Spassoff).
Father and son are locked in competition with one another, since Blake - a scriptwriter who's a giant in the industry - casts a long shadow over Stuyvesant's fledgling career. Family life is none too cozy in other respects, either. In sometimes-fantasy, sometimes-real life encounters, Blake gets into shouting matches with Stuyvesant's mom, Angela (Salome Jens), who accuses him of selling out both his career and family. Their scenes together are gruesome - gruesomely overwritten, that is. When Angela announces, "There's a vacant lot where his soul used to be," the line's so bad that the audience winces on impact.
Much better are the scenes tracking Stuyvesant's soul-shattering journey through show business.
The poor guy seems, finally, on the threshold of success when Johnny Del Gatto (Jay Acovone), a beefy Sylvester Stallone-type actor, taps the youth for a prominent role in an upcoming film. It's obvious that Johnny is making nice with Stuyvesant just to get in good with Brooks, who could write the sort of screenplay that would pull Johnny out of his career slump. But Stuyvesant, hungry for any scrap from the table, goes along, selling his soul - and his pride - in the process.
A mysterious woman named Imalami (Trula M. Marcus) emerges in the midst of this movie madness, and at first she seems to be a sort of fairy godmother. The director of a documentary about the making of Del Gatto's feature film, she claims to have slipped Del Gatto the videotape that got Stuyvesant his job. But as she becomes more interested in documenting Stuyvesant's life than in the making of the feature film, she convinces him to sign a contract in which he forfeits the rights to his own life story. In this macabre twist, show business utterly takes over his life.
Frazier is both comic and compelling as the frenzied Stuyvesant - trying to laugh off his life as a bad joke, but getting swallowed alive by his resentment and despair.
As the snarling parents, however, Cioffi (a bad guy in such films as "Missing") and Jens (one of Los Angeles' most-watchable stage actresses) are wasted in one-note, caricatured roles.
Somers and Klugman's staging effectively underscores the script's surreal qualities (such as the opening sequence of smiling, identical-twin Mormon missionaries popping out of a hole in the asphalt, followed by Stuyvesant in his bigfoot costume).
But perhaps after this tryout production of "Asphalt," father and son should leave it behind and turn immediately to Somers' next project. He shows play-writing talent, if only he can focus and clarify it.