They Saved Hitler's Head

This is too bad, because the Road Theater Company has really thrown the dice with this production. Not necessarily because the play's specific historical theme is edgy (Hitler was a bad man?), but simply because the ideas in Hitler's Head, however imperfectly formed, are ideas nevertheless, and ones which are drawing full houses in this North Hollywood venue.

The show also boasts an extraordinary set-design effort from Desma Murphy, whose detailed, drab loft discloses an authentic milieu that has a believably lived-in look to it and is not just someone's idea of how a bohemian's loft might appear. (Then again, I'm always a sucker for sets that feature simulated rainfall.) Likewise, Mary Jane Miller's highly specific period costumes are a whimsical weave of purpose and hyperbole that unmistakably announce each change of mood. I only wish the cast were up to matching the verisimilitude of the show's design elements, but alas, none of the actors truly inhabits their characters, assuming instead the all-too-familiar theatrical robotics of moving about a stage and repeating lines without self-reflective pauses. This might be put down to the production's having not one but two directors, Taylor Gilbert and Ken Sawyer; here, at least, more is not necessarily better, and the ensemble seems unaware of the difference between acting and pretending.

In the end we are mostly left wondering who should have made the jokey moments funnier and the weightier moments more focused -- the playwright or the directors? And why, despite Lee's intentions, does this play wind up ponderous when he aimed to be light, sermonizing when he tried to be suggestive? As the Napoleon and Marx of our century, and the author of its boldest crimes, Adolf Hitler demands better scrutiny. The movement and the casualties he created, from the Nazi Party to the Anton Müllers, must be analyzed with more sophisticated tools than this play offers if we are to understand their legacy -- a legacy that can be felt today, from desecrated graves and bombed embassies to the Führer's birthday being chosen by high school terrorists as their fateful D-day.

HITLER'S HEAD | By JOHN RAFTER LEE
At the ROAD THEATER, 5108 Lankershim Blvd.,
North Hollywood | Through June 6