They Lost It at the Movies

YOU'D THINK A TAPER PRODUCTION WOULD HAVE enough razzle-dazzle to compensate for the writing's leaden touch, but this is not the case. Everything on Robert Brill's graphite-toned set, including Judith Dolan's drab costumes and Jennifer Tipton's lighting (which inexplicably favors bringing up the house lights periodically), creates a black hole that sucks away the audience's energy and enthusiasm. (After the show, I felt as though I had spent the last two and a half hours wandering around Home Depot.)

Director Gordon's embarrassing use of slo-mo choreography seems less an homage to film technique than an expression of this show's lethargy, which Jeanine Tesori's faux-Sondheim, faux-ragtime score does nothing to conceal. No amount of fast-forwarding or music can breathe vitality into some of the key performances. Greene proves herself doubly irritating in the roles of the young Anne, whose lines she delivers in a kind of babyspeak, and of the unfulfilled TV-ad director Jane, who interviews the retirement-home residents with the kind of silly cooing one normally hears in a pet store.

The biggest letdown is Parsons, who, trapped in both a wheelchair and this thankless role, is only allowed to play cute, as though she or Gordon senior does not trust the audience with absorbing any subtler readings of anger and regret. This is nowhere more painfully clear than at the very end, when Parsons' face, projected on a huge video screen (another big mistake, but who's counting?), concludes her didn't-we-have-fun? speech by striking a googly-eyed pose.

Like all too many plays, The First Picture Show presumes to re-create a past armed with the hindsight and political allergies of the present. "How unfair they were back then" is the only conclusion we're allowed to draw from this mess, never dreaming that decades from now our own beliefs and habits will be subject to similar condemnation by whatever artistic Nuremberg holds court then. History may not be linear, but it can be a vindictive son of a bitch.

THE FIRST PICTURE SHOW | Book and lyrics by AIN and DAVID GORDON Music by JEANINE TESORI | Directed and choreographed by DAVID GORDON | At the MARK TAPER FORUM, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Through September 16