Downtown Race Riot

It's quiet uptown within The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's "Downtown Race Riot," produced off-Broadway by the New Group and directed by Scott Elliott, receives its world premiere.

The show opened Sunday night but don't be alarmed by the explosive title of the play, with its aptitude for homemade dynamite and race-baiting civil rights fury; while this tepid production features copious amounts of drug use, onstage T&A, simulated sex and violence, it meanders into a meltdown of inglorious maladroitness. Instead of inducing a sense of terror or tingle of anxiety, like, say, Julia Cho's insidious mass shooting drama "Office Hour," which closed Sunday, Rosenfeld's play opts to forego tackling the zeitgeist, uninspired by the urgency of modern times.

Referring to the real-life 1976 Washington Square Park riot in which a gang of youth in revolt randomly attacked people of color, killing one man and severely injuring another, the play from its inception has a lot going for it. It is set during the bicentennial of the United States and at the beginning of the financial crisis of New York City.

Taken within a tumbledown two-bedroom railroad apartment during a sizzling late summer afternoon, the narrative follows Jimmy "Pnut" Shannon (played by David Levi), an 18-year-old high-school dropout who lives in Greenwich Village with his drug-addicted, free-wheeling single mother Mary (played by consummate art-house actress and downtown cool kid Chlo� Sevigny), and 21-year-old Joyce (Sadie Scott), his wanderlust-suffering bisexual waitress sister.

Drama ensues when Pnut (pronounced "Peanut") is to be initiated into a local mafia of juvenile delinquents declaring "open season on yans and piss-a-ricans," hoping to chase them out with aluminum baseball bats, firearms, and steel pipes. Only Pnut has reservations about this and a sense of trepidation follows when catches wind that his childhood best friend Marcel "Massive" Baptiste (played by Moise Morancy as a problematic characterization of a first-generation Haitian immigrant), who allies himself alongside the white kids in the neighborhood instead of the black Americans that teased him growing up, is to become a target in the riot.

Desperate to rescue his confidante from imminent danger, Pnut tries to persuade his bosom buddy to stay inside. At first, Marcel is more than happy to oblige, considering Joyce, who has a preference for girls, offers an all night long affair with him before permanently ditching town to travel the world. But things aren't so easy: Pnut's Italian-American friends, smooth-talking rehabilitated criminal Tommy-Sick (played by Cristian DeMeo, magnetic) and graffiti artist Jay 114 (played by Daniel Sovich, a bootleg and sour-faced John Travolta wannabe), however, will stop at nothing to bring Marcel in.

Where is Mary in all this? Surviving mostly on disability payments, she likes to retreat to the sanctuary of her bedroom, a psychedelic love-letter to members of the 27 Club like her all-time favorite Janis Joplin, and injects heroin into her veins while watching her favorite soap opera on basic television. That's not to say she's one-track minded: Exploiting Pnut's asthma, she intends to sue New York City for $1 million over the lead paint on the apartment's walls that she allegedly claims caused his condition. With a sleazy, coke-snorting class-action lawyer in tow (played by saving grace Josh Pais), motivated by carnal desire, how could she lose?

The thing is, with all of this, there's very little meat-and-potatoes to provide proper theatrical substance even with the very real forces in motion: disenfranchisement, opposition to immigration, pre-gentrification, homelessness and poverty, rent strikes, racism, substance abuse, tribalism, turf wars and xenophobia. Yet, Rosenfeld's treatment of the narrative feels archaic and pass�, almost as if the script were written in a time long ago (think early Martin Scorsese or Sidney Lumet) without a breadcrumb to validate the show's importance in a near-apocalyptic Trump era. It's nostalgic, sure, but where's the gritty?

Nevertheless, Rosenfeld isn't to blame; the lion's share goes to director Scott Elliott, who bogs down the tension with molasses-slow interpolations and repetitions that fizzle and fumble the production. It doesn't help that Derek McLane's impressive outr�-expansive set design results in relentlessly obstructed sightlines that only allow ten percent of the audience to see what is actually happening on the stage at all times, because Elliot's focus is short-sighted; most of the time Sevigny or Scott lounging about their rooms doing nothing (Scott's room is even more impressive with wall posters of Nina Simone, David Bowie, and Donna Summer).

The actors do their best, but the characters are general, lacking any real depth or heart and therefore the audience is left feeling nothing for the characters. Sevigny acts the part fine, but has cartoonish bouts of concerned mother troupes and strung-out junkie fixes. Scott has heart, but we've seen this character before and therefore her performance is thankless.

David Levi follows in the footsteps of real-life tween singer-songwriting/musician brothers Nat and Alex Wolff,-both of whom played in New Group productions, with Nat Wolff starring in the 2016 revival of Sam Shepard's "Buried Child" and Alex Wolff starring in Erica Schmidt's 2017 play "All-the-Fine-Boys." Levi's co-stars on Nickelodeon's "The Naked Brothers Band," it appears The New Group is branching out in its endless pageant of big-name vanity projects, bringing more and sweeter young things into the fold. Levi is certainly talented. Dressed like a Tom of Finland fantasy model, he goes whimpering puppy to trouble young man with ease.

Brooklyn actor and hip-hop artist Moise Morancy, who became something of an urban folk hero after rescuing an underage teenage girl from an alleged sexual assault while riding a bus in Queens last year, sadly makes his off-Broadway debut as this half-baked token character. As a transplant who feels more at home with the street-smart white kids, there's no real reason why he's willing to accept the racism and prejudice he receives from them than the black Americans and Hispanics he loathes so much other than self-hatred or white idolization. In the end, his character is nothing more than a punching bag for the cast to exercise their demons.

"Downtown Race Riot" is classic New Group: intermission-less, semi- all-star casting, innovative and unique sets, an undercooked script that feels either too zeitgeist-y meta or antiquated but also includes a singular sequence that saves the day. That would be the titular riot that is conjured into the household and results in plenty of stage combat, blood packs and panic to go around; the sugar-rush choreography being courtesy of Unkle Dave's Fight-House.

"Downtown Race Riot" runs through December 23 at Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W 42nd St. in New York. For tickets or information, call 212-244-7529 or visit www.signaturetheatre.org