Audio By Carbonatix
More than anything, Aaron Kozak’s two-act play The Birthday Boys is about what mean little boys big men can be, even when they’re big, bad Marines. Onstage at the Texas Theatre through Sunday, May 29, the play, also directed by Kozak, is a study in what happens to men under the worst circumstances, playing games that seem certain to end in death.
Three low-ranking Marine guards doing routine sentry duty on a base in Iraq are kidnapped by a small band of terrorists and tossed, blindfolded and tied at the wrists and ankles, into a dimly lit storeroom. Private Lance (Trevor St. John David) and his buddy Private Carney (Nando Betancur) had hoped to be celebrating at their mutual birthday parties at the end of a day’s work. Instead, they’re awaiting interrogation alongside fellow prisoner Private Guillette (James Ryen), a hulking jarhead with a hot temper.
Inch-worming their way across the floor of the warehouse, the three men try to figure out how to escape. There’s no way out, so they talk, trying to keep each other’s spirits up with silly bets about who’ll wet their britches first and who’ll be the first to cry under pressure. They taunt 22-year-old Carney, whom they blame for the kidnapping, and they argue the merits of soccer and whether the American government should implant computer chips in soldiers to make them easier to find using satellite tracking. In these scenes The Birthday Boys sounds like the conversations kids have after lights out at camp. But the trivial jock talk humanizes the characters nicely.
The situation gets worse with the appearance of a scary, scruff-bearded Iraqi called “The Leader” (Ali Saam), who uses an M-16, light electric shocks and a machete in attempts to extract information about ammunition shipments and other military data from the men. The guys try to hold fast, even as they contemplate imminent death. To The Leader, it’s a different sort of game. Who’ll break first? Who’ll die first? How much will he enjoy using that machete on a clean young neck?
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Kozak’s script is good at capturing the macho slang and then the tender, boyish emotions of these characters and he builds some good suspense early in the play. Without giving too much away, a hacky twist at the end belies all the trust we’ve put into the previous 90 minutes of Kozak’s real-time storyline. What happens is such a badly contrived U-turn that it negates what comes before it. Abruptly, too, and that’s too bad. The cast, the same actors who performed The Birthday Boys in a successful run in Los Angeles, is a tight ensemble of strong performers. We want to believe in them. And we don’t want to see anything bad befall them. Not even a bad ending for the play they’re in.
This is the first live production presented in the re-opened and refurbished Texas Theatre. A play set in a claustrophobic room is badly served by the cavernous space here. Acoustical echoes have the actors’ unmiked voices bouncing everywhere but onto the first 10 rows of seats. (The downstairs part of the theater can seat some 600 people.) After moving back under the balcony overhang for the second act, I could hear the dialogue better, but only when they slowed down enough to account for the bounceback of their voices. When Saam spoke, using a briskly paced Middle Eastern accent, he was almost unintelligible.
The huge theater also ruins any chance of allowing the audience to experience that trapped feeling along with the actors. As much as I loathe sitting in Theatre Too, the tomblike space under The Quadrangle, it’s the type of theater more suited to a play like this, and would lend itself to that air of high anxiety caused by forced imprisonment.
The Birthday Boys continues through May 29 at the Texas Theatre, 231 W. Jefferson in Oak Cliff. Tickets, $10 to $15, may be purchased at the door or online. Performances are at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 3 and 5 p.m. Sunday. Running time is approximately 100 minutes with one intermission.
