There are a couple of problems with Performance Gallery's
Halcyon Days, at the Columbia Performance Center -- partly staging, mostly the Stephen Dietz script. Toward the end of its longish first act this welcome-to-Reagan's-Washington farce about the United States invasion of Grenada in 1983 starts to fall apart. Acting remains strong throughout, especially from the five men. Characters are painted in the broadest of strokes, but they're clearly drawn.
There's no mistaking the good-guy senator (Blake Bowden) for the bad-guy spinmeisters (Aaron Whitehead and Michael Hall) or the bumbling CIA manipulator (Jim Stump) or the rapacious student (Andrew Bernhard). Many scenes are taut, but there are too many of them. Early on the jokes play effectively, later less so because too many of them are the same jokes revisited. Act II shambles along through too many fumbled blackouts and clumsy shifts in locale between the main plot (invading Grenada) and a scabrous subplot (cheating on med school exams) as a rising tide of bleak, black-hearted cynicism begins to strangle the comedy. The bad guys, as defined by Dietz, definitely win this one.
Considering the play's content, it's unusual that there aren't more productions of Halcyon Days. A Web search produced references to only one other recent one. It aptly -- even a little eerily, considering that it was written in the early '90s -- reflects headlines from Iraq. Except that the Cuban-built airstrip that Reagan claimed threatened Western democracy was actually there on Grenada. So, too, were the 400 imperiled medical school students who supplied the other excuse for invading. The real problem was that, even before the bombing of our Marine barracks in Beirut, a bunch of politicos felt that America needed to stand up and show everybody just who's really in charge of world affairs. By the way, the students were rescued once the military managed to locate them.
At a guess, the reason Halcyon Days is not seeing more current productions is because, apt to the times though its satire might be, it plays more like a Saturday Night Live sketch than theater. Grade: B-
HALCYON DAYS, presented by the Performance Gallery at the Columbia Performance Center, continues through Saturday.
