It couldn’t happen in Los Angeles, but in New York, the
rich and poor live next to each other.
On many streets, at many corners, elaborate marble buildings
clash with decrepit brick ones, lobbying for a position on
Manhattan’s desired soil. The city delights in its own
tension, taking pride in scaling down all of American society onto
an island only 33.8 square miles in size. With boundaries that
contained, there’s no room for gradual transition.
That lack of empty space takes center stage in the Ahmanson
Theatre’s epic new production of “Dead End,” a
1935 play written by Sidney Kingsley.
The drama focuses on the literal dead end of a Manhattan street,
where the island ends and only a few wooden planks separate the
road from the East River.
Large apartment buildings fill the stage, with the
aforementioned marble battling with brick, bordering on an
orchestra pit filled with water that acts as the river.
The cast includes 42 actors, and the scene frequently seems more
like a Cecil B. DeMille production than a work of American stage
drama. In other words, it’s L.A. playing N.Y.
The story mostly follows the relations between the local poor
kids and their rich neighbors who don’t feel the economic
crunch of the ongoing Great Depression. As the street dead-ends, so
do the lives of its inhabitants. The city, already crammed with too
many people, casts off its outliers.
The poor kids jump off and swim in the river, while the rich
take their fancy cruise ships to depart, but none seem happy to do
so. In that way, “Dead End” is very much a love letter
to its setting. Even an on-the-run gangster reported to be hiding
in Colorado returns to his old neighborhood.
Unfortunately, nobody’s happy, and talk frequently
revolves around how nice it would be to get out of the city that
inhabitants love to hate and hate to love. Still, the ones who do
get out do so through death, heartbreak or arrest, taking the dead
end metaphor even further.
Opposites define “Dead End,” and ultimately the
attempt to tell an intimate human story of poverty and depression
on a million-dollar set prevents the production from achieving the
emotional movement necessary to create a lasting impression.
Perhaps my mind has been softened by the Los Angeles lifestyle,
but I left the theater thinking more about the production than the
poverty, more about the set than the struggle, and something tells
me the residents of Malibu don’t feel trapped next to the
Pacific Ocean.
““ Jake Tracer