Charred by Life

By T.E. Kalem

LAMPOST REUNION

by LOUIS LA RUSSO II

Success, which William James called "the bitch goddess," has exerted a tripolar magnetic pull on most Americans. It is variously regarded with desire, fear and despair. The desire is to succeed. The fear is of failing to succeed. The despair is the feeling of emptiness, the loss of a rooted and perhaps better self after one has succeeded. The most distressing knowledge of all, of course, is to realize that you sought esteem in the eyes of others because you lacked it in your own.

That is the essential theme of Lampost Reunion by Louis La Russo II, and it is a first play of some consequence. The reunion is in a bar. The hero is Fred Santoro (Gabriel Dell), whose career and fame resemble Frank Sinatra's. He and his henchman (George Pollock) drift into a haunt that Santoro shared with a gang of cronies (mostly Hoboken, N.J., Italian-Americans) some 20 years before.

The reunion is viscerally revealing. The humor, and there is quite a bit of it, is abrasive, anal, ethnic and sexually slanderous. One running gag is about the diminutive genitals of the bartender, whose nickname is "Biggie."

Biggie is sneeringly bitter about Fred's deserting him on the way to the big time. Each of the old gang reveals himself to be a sycophant, a drunk or a cynic, yet touchingly human. Each has an aria-styled monologue to show how his spirit has been charred by life. Fred's is the most melodramatic: he tells of how his father forced him, as an adolescent, to spy on his mother and her suspected lover from a fire escape.

The episode illuminates one of the subliminal aspects of the play. It is concerned with Southern European codes of male honor and pride, and the warping indignities suffered by those who try to conform to American codes of success and middle-class etiquette.

The cast could not be better, and Gabriel Dell as Fred is a spellbinder who might even win the respect of "Old Blue Eyes."

T.E. Kalem

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