The Bootleg Theater company works out of an old L.A. warehouse now serving as a rock club. A back room of the club has been turned into a 99-seat theatre which presently serves as the ideal setting for Four Chords and a Gun, John Ross Bowie’s hard-edged play about the Ramones, a leading NYC punk-rock band. The action takes place in L.A. and New York “between December 1978 and December 1980,” when the band, in desperate need of a hit record (although their stance was anti-establishment and anti-commercial), turned to music producer Phil Spector for help. The clash between anarchic artists and obsessive taskmaster (Spector could spend a week tinkering with the sound of a guitar lick) was not just volatile but violent, with the egomaniacal Spector (played brilliantly by Josh Brener) actually pulling a gun on the band. The clash had ramifications, all of which Bowie explores in a dramatic and skilful way. The band-members themselves were at odds with each other, fighting over things like money, sex, drugs and values. In other words, they were like a dysfunctional family; yet, as the playwright shows, they still managed to hang together as a band, even after the failure of the Spector-produced album (“End of the Century”) to top the sales charts. Essentially, though, it’s Spector vs. the Ramones in character-driven fashion; there are no pure villains or heroes, just three-dimensional human beings whose good qualities are matched by their bad. That all of them are intense, loud and a bit crazy makes for powerful, urgent and workable drama. What also helps is that, at times, they can also be outrageously funny. James Pumphrey plays Marky Ramone, a goofy guy with some kind of sleep-sickness; Michael Daniel Cassady is the drug-addled Dee Dee Ramone; Johnathan McClain, the cynical, tough-minded Johnny Ramone. Matthew Patrick Davis portrays the band’s lead singer and song-writer, Joey Ramone. The latter is a tall, gangly, compulsive dude whose groupie girlfriend Linda (Arden Myrin) dumps him (for Johnny) when she discovers that he sleeps in his shoes. Flawed as they are, these kids still make some exciting music, snatches of which are heard. And, even though they were no longer speaking to each other, they kept the Ramones going into the 1990s. Although they never were able to achieve the success of the Beatles or Stones, as Spector promised they would, the band kept fighting the good fight until the bitter end.
