Meantime at HoJo's

For the past sixteen years, Christian Levatino has been running the Gangbusters Theater Company which, as its moniker suggests, specializes in plays done in comic-book fashion. Levatino, who writes and directs the plays, has built a fairly sizable cult following. Although I don’t normally like comic-book plays (or movies), I did decide to go see two of the three plays culled from his “Black Bag Pentalogy,” King Dick and …Meantime at Hojo’s. They’ve been running, with a break, since October, in rep with Sunny Afternoon (which I was not able to cover).

What links these plays is their content: each depicts a recent seminal dark moment in American history. Sunny Afternoon deals with the interrogation of Lee Harvey Oswald by a Dallas Homicide Detective; Hojo’s deals with the Watergate break-in; King Dick with Elvis Presley’s visit to President Nixon at Christmastime in 1970.

I found myself laughing at the latter play and pretty much enjoying it, even though it did wear out its welcome over its two-hour length. But historical fact can’t save …Meantime at HoJo’s, Levatino’s retelling of the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon’s presidency in 1972. The challenge of dealing with the break-in from the vantage point of a nearby Howard Johnsons Motel proves to be insurmountable for the playwright/director. Having to somehow create believable portraits of the ten Watergate conspirators, led by a way over-the-top G. Gordon Liddy (L.Q. Victor) and an equally unfunny Howard Hunt (Darrett Sanders), is also beyond Levatino’s ken. The combination of bad script, bad acting, and bad Cuban accents (on the part of five of the Watergate crooks) sent me out into the Hollywood night feeling very glum indeed.