STAGE REVIEW : ‘TOPOKANA’: STARVATION IN THE BUSH

Famine is no joke, and “Topokana Martyrs’ Day” at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre doesn’t intend to laugh it off. Jonathan Falla’s grim comedy concerns, rather, an international famine relief station in Africa after the worst of the crisis has passed and the staff is coming down with that most insidious of jungle diseases: the blahs.

“This famine has lost its tone,” complains Dorothy Tristan as an Irish nurse who has taken the African name Ibis. She is caught between “lust and disgust” for the people she is serving, the former predominant when she regards a handsome young con artist named Ramilies (Grand L. Bush), who calls his countrymen “naked savages.”

Running the mission is a pretentious twit known as Apoo (Peter Noone), who would have some trouble keeping a third-grade classroom in order back in England. Low man on the totem pole is a sweet-faced tribesman named Julius (Niche Saboda), whom everyone treats as a 3-year-old, useful for fetching things.

A variety of voices over the jungle radio suggests that everybody back at relief headquarters is also a twit. Small wonder that massive muckups are the rule. Act I plays the confusion for laughs, somewhat as “MASH” used to do, but with a heavier heart--and hand. Act II brings in a revolution, with real bullets. At the end everyone has quite seriously freaked out.

Moral? Unclear, although Falla does seem to have a message in mind. The strongest signal is that whites would do better to stand aside and let the Africans cope with their own disasters. But since the only Africans in the play are the self-serving (and self-loathing) Ramilies and the simple Julius, it’s not clear how this would be an improvement.

Playwright Falla (a pseudonym) has himself done service in an African famine relief mission, perhaps too recently. The offstage incidents in the play--a man killed for swiping a tomato, babies chopped up by wandering bandits--are not something a responsible writer would make up. But they also make it hard for Falla to get a purchase on his tale. Underneath his protective cynicism, he seems ready to throw up his hands at the whole situation, almost ready to wash his hands of it.

The nurse does have a fine Shavian speech about the perils of basing disaster relief on an emotion so transient as pity. Yet we also see the truth behind the lame joke that so-and-so’s job as commissioner of disaster coordination is, of course, to coordinate disasters. Build famine relief into your economy, and you’ll always have famine.

Famine prevention is perhaps another matter, but there, too, wouldn’t you need a bureaucracy? The audience leaves “Topokana Martyrs’ Day” with the realization that feeding hungry people isn’t as straightforward an issue as it seems. The play also creates its own hunger for a truly Shavian comedy on the issue, with a character for every point of view and a proposal for a way out of the problem. “A plague on both your houses” only guarantees the status quo.

Nor is this a particularly well-joined play. Rather it’s a chain of set pieces, comic or melodramatic, joined by connective tissue. Luckily, John Hancock’s white actors serve the story well, while his black actors serve it brilliantly.

Noone’s pipsqueak bureaucrat might have stepped out of a British version of “Doonesbury”: the idealistic white liberal with an uncanny gift for making a bad situation worse. (We are less convinced when this wimp turns into a raging racist.) Tristan’s voice is too flat, but she makes us feel the predicament of the nurse, too burned out to know whether to leave or stay.

Saboda and Bush make the play. Saboda’s Julius is a child, all right--in a white context. But at the end he establishes his manhood in a single look. Bush establishes the many sides of Ramilies, an up-front operator who may be doing less harm than these ditsy imported bureaucrats. On a practical level, he’s got it all together. But privately he’s deeply confused about where he belongs in the world, and a gun in his hands doesn’t bode well for anybody.

The subtext of the play is there at LAAT, and A. Clark Duncan’s jungle compound setting puts the audience there physically. (Martin Aronstein did the lights, Karen Miller Kennedy the costumes.)

The problem is Falla’s text, articulate and knowing, yet so fecklessly nihilistic that the play could almost be taken as an argument against any Western attempts to deal with famine. (It’s too easy to forget that the famine under discussion here has already largely been alleviated.) This is one play where an informed post-performance discussion is obligatory: One hopes LAAT has some plans in that direction.

‘TOPOKANA MARTYRS’ DAY’ Jonathan Falla’s play, at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre. Director John Hancock. Producer Diane White. Set A. Clark Duncan. Costumes Karen Miller. Lighting Martin Aronstein. Sound Jon Gottlieb. With Peter Noone, Niche Saboda, Dorothy Tristan, Grand L. Bush. Radio voices: Kate Williamson, Charles Marowitz, Tony Ponzini, Paul Verdier. Plays Tues.-Sun. at 8 p.m., with Sat.-Sun. matinees at 2. Closes March 24. Tickets $10-$20. 1089 N. Oxford Ave. 464-5500.