‘High City’: Slices of Life Without a Core

Rootlessness, alienation and power-tripping weigh heavily on the urban outcasts that populate Mark Runnels’ “High City Miles” at Actors Circle Theatre.

The play’s five vignettes depict contemporary life as a fringe without a center, in which characters without pasts struggle to leave their fleeting imprints--often through domination or intimidation. The ludicrously cutthroat politics among the staff at a toy store, for example, feature dog-eat-dog performances from Casey Peterson, John Friend, Stephen Held and Eugenie Bondurant.

Sometimes they strive for tentative emotional links, like the two strangers (Friend and Kim Mann) in Union Station who seize the opportunity of their anonymity to speak without censoring themselves, with ironic consequences.

The illusory sense of freedom accompanying these characters’ estrangement signals an author still in his 20s. So does the incurable wanderlust of the intermittent narrator (Matthew Dunn) and the conviction of two drug-addled bicycle messengers (Peterson and Tracy Hudak) that they’re indestructible--until they have to face a friend’s (Held) death.

Though commendably naturalistic, Runnels is too content to observe rather than explore--skimming across the surface of these slice-of-life encounters, his scripting itself can become mundane.

As a result, the actors must often supply the deeper foundations. Spectacularly successful in this regard are Tobias Baker’s two appearances. His con-artist salesman in the tightest segment, a David Mamet-style game of upper-handmanship with a rival (Held), keeps us hooked by continually hinting at his hidden motives and history.

Baker reappears as an enigmatic worldly commentator on the bar scene in the extended finale, where interconnected acquaintances try to sort out their relationships before closing time. The scene also features an affecting breakup of Hudak and Friend; a cat-and-mouse duel between a surly Held and Mann, as his recent sexual conquest, and Bondurant’s charismatic turn as a jaded social predator swept off her feet by a precocious teen-ager (Peterson).

Randy Oglesby’s minimal staging keeps the focus on characterization, and he has coaxed nicely shaded performances from the skilled cast, compensating for the limitations of an author not yet fully conscious of the connections that bind people to their paths and to one another.

* “High City Miles” Actors Circle Theatre, 7313 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursday - Sundays, 8 p.m. Ends July 31. $12.50. (213) 660-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.