Love’s Dark Side Fuels ‘American Holiday’

Joyce Carol Oates’ last installment of her “Collage Play Trilogy” is theoretically about American holidays, particularly Veterans Day and Memorial Day. Or that’s at least what starts and ends her “American Holiday,” playing in repertory with the other two trilogy plays at the Attic Theatre Center. The uncohesive nature of the script is made more problematic by lackluster acting.

The pieces of this collage dart off on wildly unrelated tangents--about having money (“because if you have the money, you don’t think about it”), a nurse trainee’s first time preparing a dead patient for the morgue, an unfulfilled suicide pact between teenage gay lovers and deadly love affairs.

In the two “One Flesh” segments, Paul Nichols’ and Barbara Stirling’s deadpan performances are on target. Rick Weaver as the embittered drifter twice betrayed by his high school lover is effective in “The Pact,” and Amy Sebelius as the lascivious and sexually abused woman in “I’m Waiting” is stirring. But many of the performances are flat. Director Thomas Jackson doesn’t always control his players. Some mug shamelessly while others seem rooted in the universe of normalcy.

Jackson’s program notes comment on how Americans are more interested in celebrating a three-day holiday than in honoring the military.

However, more than the theme of respecting the uniformed dead, the unsettling repetition of love/romantic relationships with dark, if not deadly, underpinnings dominates this collage. Is love in the 1990s so bad?

* “American Holiday,” Attic Theatre, 6562 1/3 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Thursdays-Fridays, Aug. 28, 8 p.m. Also Aug. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, 8 p.m. Ends Aug. 30. $15. (213) 469-3786. Running time: 2 hours.