‘Walt & Roy’ Could Use More Animation

Michael McKinlay’s agonizingly uneventful “Walt & Roy,” produced by Bare Stage Theatre Company at Glaxa Studios, concerns one imagined night in the lives of Walt and Roy Disney--specifically, the evening in 1936 before the brothers pitched “Snow White” to the bank executives who eventually financed the groundbreaking animated feature.

And what a dark and stormy night it is. Trapped in a downpour, Walt (John Allore), head of a thriving animation studio, has been boozing steadily all evening. Roy (Tom Babuscio), the pragmatic businessman behind the scenes of Walt’s success, arrives at the studio to check up on his impulsive brother.

What follows, in McKinlay’s quasi-drama, is much talk and very little action. McKinlay may have intended his characters to be symbolically cartoonish, but they seem simply overblown. Walt, as portrayed by Allore, is an irritatingly puerile prankster who shows little hint of Disney’s creative genius, while Babuscio’s Roy is so doltish one doubts he could balance a checkbook, much less handle the purse strings of Walt’s burgeoning empire.

Not that the actors, or director Robert Lane, have been given much to work with. Evidently, McKinlay’s idea of drama is to plop his characters down in a room and have them natter pointlessly at one another for more than two hours. In the interim, few insights are derived by the characters--much less their long-suffering audience.

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* “Walt & Roy,” Glaxa Studios, 3707 Sunset Blvd., Silver Lake. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends Sept. 12. $12. (213) 694-0519. Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes.