Okay, we’ve been here before. The small house at the Hyde Park Theatre wraps around a set that could represent an anonymous, nearly vacant apartment in a half-demolished tenement building. Tom Waits is growling “Dead and Lovely” on the sound system in full derelict mode, followed by some country music phantasmagoria about facing the electric chair.
Down-market Harold Pinter, maybe, or Sam Shepard. Danger, barren stage and threat.
In Brass Ring, playwright Shanon Weaver of “A Chick and A Dude Productions” picks up again two menacing hit-men from his much applauded 2003 drama Hit, which scooped three of Austin’s B. Iden Payne Awards: outstanding director of a drama, outstanding cast performance, and outstanding original script. The company recruited the same formidable actors for those principal roles, Kenneth Wayne Bradley as Ervin (second from left) and Joel Citty (right) as Wyatt.
The action starts with a blackout, a tableau of an execution about to take place, another blackout and a bang. We didn’t know the man on his knees, stolidly facing death, or the young-looking man engaged in some cryptic dialogue with him.
In the blackness we hear a man musing about his work and its difficulties. When the lights come up again, we find ourselves in the company of the lean bald-shaven Ervin and his partner Wyatt, who is happily reporting factoids from a book he might have picked up in a bus station. They are killers on retainer.
They are waiting. Ervin and Wyatt spend most of the performance time waiting, for one thing or another. So much for the glamorous life of hit men working for the anonymous “Old Man.”
Ervin is on a fierce slow burn throughout while Wyatt is usually willing to have small amusements to pass the time.
They dialogue with abrupt, vulgar familiarity; the door flies open and their pistols come out to confront a figure hidden behind an umbrella. It’s Jasmine (now known as “Jazz”). We quickly grasp that there is a deep history between the grim Ervin and the woman who announces herself as the newest emissary of the “Old Man.”
Time splits for us. We follow the back story of Ervin and Jasmine’s first encounter in a bar, where she fingers his next hit and then their developing involvement. These scenes are intercut with the ongoing nervy wait in the tenement.
Along the way we meet the 17-year-old Asher (the playwright, Shanon Weaver), a taciturn youth adopted by the hit men after they blew away his abusing foster father; Asher becomes not quite a son and yet not quite a trainee hit man, either.
The snarling tenement dialogue between Ervin and Jasmine/Jazz quickly reveals that they had married and then split, in part because she could not have children. Armed with that knowledge, we witness the earlier days’ meetings and courtship with a growing sense of doom.
And doom it is, too, with a failed assassination, multiple betrayals, and a fatal shooting.
First things first: this duo of actors is good enough to take your breath away. You can believe that they have worked together as hit men for years. Bradley and Citty certainly had the advantage of lots of material and psychological “build” from the 2003 play, but they wear their characters as if they’d been tattooed in their souls. As Ervin, Bradley is brimming with hair-trigger anger but insistent on “the rules,” a numbered set of precepts setting the parameters for their deadly business. His ability to shift between deadly, still concentration and violent action is terrifying.
His partner Wyatt (Citty, left), as his buddy and the only person one he trusts, accommodates Ervin’s near-nuclear energy while not hesitating to disagree or counter him. This is a scary variant on bad cop/good cop, one that keeps us always on the edge of our seats. Wyatt may be a murderer, but he is perceptive, vulnerable and deeply human.
Lynn Mikeska as the time-split Jasmine/Jazz has a hard role. As Jasmine (then) she must give us an ingenue, awakening to the possibilities of the mutual attraction with a killer; as Jazz (now) she must meet the hit men’s anger and uncertainty with cold assurance, maneuvering to master the situation. Mikeska meets the challenges.
But what a shame about the script. Minor quibbles: playwright Weaver would have us believe that the anonymous “Old Man,” depending entirely upon these two for his "wet work," is dealing duplicitously and simultaneously with the Yakuza and with at least one major Italian American crime family. Weaver tosses us a fast and not very clear explanation of the job our guys will be expected to perform. He gives us voice-overs in the darkness between scenes that sometimes don’t make much sense, either in the action or of themselves. He (or director Melissa Livingston) inexplicably shifts the music at intermission and for the second act from menace-pop to funk.
But the major problem undermining all that really brilliant, character-revealing dialogue is the series of “gotcha” plot revelations in the concluding minutes. They assert that all of the action from “back then” was carried out in a tissue of untruths and impossibilities, justifying the hellish end of the play. Deus ex machina meets Philo Vance.
And who the heck was getting shot in that opening scene? Was that real or not? And if not, why not?
Click for Ryan Johnson's (promotional?) review on Austin.com
Click for Barry Pineo's perceptive review in the Austin Chronicle, August 15
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